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[werothegreat]

Due in part to the discussion over my Hunting Grounds article (which you may or may not have been following), I figured I'd start a weekly thread where we talk about a card that does not have an article written for it (or only has a short/outdated article).  The point is to bring your ideas on strategy and tactics with the card, try to get an interesting discussion going.  If someone ends up writing an article from the discussion had, that's a plus!  But don't view that as the singular aim of this.

Our first card is... Wandering Minstrel!

(I was tempted to pick Moat, but I figured that might not be taken seriously enough for the first go around)

I'll start us off with some questions:

* How does WM compare to other Villages?
* How strong is WM as a card?
* Have you ever used WM outside of an engine?
* What in the hell is hanging from the rafters in that artwork?

[eHalcyon]

Wandering Minstrel is an especially good village for engines because it helps you find other actions.  You can get away with weaker trashing because it sifts away a lot of junk, leaving only your sweet, sweet actions on top. 

Even when your deck is mostly actions, WM is very useful because of its ability to reorder the cards on the top of your deck.  If you have only a few villages, WM can bubble them to the top.  When you have multiple WMs to play and the first one reveals mostly actions, you may wish to interleave them with draw cards to maximize your filtering and cycling.  Alternatively, you can play consecutive WMs in this situation to minimize your cycling, which can be important if you don't want to trigger a poorly timed reshuffle.  You can also leave some cards on top to set up your next turn, if that is better for you.

With WM, you'll want virtual coin or else a way to draw your deck.  If you are relying on treasures for economy, WM is only going to break your heart.  This card does not do as much for you outside of an engine, but that's basically true of most villages anyway.

WM combos pretty well with cards that care about the top of you deck such as Mystic, Wishing Well, Herald and Scrying Pool.  On the other hand, Cultist and other Looters really ruin this minstrel's day.

[Elanchana]

I thiiiiiiiiiink those are decorative leaves.

For me, Wandering Minstrel is best when there are great engine components but no (or really weak) trashers. You can have a much greater chance of drawing and playing your engine cards without having to thin way down.

In a thinned deck it can have nice interactions with cards like Mystic and Wishing Well.

Edit: Ninja'd. In my defense, I wrote this post before seeing eHalcyon's.

[eHalcyon]

Here are questions for better players -- is WM ever enough to make you skip strong trashing?  If there is strong trashing, would you still choose WM over other villages?

For the first question, I would guess that you usually want the trashing anyway.  For the second, it certainly depends on the board.  I'd expect a WM or two would still be really helpful for smoothing out your draws.

[JW]

Wandering Minstrel is a strong source of +Actions for engines, particularly in games with cursing attacks and light or no trashing. Wandering Minstrel isn't enough to make you skip strong trashing, but on the margins picking up Minstrels means you can emphasize trashing a bit less.

Be careful about triggering a bad reshuffle by playing it, but in that case further Wandering Minstrels can also be used to get to the end of your deck.

In addition to the synergies eHalcyon already noted, it combos with Apothecary to get stop cards off the top of your deck, and can slightly counter Ghost Ship.

[pacovf]

With WM, you'll want virtual coin or else a way to draw your deck.  If you are relying on treasures for economy, WM is only going to break your heart.

I would argue that WM actually helps you with engines that use treasure as their payload. Treasures are stop cards, you want to draw them as late as possible so that your engine doesn't choke before you've drawn your deck. WM does precisely that.

[TheOthin]

I've seen Wandering Ministrel get picked up as an opener; can that ever really be a right call? Unlike Village, it does do something by cycling, but it fails to actually improve your immediate buying power to the point of helping you get something worth cycling to. So my thinking is edge case?

[Awaclus]

I've seen Wandering Ministrel get picked up as an opener; can that ever really be a right call? Unlike Village, it does do something by cycling, but it fails to actually improve your immediate buying power to the point of helping you get something worth cycling to. So my thinking is edge case?

If you already have something worth cycling to (such as Steward), it can be pretty good.

[pubby]

You'd rather open Minstrel/Steward over Steward/Steward?

[eHalcyon]

With WM, you'll want virtual coin or else a way to draw your deck.  If you are relying on treasures for economy, WM is only going to break your heart.

I would argue that WM actually helps you with engines that use treasure as their payload. Treasures are stop cards, you want to draw them as late as possible so that your engine doesn't choke before you've drawn your deck. WM does precisely that.

That's only if you can draw them after though, which is mostly covered by "a way to draw your deck".

[Elanchana]

Here are questions for better players -- is WM ever enough to make you skip strong trashing?  If there is strong trashing, would you still choose WM over other villages?

For the first question, I would guess that you usually want the trashing anyway.  For the second, it certainly depends on the board.  I'd expect a WM or two would still be really helpful for smoothing out your draws.

I'm not one of the better players but I'll give this a shot anyway.

1. I guess it depends on what "strong" means. Fast trashing? Probably not, because I can't think of any deck where you'd want WM and not the trasher, unless you're junking yourself up. It's most likely I'd want both actually. Bonus-based trashing? Depends on how much the bonus is featured elsewhere on the board. For example, if the only trashing is Forager and there are tons of cards with +Buy, I'd probably skip it. I still would probably grab both on most boards.

2. Depends on the other villages, natch, not to mention the rest of the board. WM is definitely better than the vanilla Village or Mining Village, barring cost issues and edge cases. It's also better than villages whose bonuses are featured on your other engine cards, like Worker's Village if your draw card has +Buy or Bazaar if your payload is trash for benefit. Synergies are also things that would make WM more valuable than other things, such as setting up Outpost turns or Minion draws or something.

Meh, this is the first time I've given in-depth commentary on a card, so... I do like WM a lot. Directed draw is cool.

[jsh357]

Wandering Minstrel is almost always the most useful village card for engines in the currently released expansions.  By providing 3 cards worth of filtering and information for the next draw or hand, it greatly improves the consistency and effectiveness of engines, particularly those that have slightly limited draw options (+2 Card draw, for instance) but any other form of draw as well.  Cantrips benefit greatly too, as knowing what you're getting can be the difference between continuing a chain and hitting a dead card.  Wandering Minstrel can be riskier if you rely on drawing Victory or Treasure cards for some purpose, but even in decks that need those things, the Minstrel can assist in drawing the entire deck, which means skipping stop cards for later was probably better.

One of the drawbacks of Minstrel is that since it cycles 4 cards total, it can trigger unwanted reshuffles.  As with any other card that carries this risk, use your judgment.  If your current hand has too many good cards you don't want to miss the reshuffle, you should think about holding off on pulling the trigger.  On the other hand, if your hand sucks you can always go ahead and trigger that sucker with a grin on your face.

Sometimes people open Minstrel.  Like any village, it's often pointless since you don't have enough actions to play anyway.  However, if you need to play a key card regularly, skipping past 3 coppers/estates and getting to the next shuffle quickly can be a good option.  I would basically never open Silver/Wandering Minstrel, but other options such as Steward/Minstrel are completely reasonable.  Steward is a card you want to play a whole lot early on, whether it's for trashing or hitting $5/6, and anything that helps you get there is a plus.

You should skip Minstrel if your deck is almost entirely treasure (e.g. in a Big Money deck), but that goes without saying.  It's sort of useful to filter through junk cards, but the risk of skipping your Gold tends to be too much to make Minstrel a good option.  This all goes without saying, but I bring it up because some players buy Minstrel for the cycling without having an end plan, and if your end plan relies on drawing treasures you don't have the draw far, you are probably making a mistake getting a card that efficiently discards those.

Minstrel is also very good for cards that improve in power with knowledge of the top of the deck, such as Mystic and Wishing Well.  It's a cheap enabler for them, and you were probably buying it anyway.

While decks that cannot trash like the filtering from Minstrel, make no mistake: decks that trash want it to.  They benefit just as much from knowing what cards are coming next, especially if you need to make a decision with a terminal draw card or cantrip.  Wandering Minstrel is a swiss army knife that you should be considering buying almost every time it's in the Kingdom.

Some specific interactions to look out for: (I tried not to be exhaustive but this card is so good I thought of a lot)
- Draw to X cards.  Sometimes your final draw amount is limited in a deck that relies on these, so it's useful to get past the crap and know you have a couple of useful things coming up. 
- Ruins.  Ruins counter Minstrel if you don't have a method of trashing them and can't use them for anything, so be careful.  Minstrel is still very good, so you should probably compete in the Ruins split instead of avoiding Minstrel.
- Baron.  Be very careful with this combination, as it's pretty likely you will skip the Estate you need when spamming Minstrels.  If you have another form of draw, it's good to make a reasonable guess where the Estate will be and try to draw it with a card other than Minstrel.
- Minion, Outpost.  If your next 'hand' is going to be 4 cards, you'd love to have a way of ensuring at least one of them is good.  Minstrel offers you that insurance or perhaps suggests you should just take the $2 from Minion now and save things for the next turn.
- Torturer, Cultist, Treasure Map, Herald.  Chaining these is rarely easier than it is with Wandering Minstrel.
- Ambassador.  Every now and then it's worth opening WM/Ambassador or at least getting a WM shortly after the game starts.  In Ambassador games, you tend to be overrun with junk cards early, and WM can get you to playing the all-important diplomat sooner and more often.
- In Ghost Ship games, WM makes a decent soft counter since you can discard a topdecked Estate or something.  However, it's best to have some powerful draw to play immediately afterward so you're being proactive.
- Potion.  If you need to buy cards that use Potion, you might hold off on the Minstrel until later.  Odds are, if you made the investment of buying the Potion, you had a good enough reason that you need to be careful about this.
- Scrying Pool, Golem.  Minstrel helps you set up big Pool draws or at least clears more junk from the top than Pool ever will.  One of the best villages for a Pool deck.  It's also wonderful for getting some guaranteed hits with Golem.
- Philosopher's Stone.  Just don't do it.  Skipping a Stone with your own Minstrel is miserable, and pretty likely to happen.  This applies to any treasure card, but normally PStone benefits from cycling cards, so this is a very notable exception.
- Possession. Be wary!  Cycling 4 cards means a possessor can quite easily trigger a reshuffle on you, and if you have lots of Minstrels you are likely to have lots of bad cards in your newly shuffled deck.  You can still play Minstrel against Possession, but trashing is almost a must and a crafty opponent can Possession lock you if your deck is smooth enough.
- Counting House. This can be a powerful combination.  Discard your Copper while cycling, get to the bottom of the deck, (using Minstrel to guarantee CH is in hand) redraw the Copper.
- Peddler.  Minstrel is great for lining up actions to buy Peddler, as well as to help smooth out the Peddler-driven economy later on.
- Tunnel.  Minstrel makes getting Gold from Tunnels easy, but it also makes you skip Gold a lot.  I suggest only playing this deck with support from another draw card.
- Hermit.  A light interaction, but Minstrel does often discard cards you can trash with Hermit directly after.
- Rebuild.  Minstrel is great in Rebuild decks as long as it isn't triggering terrible reshuffles.  It gets you to Rebuild faster, skipping Copper and telling you a few of the victory cards that you are now past, and your goal is generally to just play Rebuild with some idea what you'll hit, so that's a good thing. 
- Advisor, Envoy.  Give your opponent nothing but good draw options, why don't you.
- Prince.  Wandering Minstrel tends to be a fantastic target for Prince.  Usually a Village isn't as good as something like a Smithy, but Minstrel does so much for an engine that opening a turn with it is a great choice.  As usual, you must first determine if the Prince was worth it, though, and there may well be better targets in your hand.
 
My personal rating for Wandering Minstrel is 8.5/10.  It's one of the most versatile, most useful cards in Dominion, but there are some situations where it's plain bad and, being a village, it doesn't 'accomplish' as much as cards that provide draw, buy, and coin, so you need other cards to combine it with.  Fortunately, there are a whole lot of those.  At $4, it's always an easily affordable option, so it's usually open season on this one.  Bard power!!!

[eHalcyon]

- Draw to X cards.  Sometimes your final draw amount is limited in a deck that relies on these, so it's useful to get past the crap and know you have a couple of useful things coming up. 
- Scrying Pool, Golem.  Minstrel helps you set up big Pool draws or at least clears more junk from the top than Pool ever will.  One of the best villages for a Pool deck.  It's also wonderful for getting some guaranteed hits with Golem.
- Tunnel.  Minstrel makes getting Gold from Tunnels easy, but it also makes you skip Gold a lot.  I suggest only playing this deck with support from another draw card.

Wanted to call out these ones; I don't think they are really worth mentioning (aside from Scrying Pool, which is only here because it's on the same line as Golem).

While you can draw good stuff with your draw-to-X card, the benefit is not really any greater than with other draw cards.

Wandering Minstrel doesn't really help Golem much at all, since Golem is going to dig for actions anyway!  The only time it matters is when WM turns up 3 actions, in which case you get to choose which 2/3 you get to play.  Since you already have WM, you don't need Golem as your splitter either.  So WM already covers a lot of the advantages that Golem offers, but at much less opportunity cost.

WM is a mediocre Tunnel enabler at best, since its search space is only 3 cards.  That is not enough to reliably activate Tunnel.  Even if you succeed at that, the fact that WM will skip the Gold you gain weakens it further.

Many others also seem to be weak interactions that don't need mentioning either.  Many of them just boil down to the fact that they are strong cards on their own and WM helps you cycle to them faster.

[jsh357]

I disagree with WM being a bad Tunnel gold gain enabler. If you only play one and thus only look at 3 cards, it's a bad enabler, but who buys just one WM?  If you play 3 of them for instance, you usually cycle a ton of cards and are very likely to hit a Tunnel as long as it isn't in your hand.

Also, that post isn't an article (I apologize if it looks like one).  There's no reason for me to delete things from it or edit it.  I'm just talking about the card.  I don't see why we can't talk about smaller interactions in these threads--if there's a week to discuss, I would think it's worth discussing or taking note of even the little things.

[werothegreat]

WM can also kind of be a trap if you don't know what you're doing.  Whereas Village doesn't actually *hurt* your deck if you buy a bunch without thinking, a Wandering Minstrel Idiot can end up discarding his entire deck without having done anything with it.  Especially if they open with it.  Like a guy I know did IRL.

tl;dr Don't play with WM with newbies.

[Deadlock39]

This is mostly irrelevant, but wouldn't the cards WM skips follow rules similar to the "Venture math"? It is equally likely to skip bad cards as good, so the net effect on your deck should be cycling only.

This is of course only theoretical, because in a real world scenario, we can invoke the law of Minions, and show that WM will always discard Golds and Silvers and never Coppers and Estates.

[Witherweaver]

This is mostly irrelevant, but wouldn't the cards WM skips follow rules similar to the "Venture math"?

Because that's how arguments start!

[eHalcyon]

I disagree with WM being a bad Tunnel gold gain enabler. If you only play one and thus only look at 3 cards, it's a bad enabler, but who buys just one WM?  If you play 3 of them for instance, you usually cycle a ton of cards and are very likely to hit a Tunnel as long as it isn't in your hand.

Also, that post isn't an article (I apologize if it looks like one).  There's no reason for me to delete things from it or edit it.  I'm just talking about the card.  I don't see why we can't talk about smaller interactions in these threads--if there's a week to discuss, I would think it's worth discussing or taking note of even the little things.

OK, fair point about discussion.  Still worth calling out in case we actually have somebody turn this thread into an article.

I still don't think it's a good enabler though.  I have tried it before and it has not worked out.

[werothegreat]

At least WM is better than JoaT as a Tunnel enabler.  Tried that once.  Bad, bad, idea.

[LastFootnote]

This is mostly irrelevant, but wouldn't the cards WM skips follow rules similar to the "Venture math"? It is equally likely to skip bad cards as good, so the net effect on your deck should be cycling only.

This is of course only theoretical, because in a real world scenario, we can invoke the law of Minions, and show that WM will always discard Golds and Silvers and never Coppers and Estates.

It's not really the same, though, mostly because—unlike Venture—Wandering Minstrel often puts cards back on your deck. If you need to draw your Golds, Wandering Minstrel is going to make that much less likely unless you draw your entire deck. In short, Wandering Minstrel is great if your non-Action cards are bad, but not great in your non-Action cards are good. Having Wandering Minstrels in your deck should push you away from Gold and toward e.g. Baker.

[Awaclus]

Having Wandering Minstrels in your deck should push you away from Gold and toward e.g. Baker.

I think that this is false. You want Wandering Minstrel's ability to do stuff for you, and the stuff that you want it to do is finding powerful terminals and more Wandering Minstrels. WM skips over Gold and stops on Baker, which are roughly equally harmful for you (i.e. not very) since Baker is a cantrip.

[Chris is me]

Wandering Minstrel is pretty good. It's better than it looks even in decks that rely on Treasure, provided there's some deck thinning on the table somewhere. If you draw most of / all of your deck every turn anyway, discarding Treasures and Victory cards is a good thing - these are cards you only want at the end of your draw cycling. It's just easier to build an engine with WM than many other villages. That said, obviously the less potent your engine / the more reliant you are on Treasure, the less WM is going to do for you, but in very few cases would I say it's actually worse than Village.

It is a totally reasonable, if not great, Tunnel enabler. A Tunnel / WM strategy is pretty good on weak boards. WM is also a decent defense against Cursing attacks in the absence of a trasher. Particularly does well versus Sea Hag.

Being able to rearrange the Actions on your deck is extremely helpful for getting the most out of cantrip draws, etc.

I'm sure this is all rehashing other points.

[eHalcyon]

I would guess that WM/Tunnel is weaker than straight up Big Money.  It might be competitive just because of the extra VP from Tunnels.  Competitive with BMU is not great at all though.

WM is not better against Sea Hag than other Cursers.  It will draw the top-decked Curse before sifting the next 3.

[jsh357]

I think you are oversimplifying.  Of course wm/tunnel isn't good on its own, but there are ten kingdom cards.  If you want gold gain and have cards that can then draw the gold (such as hunting grounds) you're in business.  I apologize if that wasn't clear in my post.  I just write assuming most situations are more complicated than a 2 card combo.

[eHalcyon]

I think you are oversimplifying.  Of course wm/tunnel isn't good on its own, but there are ten kingdom cards.  If you want gold gain and have cards that can then draw the gold (such as hunting grounds) you're in business.  I apologize if that wasn't clear in my post.  I just write assuming most situations are more complicated than a 2 card combo.

Sorry, this latter response was to Chris, who seemed to be suggesting just WM/Tunnel on its own.