Dominion > Dominion Articles

COMBO: Governor/Warehouse

(1/4) > >>

HiveMindEmulator:
Governor is kind of a tricky card. It can do a lot of things, each of which also help your opponents, so it’s important to recognize when each of them are good. As a general rule:
1. You only want to use the trash option late, because the free “upgrade” for your opponent is too strong early.
2. You prefer to use the draw option when your opponents can’t take advantage of the larger handsize (i.e. you either have a hand-size reduction attack or it’s the last turn).
3. The gain a gold option is not that bad! While silver helps your opponents, in most decks it’s not even remotely as useful to them as gold is to you, because you can use the gold not only to buy stuff, but to remodel into provinces!

A great way to combine all these abilities is in combination with warehouse. The plan is to open warehouse/silver (or some good money-giving terminal, since governor and warehouse are non-terminal), adding another silver to help you buy a lot of governors, which you buy even with $6. The warehouses will help you play the governors more often to gain a lot of gold, which is the only option you should choose during the mid-game. When it starts to get toward the greening stage, you start remodeling the golds into provinces, and then on your last turn, you set up a mega-turn, using the governor draw abiltiy to draw into a huge hand, which you then shape with warehouses to allow you to remodel into multiple victory cards and buy another. You should be able to net at least 2xprovince+estate like this, and even if you give your opponents 8-card hands, they won’t get to use them if the game is over!

Warehouse is a particularly good partner for governor because the cycling helps you play the governors a lot, and because it’s really easy to put together $5 4-out-of-7-card hands with all the gold you’re gaining. And then it’s great when you have the monster-sized hand from using the draw option. But there are alternative partners. Cellar generally does the same thing but is a bit more likely to leave you with sub-$5 hands, since you can end up drawing and not discarding estates. Trashers can also have a similarly useful effect, since even though you won't see as many cards as with warehouse every turn, you’ll have less junk, which will allow you to still play the governors very often and pair them with golds late game. Adding +buy can also be nice, as you may have excess money to spend on your mega-turn, or you may find a bunch of golds with not enough governors. Even cheap terminal +buy like woodcutter is fine since governor is non-terminal.

Strong against:
 - trimmed decks (where the silver is disruptive)
Weak against:
 - terminal drawers (which become much stronger with silver)
 - handsize reduction attacks (which counter warehouse and combo more strongly with governor)

Examples:
Warehouse:solitaire, vs Governor/HP BM
Cellar:vs Bishop
Chapel: solitaire

ackack:
This is a setup where I'm not going to find solitaire results particularly convincing. While I agree that gaining the Gold is usually the strongest Governor option, I'm not sure that you can write off all the Silvers you give to your opponent. Among other things, their economy being generated for free means they can spend time picking up other cards that are useful but might ordinarily be a bit too slow. Thus I think this is going to speed up a lot of middling strategies from your opponents as well, meaning 5 Provinces in 14 turns is probably an overstatement of the relative strength of this.

added: Some concrete examples from those particular games: I think a Masquerading opponent does very well against this plan in the first game. Ordinarily I think a 2nd Masquerade is slightly dicey, but here with the Silver streaming in it would probably be a good idea. Getting pumped up with Silver would also speed up a Chapel/money strategy by a turn or two, I'd imagine.

HiveMindEmulator:
It's true that solitaire is a bad place to show this, but it's not really just "5 provinces in 14 turns". First off, it's actually 13 turns in both examples. The 14th turn is just spent resigning the solitaire game. But more importantly, the timing and purchases of the actual mega-turn should depend on what your opponent is doing. If they have 4 provinces by turn 13, you actually end up splitting them 4-4 with an extra duchy for you for the win. And even with extra silver, it's hard to get more than 4 provinces by turn 13, since to do that, you have to buy them every other turn starting with turn 7. There are strategies that can do that with the silver injection, but not s many that it's makes this combo never viable.

To be more specific, this strategy is probably bad against strategies that focus on terminal card-drawing, like smithy+money, because silver helps those strategies more than others. Against chapel+money, I don't think will do that bad. Silver really only stops chapel+money from stalling out. It won't help it buy provinces sooner. Generally, it will be good vs decks that rely on few powerful non-drawing actions played often with warehouse, because the silver slows their cycling, and, unlike gold, is not that useful in smaller warehouse hands. This is not the most powerful combo ever, but I think it certainly qualifies as "good".

Anyway, I only have solitaire games now because I haven't actually seen the situation come up yet. Governor is pretty new. I wanted to put this out there since governor is getting a bad rap from some people on the "updating the best/worst list", but the existence of strats like this keep it nowhere near the worst list imo. Rather than posting there, I figured I'd just make a whole real post of it, and hopefully someone can play this strat and submit a good game log.

timchen:
Excellent thought I would say. Certainly something I look forward to trying.

Geronimoo:
Solitaire might blind you from the benefits your opponent is gaining (which are not light!)

I implemented this combo in the simulator. Try the Governor/Warehouse bot.

The mega turn is a bit hard to program, so that's certainly not played perfectly.

The combo barely beats BMU and gets crushed by Envoy (as expected). It does however crush Minions/Chapel because that deck really hates the Silvers it receives.

Definitely an interesting option if your opponent is going for some moneyless engine, but not if he's going big money.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page