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[liopoil]

Liopoil was pretty adamant in the chat that I should get Rats. I can't tell if he was kidding.

I wasn't kidding. Though after a bit it was too late to go for rats and wasn't relevant. But I totally would have gotten rats at some point in turns 3-7 or so if I were playing.

[-Stef-]

Black Market and Tournament in the Black Market. I hate everything about this game. We both could have played better but I feel like I lost because he pulled Tournament from the BM deck. I'd like to say more but I'll just say that Black Market is a stupid card and I hate it, and that's putting it lightly.

Wow. Just wow. Black Market is my favorite card. And that's not just because I really enjoy the variety it brings to the game, I also think it's among the top-5 cards that require skill to play with rather than luck.

Maybe it's time for an article.

[liopoil]

Black Market and Tournament in the Black Market. I hate everything about this game. We both could have played better but I feel like I lost because he pulled Tournament from the BM deck. I'd like to say more but I'll just say that Black Market is a stupid card and I hate it, and that's putting it lightly.

Wow. Just wow. Black Market is my favorite card. And that's not just because I really enjoy the variety it brings to the game, I also think it's among the top-5 cards that require skill to play with rather than luck.

Maybe it's time for an article.

I like black market too. What made that game bad was tournament.

Does anyone try to track the black market deck during the game? I always feel like I should, but I never do. I wonder how many games I've lost that way.

EDIT: yeah, an article for that card would be great.

[AdamH]

Black Market and Tournament in the Black Market. I hate everything about this game. We both could have played better but I feel like I lost because he pulled Tournament from the BM deck. I'd like to say more but I'll just say that Black Market is a stupid card and I hate it, and that's putting it lightly.

Wow. Just wow. Black Market is my favorite card. And that's not just because I really enjoy the variety it brings to the game, I also think it's among the top-5 cards that require skill to play with rather than luck.

Maybe it's time for an article.

I'm not going to say that Black Market is a luck-heavy card, but what I hate about it is the fact that sometimes (as I believe was the case here) the game comes down to who can draw the bomb from the BM deck. I am very much aware after reading chat and YouTube comments several things I could have done better, but I posit that had I drawn Tournament from the BM deck I would have won the game.

The fact that this dynamic exists just sparks a strong, seething, probably irrational hatred inside of me. My favorite thing about Dominion is that all opportunities are available to both players -- if I lost a game by doing something different than my opponent it's because I failed to do the best thing and it's my own fault. If you take that away it just enrages me, we're playing a game that I don't like anymore. I realize you can say the same thing about your draws affecting things and why doesn't that bother me? Well I don't know why but it doesn't -- probably due to the fact that my hatred is irrational in nature. Some people find this dynamic fun and interesting, that people are forced into different strategies that may not be equal in nature -- It makes me want to break things.

So I will continue to hate BM, Tournament, and Knights. I will continue to never carry them in my IRL box with me and I will continue to do everything in my power to make sure they don't come up in my online games. And I will continue to strongly hate whenever it comes up in tournament matches. I realize that I'm not as good with these cards as other people because I just don't play with them.

But you know, I can sit through an hour-long game that I have no chance of winning and not resign, where most other people would let that affect them emotionally and be on tilt for the rest of the match, and not really be affected by it. But I rage against Black Market enough that I'm actually OK losing tournament/league matches more often because of my inexperience, just because I find playing with it so unpleasant. We're all snowflakes, we're all unique, we're all beautiful.

All that said, if you wrote a Black Market article, I'd certainly read it. I'd certainly +1 it. I'd probably learn more from it than anyone else. Just don't be disappointed if it doesn't make me like the card.

[Awaclus]

My favorite thing about Dominion is that all opportunities are available to both players -- if I lost a game by doing something different than my opponent it's because I failed to do the best thing and it's my own fault. If you take that away it just enrages me, we're playing a game that I don't like anymore.

It's still there with Black Market, Tournament and Knights. If you weren't the first player to gain Followers or Princess or whatever, it's because you failed to do the best thing and it's your own fault.

Well, it's true on average at least.

[AdamH]

It's still there with Black Market, Tournament and Knights. If you weren't the first player to gain Followers or Princess or whatever, it's because you failed to do the best thing and it's your own fault.

I realize you can say the same thing about your draws affecting things

This is the kind of thing I was referring to. You can do things to increase your odds of getting there first, but past that it's just a race to the Followers or something like that. It does nothing to quell my irrational rage.

[Eevee]

Black Market and Tournament in the Black Market. I hate everything about this game. We both could have played better but I feel like I lost because he pulled Tournament from the BM deck. I'd like to say more but I'll just say that Black Market is a stupid card and I hate it, and that's putting it lightly.

Wow. Just wow. Black Market is my favorite card. And that's not just because I really enjoy the variety it brings to the game, I also think it's among the top-5 cards that require skill to play with rather than luck.

Maybe it's time for an article.

It's probably the only card I think most even decent players criminally underrate, and your article would totally ruin that. Don't write it!

[AdamH]

Black Market and Tournament in the Black Market. I hate everything about this game. We both could have played better but I feel like I lost because he pulled Tournament from the BM deck. I'd like to say more but I'll just say that Black Market is a stupid card and I hate it, and that's putting it lightly.

Wow. Just wow. Black Market is my favorite card. And that's not just because I really enjoy the variety it brings to the game, I also think it's among the top-5 cards that require skill to play with rather than luck.

Maybe it's time for an article.

It's probably the only card I think most even decent players criminally underrate, and your article would totally ruin that. Don't write it!

I felt that way before I wrote my article on Jack, and I still feel like people underestimate Jack in the ways my article tells them not to. Is it because they don't believe me or something? I dunno, but I think I'm at least as respected as Stef is around here, right?

I'm being sarcastic.

[Awaclus]

I think I'm at least as respected as Stef is around here, right?

No, he's respected +1505, you're respected only +1346. Objective measures right here.

[Donald X.]

We're all snowflakes, we're all unique, we're all beautiful.

Like the cards in the Black Market deck!

[ehunt]

It's probably the only card I think most even decent players criminally underrate, and your article would totally ruin that. Don't write it!

A long, long time ago, in the era before Scout jokes, it was written somewhere or other that black market is the worst card in the game -- it's like woodcutter, which is already terrible, except it restricts your extra buy to one of three cards. I think this was in a comment on the ds blog before the forum even started. In hindsight, this was wrong at the time and is wronger now.

[DG]

I think the later expansions did make black market more viable. The big problem with the black market is that your purchased cards can come into your deck too late to make a difference. The cards from the later expansions seemed to ease that problem, mainly with trashing.

[silverspawn]

the game comes down to who can draw the bomb from the BM deck

let's see, bomb will appear in the black market on maybe turn 12 average. then it's ~50% that you played the BM, ~20% that it collided with gunpowder so that you can buy it (you don't have a small deck, or why else would you want bomb?), and then, after you shuffle again to get bomb into your deck, and again after you trashed with it, your deck will have one less card. that amounts to about 20 turns with one more dead card (the turns where you also have bomb count double), for a 10% chance of one less card afterwards. so the game has to go for 220 turns in order for that to be worth it (if we are generous and assume you don't have to spend money for gunpowder)

 

[Awaclus]

the game comes down to who can draw the bomb from the BM deck

let's see, bomb will appear in the black market on maybe turn 12 average. then it's ~50% that you played the BM, ~20% that it collided with gunpowder so that you can buy it (you don't have a small deck, or why else would you want bomb?), and then, after you shuffle again to get bomb into your deck, and again after you trashed with it, your deck will have one less card. that amounts to about 20 turns with one more dead card (the turns where you also have bomb count double), for a 10% chance of one less card afterwards. so the game has to go for 220 turns in order for that to be worth it (if we are generous and assume you don't have to spend money for gunpowder)

 

Sometimes the game just comes down to that.

[KingZog3]

It's still there with Black Market, Tournament and Knights. If you weren't the first player to gain Followers or Princess or whatever, it's because you failed to do the best thing and it's your own fault.

I realize you can say the same thing about your draws affecting things

This is the kind of thing I was referring to. You can do things to increase your odds of getting there first, but past that it's just a race to the Followers or something like that. It does nothing to quell my irrational rage.

Your rage is not irrational. I find Black Market push the boundry of how much luck the game needs. Of course you can be affected by your draws, or a 4/3 opening is worse on a certain board, but the draws create just enough luck that strategy can overcome the luck most of the time. Also it's a question of a practical way to play the game, and cards are just always going to have luck, you can't avoid it. But Black Market is adding so many variables and these variable are unknown to the players. I can't plan for it, and while in some games that's fun, in Dominion it's not. Dominion to me is about planning my strategy and then trying to play to it and against my opponent as well as my draws will let me. Black Market is random, I can't plan for it, and what comes out of it can affect the game immensely. That's why you rage, because you are trying to plan things around a bunch of unknown variables that may or may not cause you to win or lose the game.

[-Stef-]

Your rage is not irrational. I find Black Market push the boundry of how much luck the game needs....

My dearest black market, I will defend you

I don't know what would convince you more that Black Market is not a heavily luck based card, a profound article or some statistics.
I'll try to write something but it's not easy because I think it's one of the hardest cards in the game to describe or play right.
In fact I already wrote an article a year ago but didn't consider it good enough to actually post it.

Until then, you'll have to do with statistics... I just looked back through 2 pages of log results (40 games)
From those 40 games I won 35 and lost 5, against these opponents: HvBoedefeld, Wandering Winder (2x), LESPEUTERE, SheCantSayNo.
This is far, far above my average win ratio, and it means I literally won every single game against an opponent below level 45. How on earth would that be possible with a card that is all about luck?

[Witherweaver]

You make your own Black Market luck.

[liopoil]

You make your own Black Market luck.

seriously, you get to put them back in any order.

[markusin]

It's probably the only card I think most even decent players criminally underrate, and your article would totally ruin that. Don't write it!

A long, long time ago, in the era before Scout jokes, it was written somewhere or other that black market is the worst card in the game -- it's like woodcutter, which is already terrible, except it restricts your extra buy to one of three cards. I think this was in a comment on the ds blog before the forum even started. In hindsight, this was wrong at the time and is wronger now.

I can't explain why Black Market is way better than Woodcutter, but it just is somehow. There is strength in variety, and sometimes there are fancy plays you can do with it (Merchant Guild, Tactician, stuff like that).

I like Black Market a lot. Tournament not so much, but at least Tournament tends to speed up the game, which is more than can be said for Knights. Also Tournament is interesting in Colony games.

There was also a time where I used the blank cards in its place in a base-only IRL game, but forgot that it gave +$2. It still got bought.

[KingZog3]

Your rage is not irrational. I find Black Market push the boundry of how much luck the game needs....

This is far, far above my average win ratio, and it means I literally won every single game against an opponent below level 45. How on earth would that be possible with a card that is all about luck?

It is not all about luck, but you can't deny there is more luck than other cards. It's like swindler hitting estate every time, and he hits your action cards. You can't plan for that, in the same way I can't plan for my opponent to get the only goons, or KC or tournament (well tournament you know is in from th start, but it's just a race to get it often).

[liopoil]

Your rage is not irrational. I find Black Market push the boundry of how much luck the game needs....

This is far, far above my average win ratio, and it means I literally won every single game against an opponent below level 45. How on earth would that be possible with a card that is all about luck?

It is not all about luck, but you can't deny there is more luck than other cards. It's like swindler hitting estate every time, and he hits your action cards. You can't plan for that, in the same way I can't plan for my opponent to get the only goons, or KC or tournament (well tournament you know is in from th start, but it's just a race to get it often).

I'd guess that black market actually does have less luck than the average card.

[Mic Qsenoch]

Your rage is not irrational. I find Black Market push the boundry of how much luck the game needs....

This is far, far above my average win ratio, and it means I literally won every single game against an opponent below level 45. How on earth would that be possible with a card that is all about luck?

It is not all about luck, but you can't deny there is more luck than other cards. It's like swindler hitting estate every time, and he hits your action cards. You can't plan for that, in the same way I can't plan for my opponent to get the only goons, or KC or tournament (well tournament you know is in from th start, but it's just a race to get it often).

You can plan for all the things you've mentioned... you should be planning for all those things, just like you'd be planning for any of the random outcomes in Dominion.

[silverspawn]

A long, long time ago, in the era before Scout jokes, it was written somewhere or other that black market is the worst card in the game -- it's like woodcutter, which is already terrible, except it restricts your extra buy to one of three cards. I think this was in a comment on the ds blog before the forum even started. In hindsight, this was wrong at the time and is wronger now.

I can't explain why Black Market is way better than Woodcutter, but it just is somehow. There is strength in variety, and sometimes there are fancy plays you can do with it (Merchant Guild, Tactician, stuff like that).

well, i can. the +buy of woodcutter is just a bonus, if you bought woodcutter early, you would often times refrain from using it. likewise, it's not a big deal that the original buy of black market is restricted to 3 cards, because you can just put them back and buy a card from the board, which you often end up doing. and because the cards vary so heavily in strength, it's not uncommon that a card from the BM is a lot stronger than anything on the board, both in general and in the context of the board. if dominion was a more "balanced" game, black market would be worse.

also, the shenanigans with variety, rats, draw to x and all of that stuff are probably enough on their own to make it better than woodcutter

on a sidenote, the stats that stef posted are pretty crazy/impressive

[Mic Qsenoch]

Some skill intensive things involving Black Market:

- Obviously there's looking at the BM cards and seeing what might be good. It expands the kingdom, it makes it more complicated.
- How often do I need to be playing Black Market? (related to how many Black Market cards will be useful)
 * How do I play my single Black Market more quickly? (Warehouse, trashing, whatever)
 * Do I need multiple copies of Black Market?
- Which of these three cards do I want? (in combination with, how much money will I have left to buy stuff from the regular kingdom)
 * Card X seems good now, but Y seems really good two turns later, which do I take?
- My opponent just bought X from the Black Market, how do I respond?
- I just bought X from the Black Market, how can I modify my deck to best exploit this possibly unique card effect I've acquired.
- You can play the cards you gain from the Black Market this turn, people mess this up a lot by auto playing actions.
- Cute little play Treasure in the action phase interactions (Tactician, Quarry, etc.).
- My opponent is ignoring Black Market. I know given enough time I can get any card in the Black Market deck, how does this change my play. SCSN has a nice game against AI where he does soul crushing Possession-Masq stuff (Possession from the BM), and it works even though it takes him ages to get there.
- I am ignoring Black Market, my opponent eventually can get anything in there. How do I end the game before they pull out that Possession?

General ideas:
- Very rare to have a "bad" Black Market deck, usually enough good things worth going for.
- I don't have any more general ideas.

Uh, unlike SCSN or Stef, I am not convinced Black Market is a uber-ultra powerful card. It's strong though. I am definitely convinced it's playable on most boards. I probably think there are alternative strategies which are competitive more often than they do.

[liopoil]

There's also tracking the black market deck, which can be a big deal occasionally I would think.

[Polk5440]

Black Market remains my least favorite card, but I like it better in two player games and when I can control the Black Market.

When I play with BM in person (I like playing it in person better than online because of the control over what goes into the BM deck), I like putting cards from one expansion in there. My favorite BM set up is having all of the base Dominion cards in the BM to keep it simple and randomizing among the other expansions for the kingdom cards (AP and reading time is another big negative of playing BM with anyone but really frequent players).

The game I played against Stef today was probably my favorite online BM game in a long time. I am rusty on my Dominion play, so I wasn't as sharp early as I probably should have been. However, the BM provided a really great dynamic -- trashing and villages came from BM. Multiple options for each, so neither player could get entirely shut out by one bad draw. Based on my draws, I was picking up most of the villages, Stef was picking up most of the trashing. I tried to compensate with Cellar early. He got Masq right away, which I thought was one of the best BM draws he could have hoped for. But the game was still close-ish in the end and there were a lot of interesting decisions throughout.

[Titandrake]

You know, back in the day (as in, almost 2 years ago), I wrote a BM article. Looking back, I still agree with some of the points, but definitely got stuff wrong.

The main points are:
- Black Market is better the more you get to play it, so it's great to fit into engines, and it's also great to find engine components that are missing on board.
- Seeing 3 cards each BM lets you cycle through the deck a lot faster than you would think.
- I claim BM is good in weak engines, and bad in strong engines, but I think BM is good in strong engines also. If you can create a good engine with the cards on board, you can probably fit in a BM somewhere in there, and you open up so many more possibilities, which should offset the on-board payload for most possible BM decks.
- I also claim the board in general needs to be slow for BM to be worth it. What I don't realize is that you can control the pace of the game - if you aren't buying Provinces, the game goes longer and BM can be more useful. I mention a cutoff point of Embassy-BM/Courtyard-BM, which still feels fast enough to make BM not good, but you can probably get pretty close to that speed and still be okay.

[Holger]

To quote an appropriate reply from that old thread:

Are we talking about Black Market, or Isotropic Black Market?

If you take the card literally, the BM deck contains one card of every kingdom not in play, i.e. almost 200 cards for someone who has all expansions, which makes fishing for specific cards impossible. With only 25 cards and the deck content being public knowledge, it becomes much more plannable. So which do you consider the standard way of playing BM? (Which method does Goko use, by the way?)

[GeoLib]

To quote an appropriate reply from that old thread:

Are we talking about Black Market, or Isotropic Black Market?

If you take the card literally, the BM deck contains one card of every kingdom not in play, i.e. almost 200 cards for someone who has all expansions, which makes fishing for specific cards impossible. With only 25 cards and the deck content being public knowledge, it becomes much more plannable. So which do you consider the standard way of playing BM? (Which method does Goko use, by the way?)

The same method as Iso did. I suspect this is the method most people are discussing here too, since most games are played on playdominion