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[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