Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Awaclus]

(inspired by this thread)

What's the maximum number of Coppers you can gain with Ill-Gotten Gains in a single turn, if there's an unlimited supply of Coppers? As usual, you get to design the kingdom and make your own shuffle luck.

[TheOthin]

With Actions, without, or both?

[Awaclus]

With Actions, without, or both?

There are no restrictions. You can use Actions.

[amalloy]

One. The card says "...you may gain a Copper...". Gaining more than one would be against the rules.

[eHalcyon]

Probably involves Black Market, Counterfeit and Rogue/Graverobber.

Edit: oops, these were already called out in the other thread.

[TheOthin]

Okay so if you play 10 IGGs, gain Coppers with them, then use HoP/Mandarin/Cultist/Watchtower to get them back, you can gain the 10 Mandarins for 100 Coppers, then another 20 by playing them again with Counterfeit for a total of 120. I'm assuming you can get at least that far, and it seems like the maximum without playing Actions.

Allowing Actions makes things weirder, since you can use Black Market to play the IGGs mid-turn, get Mandarins, then play Ambassador to return them to the Supply. This starts to vary drastically based on whether the game is two-player or solitaire. In solitaire you could use KC-Ambassador to return six Mandarins to the Supply at once, but in two-player half of them will go to your opponent and end up off-limits.

---

Oh hmm I forgot about Rogue/Graverobber getting around that; you don't have to gain them from the Supply. That's gonna get really ridiculous.

[ConMan]

Okay so if you play 10 IGGs, gain Coppers with them, then use HoP/Mandarin/Cultist/Watchtower to get them back, you can gain the 10 Mandarins for 100 Coppers, then another 20 by playing them again with Counterfeit for a total of 120. I'm assuming you can get at least that far, and it seems like the maximum without playing Actions.

Allowing Actions makes things weirder, since you can use Black Market to play the IGGs mid-turn, get Mandarins, then play Ambassador to return them to the Supply. This starts to vary drastically based on whether the game is two-player or solitaire. In solitaire you could use KC-Ambassador to return six Mandarins to the Supply at once, but in two-player half of them will go to your opponent and end up off-limits.

---

Oh hmm I forgot about Rogue/Graverobber getting around that; you don't have to gain them from the Supply. That's gonna get really ridiculous.

Well, unless your opponent got a Lighthouse from the Black Market. I've been trying to work out whether there's ever any benefit to Processioning a Rogue and then gaining the Rogue back later (probably not in net, but it might be a neat trick if you're in the middle of a KC/TR/Pr chain and you need to "waste" a gain from trash because the numbers don't add up otherwise).

I think the turn has to start by playing Native Village to take the entire contents of your deck in hand, which can also give you some of the Actions you need to play the other cards. Then, one of the tricks I think might be involved is to let the Coppers get gained to the discard pile, then gain back the trashed Counterfeits and IGGs, and play Counting House followed by Storeroom or Vault to draw all the necessary cards to continue.

[eHalcyon]

Play Black Market, Counterfeit-Counterfeit chain to eventually play and trash 9 Counterfeits and 10 IGGs.  Each IGG gets played twice, so that's 20 Coppers gained.  Buying Mint from Black Market could get all 10 Counterfeits trashed, but that only works once.

KC-Graverobber or KC-Rogue can be used to gain back all the Counterfeits and IGGs so they can be played again for at least 20 more Coppers gained.  It's just a question of how many times you can repeat this, and I am not inclined to figure it out.

Could you use Procession-Graverobber to eke out more plays?  Procession gets you one extra play of Graverobber, but then you need to use one extra play of Graverobber to get the Procession back.  Doesn't really work.  But you could maybe do Procession-King's Court and then sacrifice a Graverobber play to get the KC back... not sure if it works out to be better.

Alternative strategy is to skip Counterfeit and gain Mandarin to put the IGGs from play back on top of your deck, then repeat.  Using more conventional draw is better than doing Cultist/Watchtower shenanigans, which would only let you draw 33 cards (thus not allowing you to get 4 plays of every IGG).

The best answer will probably do both.  Use the Counterfeit method until you run out of Graverobber and Rogue plays, then do the Mandarin thing.  You could probably fold a HoP-Cultist-Watchtower loop into one of the Black Market plays, or just save it for after you run out of Black Markets.

Might also need to sacrifice some of that in order to have enough draw to get everything back.  Drawing a bunch of treasures is not as easy as drawing a bunch of actions.

[Dingan]

This question is a bit confusing.  If I can only gain coppers via IGGs and nothing else, I can gain from 0 to n coppers when I play n IGGs.  If I can play other cards (with IGGs in play), then can't I pretty much just gain however many coppers I want, i.e. just go crazy with KC + more buys + Hagglers, etc.?

[eHalcyon]

This question is a bit confusing.  If I can only gain coppers via IGGs and nothing else, I can gain from 0 to n coppers when I play n IGGs.  If I can play other cards (with IGGs in play), then can't I pretty much just gain however many coppers I want, i.e. just go crazy with KC + more buys + Hagglers, etc.?

The "gain coppers with IGG" isn't the important part.  The heart of the question is "how many copies of one kingdom treasure can you play in a single turn?"  It's trivial to play 10 copies -- just have and play all 10 from the supply.  But how can you get more than that?  You can play one copy multiple times with Counterfeit, you can gain them back from the trash to play them again, you can top-deck them from play with Mandarin and then draw and re-play them... so how do you max it out?

I've posted some general strategies, but it is too much effort for me to attempt a complete and optimized solution.

[TheOthin]

This question is a bit confusing.  If I can only gain coppers via IGGs and nothing else, I can gain from 0 to n coppers when I play n IGGs.  If I can play other cards (with IGGs in play), then can't I pretty much just gain however many coppers I want, i.e. just go crazy with KC + more buys + Hagglers, etc.?

Basically the idea is solving for n. Other cards can let you gain Coppers other ways, but that's not counted, only IGG Coppers.

It seems simple, as there are only 10 IGGs, but cards like Counterfeit, Horn of Plenty + Mandarin, and Black Market + Graverobber (on top of Counterfeit) allow for playing those IGGs multiple times in one turn.

[jomini]

This can go pretty insanely high.

Key points
1. This is a Bm deck, so we have a lot of free villages.
2. We have Mandarin as a kingdom card so we can play all our Igg multiple times via Bm -> Igg (gain a copper) x10 -> buy cards that cost >$3 (remember that a single Quarry can make pretty much all the non-actions except Fool's gold, Tunnel, etc. viable for Mandarin gaining).
3. We can redraw our Igg with something good for big draw (e.g. Madmen from the Bm deck; Cellar all the copper we gain & keep and hand; Apprentice a few colonies).
4. We can return Mandarin to the supply with Ambassador (optimal play gets hinky with non-solo play, but we should be able to do this a huge number of times even with cooperative 2er).
5. We can reuse Bm with Procession/Rogue/Graverobber
6. We juice the whole works with Ventures so we can draw back the Igg during Prssn->Bm plays.
7. With Princess & Highway in play we can use the gainers from the Bm (e.g. Iw, Armory) to get the 10th cards in a lot of piles.

So we want something like Play a single Haggler -> Prssn -> Bm (play 10 Igg, gain - don't play 10 coppers, play a Quarry, buy a $4, gain a Mandarin, top deck 10 Igg & 1 Quarry; play 10 Ventures -> play 10 Igg, gain another 10 C, buy a second Mandarin) -> Graverob the Bm back (note Quarry is not "in play") -> draw everything -> Amb (return 2 Mandarins to supply).

So on net this whole shebang has cost us exactly: 1 Prssn,  1 Amb, 1 Graverobber/Rogue, and 1 monster draw card (10 Madman, Cellar, Storeroom, Xroads, Apprentice&Colony)

We could optimize this a bit with multiplicative play of Prssn and then gaining back some Amb by trashing them with Prssn, I don't have time to do that so let's stick with the simple case: we do this 10 times. This gives us 10 x 20 gained  coppers = 200.

Okay, now we have 10 more plays of Bm, until we run out of Mandarins. So this is another 100 coppers gained.

So what cards need to be in the kingdom?
1. Bm
2. Igg
3. Graverobber
4. Mandarin
5. Prssn
6. Amb
7. (likely to get enough draw) Xroads (bane)
8. Kc (likely to ensure enough actions)
9. Venture

so we need 2 more slots.

Well we can put in Counterfeit. And play another 20 Iggs for another 20 coppers, but a better option would be using Rogue/Kc/Tr to build a very finicky multiple play chain to trash Amb's and Prssns as well as Bm's & gain everything back to play again. Band of Misfits would also work as a filler card allowing us to effectively double any one of Bm, Amb, or Prssn.

Ultimately, I'm pretty sure we can do the whole Prssn -> Bm (gain Mandarin x2; using 10 Igg then 10 Ventures) -> Amb (return Mandarin x2) at least 20 times and maybe even more with full on optimization.

So for the non-optimized run through, that should be 320 coppers gained. For an optimized setup, likely north of 500, perhaps as high as an order of magnitude more (though this is doubtful). The top end is hinky (at some point you run low on huge draw and even every village from the Bm deck isn't enough); and you are trying to optimize a lot of cards (you want to double/triple play Prssn/Graverobber, but you need stuff in hand/trash to make that work).

[liopoil]

Are you sure you have enough actions? I'd guess there are only ~30 villages or pseudo villages to put in the black market deck for just ~31 actions.

[TheOthin]

A full KC chain allows for triple-playing 19 non-KC Actions. All of those for just one Action, and any villages mixed in there get a whole lot more.

[Awaclus]

Are you sure you have enough actions? I'd guess there are only ~30 villages or pseudo villages to put in the black market deck for just ~31 actions.

Hermit and Scheme give you 10 villages.

[eHalcyon]

So we want something like Play a single Haggler -> Prssn -> Bm (play 10 Igg, gain - don't play 10 coppers, play a Quarry, buy a $4, gain a Mandarin, top deck 10 Igg & 1 Quarry; play 10 Ventures -> play 10 Igg, gain another 10 C, buy a second Mandarin) -> Graverob the Bm back (note Quarry is not "in play") -> draw everything -> Amb (return 2 Mandarins to supply).

Bolded two parts.

For the first one, I'm assuming that by that you mean you need to buy a card that costs $4, accounting for Quarry?  That may put a smaller cap on how many times you can pull it off, but I don't want to go count.

An obvious alternative would be to just play HoP.  You have Haggler, Procession, Black Market, IGG, Horn of Plenty makes 5, so you don't even need the Quarry.  But if you do this, you don't really need the Haggler either.  You save actions by skipping Haggler, and you should still have enough cards in play for HoP considering all the background stuff you're playing to have enough actions.

The second line also seems like a typo; you can't buy a Mandarin from the Supply via Black Market.  Maybe you mean buy another card from the BM deck to gain Mandarin via Haggler, but Quarry is gone at this point so now you need a $6+ card, and that just further eats into your options.  You can, of course, use a second HoP.  Then the second Mandarin should put it back on top and you can draw both HoPs back into hand for your loop.

That does require HoP to be in the kingdom though, which limits it in other areas.

[jomini]

The trick I forgot to write up is to buy something that costs more resolve the "on-buy" clause of Haggler then reveal Traders (gaining silver instead of say Fairgrounds). The reason to use Quarry is that most all kingdom VP and treasures giving you more options than just the $6, 7, and 8's. I'm pretty sure that the rule set allows this resolution order for on-buy and on-gain effects.

In both cases of a Prssn -> Bm play you should buy something in the Bm deck, gain a Mandarin (top decking the treasures), revealing Trader (gaining silvers instead until they run out), and then using Prssn, Amb, and Graverobber/Rogue to restore the key cards.

In terms of action balance, you might be able to get by with just the 30 odd villages and 10 Madmen (which double up on function to draw back the treasures), but I'm guessing you will want to chain some Kc/Tr/Prssn. All told each cycle requires you to play 3 terminals per cycle with possibly an additional terminal for draw (e.g. Storeroom), but most of the major draw cards (Madman, Cellar, Apprentice, Xroads) are non-terminal.

I'm guessing that BoM and Tr are your best additions; but the optimization appears to be a non-trivial thing. We most want to maximize the play of Bm, no more than doubles, and then Amb to return Mandarins. Each double play of Bm -> Igg -> Venture/Igg is 20 coppers, you get 10 plays (5 double plays) for free, then you need an Amb play for every additional Bm play. Bom gives you 10 more cards, Prssn allows you to play the card again with trash diving.