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Flip5ide

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Lack of quality posts
« on: March 01, 2015, 03:17:05 am »
+2

Recently there has been a dropoff with anything remotely Dominion-related on f.ds... has anyone noticed this?
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Awaclus

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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #1 on: March 01, 2015, 03:57:21 am »
0

I don't think so. The only thing that we haven't gotten a lot lately is new articles, which is just natural since there haven't been new cards either. EDIT: I think there's room for another general engine article though, I feel like a lot of the actual stuff going on in high level engine games isn't really very common knowledge, so if someone wants to write a good quality post, there's a possible subject.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2015, 04:01:58 am by Awaclus »
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2015, 03:58:57 am »
0

Yeah. I attribute this to:
  • It's been almost three years since Dark Ages came out (last big expansion) and almost two years since Guilds came out (last expansion of any size). No new cards coming out means less to discuss.
  • This might just be my perception, but the Goko era seems less conductive to sustaining a competitive scene than the isotropic era. Whether that's because of some failing of the existing Dominion Online, or the trauma of the switchover, or just people having played enough and moving on to other things, I don't know. But I remember more activity pre-switchover.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2015, 04:05:53 am »
+6

What do you mean, lack of quality posts? There are plenty of Dominion memes and in-jokes.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #4 on: March 01, 2015, 10:09:15 am »
+8

What do you mean, lack of quality posts? There are plenty of Dominion memes and in-jokes.

And forum games.

That said, what is "quality"? If the objective of being here is to discuss Dominion, then the quality of posts was inevitably going to decrease without new cards, and with the Goko switch.

If the objective is instead to maintain a community dedicated to Dominion, then all the ancillary posting does exactly that.  Even though I haven't played much Dominion lately, I'm still a bit excited about Adventures... but I wouldn't be if I didn't hang out here.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #5 on: March 01, 2015, 10:26:29 am »
+3

I think a lot of us are waiting for a) Adventures and b) "new" Goko
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #6 on: March 01, 2015, 10:42:14 am »
+14

I am not a top tier Dominion player, but I've been around for a long time.

The site used to be a bunch of people discovering Dominion together, if this makes sense. Many cards simply weren't well-understood until years after being released. It wasn't at all uncommon for a new combo to be discovered that completely changed the way you would play most boards.

Nowadays, our understanding of the game has evolved a lot, and the number of pretty-good players has gone way up as well. I can't remember the last new strategic insight from someone relatively new to the forum that I thought was worth thinking about.

Going back and reading theory's old posts to the blog, which at the time were brilliant, I'm struck by how many I now completely disagree with, or at least, which I think contain parenthetical remarks that I disagree with. Part of this, of course, is that the overall weight of the game has shifted as new expansions are released, so that cards which seemed must-buy around Prosperity time wasn't, but another part is just that the community has put in a massive amount of time on figuring this game out, and at this point we are sort of chipping at the margins instead of discovering great new swaths of territory. I think even with new cards, there will still be less to say, just because we'll already have a framework for thinking about them.

That said, I disagree with the premise a little. The "Game Reports" section is, for example, excellent; there are many quality posts and you can certainly improve your strategy and tactics by reading it.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #7 on: March 01, 2015, 11:10:54 am »
+9

Part of the problem I've seen is such Dominion talk as still happens is heavily circumscribed by "how frequent is that going to actually be" and "that is not what elite players do".

It used to be that if you wanted to talk about something interesting - like say which cards make Pstone good you could have a nice discussion about the relative merits. Because most people on the boards play all random all the time, you end up in the situation where two card combos are <1 in 500 games and there is heavy antipathy on the boards for discussing things that are "rare". This has gotten to the point that you can be discussing something and offer an example that is obviously contrived example to show a point and most of the thread becomes screed about how rare it is to have X + Y + Z. Dominion is large enough that any degree of specificity is going to be by definition rare, but the boards are pretty much intolerant of anything that isn't fiendishly common and frankly obvious.

The elite players bit is another huge thing killing the boards. It used to be a newb could come in say I think this is good and then people would debate on theoretical merit. Elite players have gotten good enough that, pretty much they can win with anything against non-elite players. The tacit skills of timing, adaptation, and end game strategy are now more than enough that elite players could be utterly terrible with some card or even class of cards, but their execution of a slightly weaker strategy is flawless (or close thereto) and will trump the idealized strengths of cards and combos. This leads to the boards becoming moribund. When arguments start getting made based on ranking it becomes really hard to delve into the subtle parts of the game; someone who executes better can just shut down a thread without actually addressing the dynamics in question. Coupling this with the heavy frequency bias and there just isn't a lot to talk about.

In order to have robust debate and new material you need to have open allowable spaces where people can come with explicit arguments. Virtually every dominion thread these days falls into three camps:
1. A newb come in and says something. There is a wealth of dogpiling that either the newb is utterly wrong, the topic is too rare to merit discussion, or that is not how elite players play.
2. An elite player broaching a "big topic" which tends use excessive generalities that make it really hard to get useful information out. Inevitably some people start offering counterexamples, but such discussions aren't particularly welcome and they die once people start talking about frequency.
3. Specific card discussions. For some unknown reason people think these are reference articles that newbs will read and learn to better play. Virtually all specific card discussion revolves around the most obvious combos, a few generic statements about board types of setups that favor the card, and maybe a few contraindications. In reality, nobody who can find the article will ever learn anything they couldn't have managed just by playing 10 or 20 boards with the card in question.
4. Specific kingdom discussions. These in theory should be a great place for specific discussions, but the board mostly is content to identify a handful of power cards and be done with a kingdom.

To whit, the goal of the boards is no longer to enjoy or understand Dominion; it is to become a strong Dominion player. Nothing wrong with that, but after a small amount of discussion nothing you can actually say is going to come close to the skill gain to be had from just playing more.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #8 on: March 01, 2015, 11:57:21 am »
+13

I want to say that I think a big part of the problem is that so much of the game comes down to how you play through the mid and endgame. Reacting to your opponents, adapting to the shuffles, dealing with buying power, jockeying for position for the endgame, where you are buying points and making sure that they can't pile out against you, whilst setting yourself up to do the same... this dominates, and it is very hard to discuss. I think part of the reason here is that it's hard to figure out at what point to start this, some of it is because it's hard to just get someone up to speed at this point. There have been a few endgame articles, but it's very difficult to say 'okay, on turn 15 I have X, Y, Z, he has J, K, L, we need to set up for Q, we need to be aware of his/her ability to R', etc. Moreover, it's really hard to do this in a way that will be generally applicable. "How to play this one particular game" is just not so much an article that is nice and generally helpful, but the situations are so varied, so different, that extrapolating very much from a single game is difficult to do, especially in a succinct manner that makes for an effective and interesting article.

I also think this is why videos and streaming have become much more popular, because this kind of thing is much easier to get across there.

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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #9 on: March 01, 2015, 12:16:52 pm »
+10

To whit, the goal of the boards is no longer to enjoy or understand Dominion; it is to become a strong Dominion player.

Nailed it.

Personally, I do not strive to become an elite Dominion player. I play Dominion because I enjoy playing it. I enjoy reading the discussion threads here, but do not so often get other value from them these days.

HOWEVER! There is one advantage of the situation that you have missed (because according to your stats you never go there), which is that the Variants and Fan Cards forum on f.DS is excellent. Both the quality of the posted ideas and the quality of feedback is worlds better than at e.g. BGG due to the same level of expertise that has made discussion of the published cards so stagnant.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #10 on: March 01, 2015, 01:04:57 pm »
+5

The elite players bit is another huge thing killing the boards. It used to be a newb could come in say I think this is good and then people would debate on theoretical merit. Elite players have gotten good enough that, pretty much they can win with anything against non-elite players. The tacit skills of timing, adaptation, and end game strategy are now more than enough that elite players could be utterly terrible with some card or even class of cards, but their execution of a slightly weaker strategy is flawless (or close thereto) and will trump the idealized strengths of cards and combos. This leads to the boards becoming moribund. When arguments start getting made based on ranking it becomes really hard to delve into the subtle parts of the game; someone who executes better can just shut down a thread without actually addressing the dynamics in question. Coupling this with the heavy frequency bias and there just isn't a lot to talk about.

I don't believe that "elite players" are "utterly terrible" at anything. You don't become an elite player through memorizing 29384729384729837 different cool tricks you can do in different situations, and then lose games because your opponent used that one trick you didn't remember. You become an elite player through understanding how the entire game works as a whole (not perfectly of course, but on a certain level). When you're good at estimating the consequences of your actions in general, there won't be "some card or even class of cards" that you're "utterly terrible" at.

FWIW, I played Hermit/Market Square against Marin who had just returned and didn't know about the combo, he won that game.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #11 on: March 01, 2015, 01:09:04 pm »
0

FWIW, I played Hermit/Market Square against Marin who had just returned and didn't know about the combo, he won that game.
Did... he see the combo though? I can't imagine uncontested hermit/market square loses often at all. Or maybe he just got hermits because it's a good card and it worked out?
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Awaclus

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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #12 on: March 01, 2015, 01:48:26 pm »
0

FWIW, I played Hermit/Market Square against Marin who had just returned and didn't know about the combo, he won that game.
Did... he see the combo though? I can't imagine uncontested hermit/market square loses often at all. Or maybe he just got hermits because it's a good card and it worked out?

He didn't, but he bought so many Market Squares that I couldn't get enough Golds to do anything particularly useful. I don't remember the game too well anymore, but I'm pretty sure it would have been possible for me to win the game if I hadn't been all like "Yay, let's do this Hermit/Market Square trick and hope he doesn't know it! Let's see, first you do this, and then this..." and had paid attention to the relevant things instead.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #13 on: March 01, 2015, 02:20:14 pm »
+2

This is a quality thread about Dominion
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #14 on: March 01, 2015, 02:48:07 pm »
+2

I'm mostly here for the forum games tbh.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #15 on: March 01, 2015, 03:33:34 pm »
+1

I'm mostly here for the RSP board, RSPII thread, fan card ideas, Mafia speccys, card previews, blueblimp's posts, necrophilia jokes, obscure references, painful puns, and the "Show unread posts since last visit." button.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #16 on: March 01, 2015, 03:38:00 pm »
+1

Recently there has been a dropoff with anything remotely Dominion-related on f.ds... has anyone noticed this?

I agree, you've hardly posted anything since August and only started a couple of threads in that time!

Forums ebb and wane though, new joiners have been steadily declining, as have total posts over all.

I blame Goko, because, well why not! Well it's either them or JSH!
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #17 on: March 01, 2015, 03:41:21 pm »
+3

As someone who is still trying to write articles, I have to say that there hasn't been much positive feedback to encourage me to keep doing it. My last article had no responses whatsoever so I don't know whether it was liked, disliked, or should have been something different. If nobody responds then thread drops off the recent posts list very quickly as well.

I think the responses to the help! section could be more helpful and instructive (less dismissive).
We could do with some new (play based) puzzles and challenges, those seem to have dried up.
As a community we could do with a universal simulator that everyone can use easily and share scripts.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #18 on: March 01, 2015, 04:46:25 pm »
+2

I suppose there has been a fair amount of quality content on the streams.  I've learned a lot watching them. However, it doesn't translate so well to forum content generally.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #19 on: March 01, 2015, 07:59:59 pm »
+1

The elite players bit is another huge thing killing the boards. It used to be a newb could come in say I think this is good and then people would debate on theoretical merit. Elite players have gotten good enough that, pretty much they can win with anything against non-elite players. The tacit skills of timing, adaptation, and end game strategy are now more than enough that elite players could be utterly terrible with some card or even class of cards, but their execution of a slightly weaker strategy is flawless (or close thereto) and will trump the idealized strengths of cards and combos. This leads to the boards becoming moribund. When arguments start getting made based on ranking it becomes really hard to delve into the subtle parts of the game; someone who executes better can just shut down a thread without actually addressing the dynamics in question. Coupling this with the heavy frequency bias and there just isn't a lot to talk about.

I don't believe that "elite players" are "utterly terrible" at anything. You don't become an elite player through memorizing 29384729384729837 different cool tricks you can do in different situations, and then lose games because your opponent used that one trick you didn't remember. You become an elite player through understanding how the entire game works as a whole (not perfectly of course, but on a certain level). When you're good at estimating the consequences of your actions in general, there won't be "some card or even class of cards" that you're "utterly terrible" at.

FWIW, I played Hermit/Market Square against Marin who had just returned and didn't know about the combo, he won that game.

See this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, I say they could be terrible and immediately you start as though I actually ever said such. This was a rhetorical contrived case to illustrate a point. And yes it does happen a lot that elite players do miss things because they have certain biases for and against things.

Dominion isn't about learning 1001 tricks, but learning about the tricks, particularly the less obvious shades of value are one way to "get an understanding" of how the game works. Take the long Counterfeit/Venture thread that was recently revived, the "trick" of Counterfeit being the strongest single copper trasher in a Venture deck is pretty weak. But the logic behind why Counterfeit works well when you are already committed to Venture is the type of "understanding" that lets you learn the game. Sure sitting down to crank numbers and the like isn't time effective, but the process of understanding where to find "tricks" is pretty good for learning board reading. Once you have a tacit feel for the game you could, theoretically, be utterly terrible at playing Venture decks, but odds are even when Venture is the strongest option, elite players could still win with something else; even when they lose it is awfully hard to see if they were wrong or just unlucky.

Now are elite players going to be actively bad? No. But there are things where they just have a good feel and the margin by which they are wrong isn't strong enough to swamp their tacit skill level. Think of this way, if I pick a better base strategy, just how much better does it have to be before I can beat someone with better sense of game flow and the like? Pretty high. Most of the interesting stuff about dominion is now going have less than 5% chance of swinging a game. Pick a card, even a strong on like Pool or Steward; try playing without buying it ever for a 100 games. How many extra will you lose? Not that many.

And this is the thing that kills actual Dominion discussion here, the stuff that isn't well mapped out is rare enough that even if, by some miracle, the elite players were completely ass-backwards about some card it wouldn't show up much in the stats. So for now, we've reached a point where the most efficient way to become an elite player is just to play a bunch and the interesting questions are actively killed on the board.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #20 on: March 01, 2015, 08:19:18 pm »
+3

The death of Isotropic was the reason I'm no longer playing Dominion online. I don't feel like paying Goko/MakingFun/whoever for their implementation, and I have little interest in Base Set games. There are probably many others like me, who would otherwise be part of an online Dominion-playing community, sharing their games.

Some of this parallels what has happened in the development of chess. It's actually pretty hard these days to write decent strategy articles about chess, because so much of modern positional understanding is based on specific features of specific positions. John Watson's book Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy has much to say on this topic.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #21 on: March 01, 2015, 10:50:41 pm »
0

The death of Isotropic was the reason I'm no longer playing Dominion online. I don't feel like paying Goko/MakingFun/whoever for their implementation, and I have little interest in Base Set games. There are probably many others like me, who would otherwise be part of an online Dominion-playing community, sharing their games.

Some of this parallels what has happened in the development of chess. It's actually pretty hard these days to write decent strategy articles about chess, because so much of modern positional understanding is based on specific features of specific positions. John Watson's book Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy has much to say on this topic.
I actually have trouble happening upon base only games in automatch since my rating is decent..

I think the group size definitely shrank when things moved to Goko.  I play WanderingWinder and Stef and Mic Qsenoch all the time now with the same isotropish rating that wasn't good enough to get me a glimpse of those kinds of players back in the day because they could set to +-10 or +-5 and get games really quickly with the huge number of strong players playing.  The number of players overall might not have changed much but the number of mid-high level players has decreased
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #22 on: March 01, 2015, 11:24:08 pm »
+2

Well, everyone's gonna be fumbling around for a while once Adventures releases, so there'll be that.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #23 on: March 02, 2015, 01:35:22 am »
0

Recently there has been a dropoff with anything remotely Dominion-related on f.ds... has anyone noticed this?

I agree, you've hardly posted anything since August and only started a couple of threads in that time!

Forums ebb and wane though, new joiners have been steadily declining, as have total posts over all.

I blame Goko, because, well why not! Well it's either them or JSH!

Well you know... college and studying and stuff. I'm top of my class as it stands, so I think it was a reasonable trade-off.
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Re: Lack of quality posts
« Reply #24 on: March 02, 2015, 05:32:44 am »
+1

The elite players bit is another huge thing killing the boards. It used to be a newb could come in say I think this is good and then people would debate on theoretical merit. Elite players have gotten good enough that, pretty much they can win with anything against non-elite players. The tacit skills of timing, adaptation, and end game strategy are now more than enough that elite players could be utterly terrible with some card or even class of cards, but their execution of a slightly weaker strategy is flawless (or close thereto) and will trump the idealized strengths of cards and combos. This leads to the boards becoming moribund. When arguments start getting made based on ranking it becomes really hard to delve into the subtle parts of the game; someone who executes better can just shut down a thread without actually addressing the dynamics in question. Coupling this with the heavy frequency bias and there just isn't a lot to talk about.

I don't believe that "elite players" are "utterly terrible" at anything. You don't become an elite player through memorizing 29384729384729837 different cool tricks you can do in different situations, and then lose games because your opponent used that one trick you didn't remember. You become an elite player through understanding how the entire game works as a whole (not perfectly of course, but on a certain level). When you're good at estimating the consequences of your actions in general, there won't be "some card or even class of cards" that you're "utterly terrible" at.

FWIW, I played Hermit/Market Square against Marin who had just returned and didn't know about the combo, he won that game.

See this is the sort of thing I'm talking about, I say they could be terrible and immediately you start as though I actually ever said such. This was a rhetorical contrived case to illustrate a point. And yes it does happen a lot that elite players do miss things because they have certain biases for and against things.

Dominion isn't about learning 1001 tricks, but learning about the tricks, particularly the less obvious shades of value are one way to "get an understanding" of how the game works. Take the long Counterfeit/Venture thread that was recently revived, the "trick" of Counterfeit being the strongest single copper trasher in a Venture deck is pretty weak. But the logic behind why Counterfeit works well when you are already committed to Venture is the type of "understanding" that lets you learn the game. Sure sitting down to crank numbers and the like isn't time effective, but the process of understanding where to find "tricks" is pretty good for learning board reading. Once you have a tacit feel for the game you could, theoretically, be utterly terrible at playing Venture decks, but odds are even when Venture is the strongest option, elite players could still win with something else; even when they lose it is awfully hard to see if they were wrong or just unlucky.

Now are elite players going to be actively bad? No. But there are things where they just have a good feel and the margin by which they are wrong isn't strong enough to swamp their tacit skill level. Think of this way, if I pick a better base strategy, just how much better does it have to be before I can beat someone with better sense of game flow and the like? Pretty high. Most of the interesting stuff about dominion is now going have less than 5% chance of swinging a game. Pick a card, even a strong on like Pool or Steward; try playing without buying it ever for a 100 games. How many extra will you lose? Not that many.

And this is the thing that kills actual Dominion discussion here, the stuff that isn't well mapped out is rare enough that even if, by some miracle, the elite players were completely ass-backwards about some card it wouldn't show up much in the stats. So for now, we've reached a point where the most efficient way to become an elite player is just to play a bunch and the interesting questions are actively killed on the board.

No, you don't get an understanding of how the game works by learning individual things that only apply in specific scenarios. You get an understanding of how that individual thing works in that specific scenario. I stopped reading the Counterfeit/Venture thread when the posts got tl;dr, so I'm not sure what kind of stuff was discussed there, but I'm sure that learning about "when cards dig for stuff, it's good to build your deck in such a way that they will hit stuff you want them to hit" is way more useful than learning about "Counterfeit is good with Venture". If you learn the first thing, you already know that you want lots of cantrips when Golem is your only splitter, you want as few non-Action cards as possible when Scrying Pool is your only draw, you don't want Estates when you're playing Rebuild and the Duchies are out, and a bunch of other stuff that will actually be useful in real games. You can say that these things are obvious, but it's not obvious how important it is to not have Estates with Rebuild, or to have lots of cantrips with Golem. I know I shouldn't have too many non-Action cards with Scrying Pool, but I really want to hit $5 so should I buy this Silver anyway? If I have a general understanding of how the game works, I can probably tell if it's worth it or not depending on the kingdom, but if I know how good Counterfeit is with Venture, that doesn't help me at all in that situation.

Also, even though we are all Wandering Winder, elite players are, surprisingly enough, actually not a hive mind. Everyone has their own playing style and it influences things, and some elite players are simply even better than some other elite players and that also influences things. I remember a lot of games where I went for a different strategy than my opponent, and one of us won because we both implemented our strategies fairly well and one strategy was better than the other. I don't remember a lot of games where I went for a different strategy than my opponent and felt that the winner had the worse strategy, but played it so much better that he won anyway. The majority of time, I'm probably going for the same strategy as my opponent, but there are times when someone tries out something new. It might be the case that there's stuff that you would try out, but an elite player wouldn't, and then we don't have data about elite players trying it out, but I'm not buying it that there's any major reason for this other than that the strategy actually isn't very good and elite players can see it without even having to try.

If you pick a strong card like Scrying Pool and ignore it for 100 games, you will probably lose pretty much all the games where the card is on the kingdom. Which is not that many. And if you would have lost somewhere around 50% of those games anyway, it's just natural that you won't lose that many extra games because there aren't that many extra games that you could have possibly lost in the first place. Maybe there's one or even two games where ignoring Pool is actually correct, but most of the time, it won't be, and if you ignore it regardless, there's just no way you're ever winning the game against someone who doesn't.

It's not a bad thing to ask questions on the forums. People will answer the questions and you can learn something from that. If you refuse to learn, that's your own problem, not the forum's.
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Bomb, Cannon, and many of the Gunpowder cards can strongly effect gameplay, particularly in a destructive way

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