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[Elanchana]

Oh look, another "what do you guys do" thread by Ela.

When I heard that chapel was the best/most powerful card in the game, I have to admit I was quite a bit taken aback. I mean, sure, it's awesome for getting rid of curses and that, but I had had, and still have had, much better luck when I haven't bought chapel. I have definitely lost games to trashing more opening estates than my opponent, or chapeling too much copper to buy anything useful, or waiting too long to trash copper because of that and drawing chapel at the most inconvenient times. Can I, and other newbies, get some advice about how to use chapel responsibly?

[jsh357]

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Chapel

Generally, you want to trash all of your starting cards, but that doesn't do anything for you unless you are doing it to play more powerful cards more often.  Just replacing your Copper with Silver and Gold isn't that great; in a money game Chapel tends to not do so much for you.  It's important to trash things, but keep a $3 economy in your deck if some card you need to buy costs $3.  Chapel gets better and better the more you understand card interactions and what kinds of decks are good to build.  I'd advise watching what stronger players do with Chapel and trying to understand why they did it. 

Try WanderingWinder's videos. 


He has shown off countless games, many including Chapel. 

Of course, another thing to remember is that, while Chapel is a great card, that doesn't mean it's the be-all-end-all.  It's only good when the other Kingdom Cards support it.

[silverspawn]

it's pretty straight forward. You want chapel to get rid of bad cards. Getting rid of bad cards is very important in dominion. Bad cards are: Estates, Curses, and Coppers. Coppers are bad. It pretty much comes down to the understanding of this fact. You start the game with 10 bad cards, not 3.

While it's important to always keep a minimum of money in your deck, this is usually something that works out by itself.

Always open chapel. (There are situations where you don't buy it, but I think none in 2p base, and it's a good way to start it). Either couple it with silver, or with a terminal silver (mainly militia).

If you draw chapel without your silver/terminal silver in turn 3 or 4, always trash your hand. On the other turn (where you didn't draw your chapel), buy a second silver (or a gold, if possible). Now you already have 2 silvers, which is enough to buy new economy, so you don't have to worry about not having enough money. Which means, for the rest of the game, whenever you draw chapel, trash everything that's not silver or better.

The only time where you have to worry is, if you draw your chapel together with silver on turn 3 or four. In that case, either trash everything except the silver, or trash everything except the silver and a copper, and buy a silver.

Never buy a second chapel.

[eHalcyon]

If you don't have the experience to know otherwise, these are the basic rules of Chapel:

- Buy one and only one.
- Buy it on your first or second turn.
- When you draw it, trash every Copper and Estate in your hand (or Shelter if playing with Dark Ages).  You don't need to buy anything that turn.

When playing with Chapel, the goal is to get down to a slim deck of good cards as fast as possible.  Every hand is better for it, and you get to play your key cards more often.

If you are having trouble with Chapel, it's probably because you're not trashing aggressively enough or you don't have a good plan for what kind of slim deck to build.  A deck of nothing but Village is useless.  You want attack cards to slow down opponents and payload cards that help you gain multiple Provinces each turn.

Also, keep in mind that trashing isn't always that helpful if you just plan to play a Big Money strategy anyway.

(PPE: ninja'd!)

[liopoil]

Getting rid of bad cards is very important in dominion. Bad cards are: Estates, Curses, and Coppers.

As well as silver, gold, and scout. Scout can be okay sometimes though.

[Awaclus]

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Chapel

That article is surprisingly accurate even today, considering how old it is.

Scout can be okay sometimes though.

No, it can't.

But trashing Silvers is seriously a good point. It feels weird that you buy the Silvers first, and later you trash them, but it is often the case that buying the Silvers is a good idea and trashing them later is a good idea too. Of course you shouldn't just start trashing your Silvers in every game because some people on the forums told you it's a good play, but you shouldn't be hesitant to trashing your Silvers when you already have more money in your deck than you need and your engine isn't working quite as well as you'd like.

[liopoil]

Scout can be okay sometimes though.

No, it can't.

But trashing Silvers is seriously a good point. It feels weird that you buy the Silvers first, and later you trash them, but it is often the case that buying the Silvers is a good idea and trashing them later is a good idea too. Of course you shouldn't just start trashing your Silvers in every game because some people on the forums told you it's a good play, but you shouldn't be hesitant to trashing your Silvers when you already have more money in your deck than you need and your engine isn't working quite as well as you'd like.

I can't imagine trashing silvers ever being a good idea when playing with base only, as the OP is. If trashing silver is good in a scenario with base only, you shouldn't have bought the silvers.

EDIT: I might be able to see it in a game with chapel, festival, library, other support, and a 3/4 opening.

[silverspawn]

I can't imagine trashing silvers ever being a good idea when playing with base only, as the OP is. If trashing silver is good in a scenario with base only, you shouldn't have bought the silvers.

+1 this. for base, it's very rare that a deck that buys 1 province each turn is not good enough. with silver, you can buy provinces. your hand has 5 silvers, silver is worth 2, 2*5=10, 10>8, province costs 8$. silver helps you to buy provinces, that's why it's a good card until the end. Copper doesn't, which is why it's a bad card. it gets more complicated when you play better engines, but for base, this is pretty solid.

[theright555J]

I'd also recommend the article "Five Fundamental Deck Types" which can be found on the archive of f.ds.

Trashing is excellent for engines and often combos, can be OK for rushes but really depends on what rush and which trasher, and not quite so good for BM and slog.

With more expansions, engines become increasingly more viable and so trashing becomes more important on the average.

[Awaclus]

I'd also recommend the article "Five Fundamental Deck Types" which can be found on the archive of f.ds.

Trashing is excellent for engines and often combos, can be OK for rushes but really depends on what rush and which trasher, and not quite so good for BM and slog.

With more expansions, engines become increasingly more viable and so trashing becomes more important on the average.

Trashing is good for BM, too, you just don't want to spend much time doing it. Chapel is bad for BM, because you have to waste one turn buying the Chapel, and one turn every time you want to trash with Chapel, and once you're done trashing, it's a useless card in your deck. Masquerade is good for BM, because it gives +2 cards, so in addition to trashing, it also improves your current turn, so it's not a waste of time. Count is sometimes fine for BM in weak kingdoms, because it gives +$3, gains Duchies and topdecks extra money from your hand, so buying it isn't a waste of time, and it can be good to waste one turn in the early game if that means you're getting rid of some Estates and Coppers.

[theright555J]

@Awaclus:  Agreed and +1'd.  As a concept, I'd still hold that trashing is in general not "quite so good" for BM as it is with engines, where trashing is the lifeblood of the whole thing.  Of course BM is usually much worse than an engine when both are played optimally so there's that.  This thread is making me nostalgic for the early days of Dominion!

[soulnet]

This is the way I find most intuitive for beginners, though it is not accurate: you don't get to play with your entire deck every time, you draw 5 average cards, and if you draw more, each card is an average card (on average). There are two ways to make the average go up: add above-average cards and remove below-average cards. As long as Copper is (or will soon be) a below-average card, removing it is a good idea.

PS: I find this especially useful for people used to building games in which almost always all your buildings do positive things for you after you built them (Citadels, Puerto Rico, 7 wonders).

[dondon151]

BM doesn't really mind having extra Coppers hanging around the deck. One thing that players notice when trying to do Chapel-BM, especially in the base set, is they they very quickly go from a high quality deck to one that has trouble buying Victory cards at all once a few Victory cards enter the deck.

[silverspawn]

does BM/nothing win against BM/chapel? you're making it sound like it does. It would surprise me though.

BM does mind coppers, for the reason I listed. BM wants to buy provinces. Coppers don't buy provinces. what's true is that the majority of engines mind coppers more than BM.

[shark_bait]

If you don't have the experience to know otherwise, these are the basic rules of Chapel:

- Buy one and only one.

If I know that my chapel is in my T5 hand I will sometimes buy a 2nd one on T4 to hopefully make up for the loss of trashing tempo.

[Deadlock39]

does BM/nothing win against BM/chapel? you're making it sound like it does. It would surprise me though.

BM does mind coppers, for the reason I listed. BM wants to buy provinces. Coppers don't buy provinces. what's true is that the majority of engines mind coppers more than BM.

If I recall correctly, I think the simulators showed BM beats BM+Chapel.

[Awaclus]

BM doesn't really mind having extra Coppers hanging around the deck. One thing that players notice when trying to do Chapel-BM, especially in the base set, is they they very quickly go from a high quality deck to one that has trouble buying Victory cards at all once a few Victory cards enter the deck.

This is not a result of trashing your Coppers, but spending your turns doing that rather than buying Silvers and Golds. You want the Coppers for buying Duchies, but not for Provinces.

[silverspawn]

If I recall correctly, I think the simulators showed BM beats BM+Chapel.

and do the simulators play BM/chapel correctly? there are a bunch of things that are somewhat easy to get wrong in that matchup.

[eHalcyon]

If you don't have the experience to know otherwise, these are the basic rules of Chapel:

- Buy one and only one.

If I know that my chapel is in my T5 hand I will sometimes buy a 2nd one on T4 to hopefully make up for the loss of trashing tempo.

I started it with a caveat!  Those are just general rules of thumb for the inexperienced!  And I'm curious how much a second Chapel helps in your scenario. 



@silverspawn, I'm pretty sure BMU does beat BM-Chapel, or else it comes really close.  Coppers may not help with buying Provinces, but Provinces help even less with that.  Trashing Copper increases your money density, but when you green, money density will fall much faster if you've trashed those Coppers away.  It balances out, except that the trashing does not make up for the lost buys.  It takes minimum 3 turns to trash all starting cards and the turn you bought Chapel.  Those 4 turns could have been 4 Silver buys instead.  Moreover, BMU will be much better at Duchy dancing than BM-Chapel.

There's some discussion about it here, with talk about simulation results.

Of note:

A long time ago, I micro-optimized a Chapel bot (with much more complex play rules than Geronimoo's simulator supports) against BMU, and the absolute best I could do was about 55/45 for the Chapel bot among un-tied games. Before that exercise, I thought single-Chapel was an excellent strategy. But it turns out it's not! Though it does work very well against novice and even intermediate players who don't yet understand when to buy Duchies. Anyway: Chapel is elite for building engine decks and pretty crap for building pure money decks.

I didn't even bother to try it against single-Smithy, and I would expect Smithy to absolutely crush Chapel in that matchup. I'm sure others have done simulation studies.

[Deadlock39]

If I recall correctly, I think the simulators showed BM beats BM+Chapel.

and do the simulators play BM/chapel correctly? there are a bunch of things that are somewhat easy to get wrong in that matchup.

Perhaps not, but I don't know how to play BM/Chapel, so I'm not qualified to check.

[LastFootnote]

does BM/nothing win against BM/chapel? you're making it sound like it does. It would surprise me though.

BM does mind coppers, for the reason I listed. BM wants to buy provinces. Coppers don't buy provinces. what's true is that the majority of engines mind coppers more than BM.

Trashing Coppers makes it much harder for a BM deck to buy Duchies, which can be important depending on what your opponent is doing.

[silverspawn]

I understand the reasons why BM could beat chapel. I said it'd surprise me, but it wouldn't surprise me that much. I was maybe 2/3 certain or something.

that said, I'll keep my suspicion concerning the simulation, until a really good player tells me that it's accurate.

[Jorbles]

I +1ed a lot of stuff here that I thought was good advice, but I wanted to reiterate this one point more strongly:

If Chapel is on the board you should think about building an Engine-based deck. Estates and Coppers are the enemy of almost all Engines (barring some edge-case Copper interactions involved with Counting House and Apothecary or Estate interactions with Baron). Chapel is the best card at getting rid of Estates and Coppers. Chapel is probably the best card at jumpstarting an Engine on any board where an Engine is viable. So if you see a Chapel out there look at all the other cards on the board and say to yourself, could I build an Engine out of this? Chapel makes Engines way easier to build.

[Titandrake]

If you don't have the experience to know otherwise, these are the basic rules of Chapel:

- Buy one and only one.

If I know that my chapel is in my T5 hand I will sometimes buy a 2nd one on T4 to hopefully make up for the loss of trashing tempo.

Wait, is this a thing? I'd think that although you might be able to catch back up in deck size, your deck will be so much worse with the extra Chapel instead of the alternative card you could have bought (at least a Silver)

There are probably boards where the pure deck size is worth it, but I can't think of any that don't involve Ambassadors, which act as exceptional attacks in small decks.

[eHalcyon]

If you don't have the experience to know otherwise, these are the basic rules of Chapel:

- Buy one and only one.

If I know that my chapel is in my T5 hand I will sometimes buy a 2nd one on T4 to hopefully make up for the loss of trashing tempo.

Wait, is this a thing? I'd think that although you might be able to catch back up in deck size, your deck will be so much worse with the extra Chapel instead of the alternative card you could have bought (at least a Silver)

There are probably boards where the pure deck size is worth it, but I can't think of any that don't involve Ambassadors, which act as exceptional attacks in small decks.

I didn't think it was a thing, but I can imagine how it would be.  You know Chapel is going to miss the shuffle so you buy a second one.  The second Chapel probably won't collide with the other one (which just missed the shuffle), and after that you can trash one  Chapel with the other.

No idea if it's worth it overall, but it doesn't seem totally crazy.