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Author Topic: Cards you hate!  (Read 101490 times)

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RTT

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #50 on: June 03, 2015, 06:33:39 am »
+2

Rebuild.

I used to hate Hunting Party because every game with it just seemed to descend into a Hunting Party race ... But this seems much less of a problem since dark ages came out.
because since then the rebuild and cultist races were more annoying ? :)

OT: I hate scryiing pool
« Last Edit: June 03, 2015, 06:36:35 am by RTT »
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AdamH

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #51 on: June 03, 2015, 07:09:11 am »
+1

Anything that's too swingy -- e.g. if you are lucky and you get one, then getting all of the rest of them is even easier, like Grand Market, or if you're going for multiple Mercenaries. I had a game recently where I opened Urchin/Urchin and never got them to collide.

That's why you should always have a third Urchin. To quote an Urchin master:

Two Mercenaries are simply mandatory, and getting two should be your top priority whenever you want one at all.

One of the biggest recurring mistakes I see is people not buying a 3rd Urchin after connecting on T3 or 4. The purpose of the 3rd Urchin is not to speed up the time of your first connection, but to get to a deck containing two Mercs as quickly as possible.

Pretty much the only exception to this is if you already trashed down with e.g. Chapel and only use the Mercenary for its discard attack.

As is the case with almost everything that comes out of SCSN's mouth and/or keyboard, I really don't think you should take this seriously.

Wanting a second Mercenary in your deck is highly dependent on the kingdom. If I collide Urchins on T3, maybe I want to continue buying Urchins, but I would say more than half of the time it's better to start building my engine. Silver becomes a really, really good card if a lot of my components cost $4 or $5; but more likely is that I just start thinning and drawing and eventually use my Mercenary to turn my Urchin into the second Mercenary.

Sure, sometimes it's right, but if I'm only using Mercenary for its discard attack, I'm probably not opening double Urchin for it. Also, I'm probably losing the game. I would say the main exception is if there's some other attack on the board that you want in your deck -- get that Attack and use it to increase your Attack density instead of a third Urchin.

<3 you SCSN :-*
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Amac

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #52 on: June 03, 2015, 11:41:30 am »
0

There are two I absolutely detest, the Knights pile (for both their main action and their extreme variety making especially Anna and Michael really really strong sometimes) and Rebuild for completely controlling the game. I cannot stress over how boring I find Rebuild as a card, even though it needs strategy. I hate the Knights much much more though.

Then there are a couple I don't like, Tournament and Black Markey for variety, curses that work especially sloggy (Sea Hag in particular, but Familiar comes a close second), Kings Court for the reason that almost every KC game is a game about who can either play KC+X or KC-KC-X first. Possession because it's just a troll, Treasure Map because it can help people without many skill so much.

And I don't like Gardens. I really, really, really don't like Gardens. Silk Roads, Dukes, Vineyards, at least you need a decent plan for them (although Silk Road can turn into a rush very much.) But I hate Gardens rushes or slogs for some reason. Contraband is another card I don't really like, but it's rather easy to play around it, contrary to most of the other named cards. Most of the universally hated cards are either very strong (gamebreaking strong in some cases) or a certain winner in certain types of games.
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Cuzz

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #53 on: June 03, 2015, 02:03:28 pm »
+8

Man, Dominion is a weird favorite game for some of you folks who hate swingy-ness so much.
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LastFootnote

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #54 on: June 03, 2015, 02:04:25 pm »
0

Man, Dominion is a weird favorite game for some of you folks who hate swingy-ness so much.

Yeah, I was thinking that too.
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liopoil

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #55 on: June 03, 2015, 03:34:52 pm »
0

Man, Dominion is a weird favorite game for some of you folks who hate swingy-ness so much.
Why? Dominion really isn't that swingy. It's only particularly swingy when two good players play the best strategy on the board close to optimally. And well, how else are you going to decide who wins at that point?
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chwhite

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #56 on: June 03, 2015, 04:02:17 pm »
+2

My least favorite card is Ill-Gotten Gains.  It's okay if there are counters to the rush, but if there aren't those games are as one-dimensional and unfun as it gets.

I'm not entirely sure I get all this fear of Cultist, though.  Maybe we're playing it wrong or there has been some *serious* long-tail probability weirdness involving it just so happening to always show up with its strong counters, but I'm pretty sure that the last five or six games we've had including Cultists have been won by the person who got zero/fewer of them.  It's starting to get a serious aura of "trap card" on our table.
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Cuzz

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #57 on: June 03, 2015, 04:39:09 pm »
0

Man, Dominion is a weird favorite game for some of you folks who hate swingy-ness so much.
Why? Dominion really isn't that swingy. It's only particularly swingy when two good players play the best strategy on the board close to optimally. And well, how else are you going to decide who wins at that point?

I just mean, like, you shuffle your deck each time you go through it. It's a game with a nontrivial luck element. There are ways to mitigate that. You can decide not to play with "swingy" cards. You can decide to force common opening hands. You can always play best-of-15 matches. You can play chess instead. Or you can just enjoy it for what it is.
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swedenman

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #58 on: June 03, 2015, 05:32:17 pm »
+1

To be honest, Dominion is one of the more balanced deck-building games I've come across. The only one that I'd say is definitely more balanced is Puzzle Strike, and I got bored of that pretty quickly due to the lack of interesting chips and little variation from game to game. The deck-building genre is always going to have a major luck factor due to the frequent reshuffling of cards (to be honest, luck is going to be a pretty major factor in any card game), and that's just something we need to accept about it. But Dominion does better than most at balancing the luck factor. It does nothing to mitigate first-player advantage, unfortunately, but the cards are complex enough that it usually takes a good amount of skill to construct the probabilistically optimal deck. I mean sure, there are frustrating games, but even if my opponent gets a turn 3 Province on a Tournament board and gets all 5 Prizes before I hit $6, I'm not going to blame the game. When you get into a game like Dominion you just have to sort of accept that that swinginess is going to rear its ugly head every once in a while. If it bothers you so much that it prevents you from enjoying the game, then maybe find a different game.

That being said, games where the swinginess is out of control are just no fun. They're not frequent enough to ruin the game for me, but when they do pop up they really suck. So no, I don't really think it's weird that people who hate swinginess still love Dominion.
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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #59 on: June 03, 2015, 06:06:59 pm »
0

Sure, sometimes it's right, but if I'm only using Mercenary for its discard attack, I'm probably not opening double Urchin for it. Also, I'm probably losing the game. I would say the main exception is if there's some other attack on the board that you want in your deck -- get that Attack and use it to increase your Attack density instead of a third Urchin.

2 Urchins + 1 copy of a different attack (as long as you can buy that attack on turns 1-4) can also be a fine way to get two Mercenaries.
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Throwaway_bicycling

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #60 on: June 03, 2015, 06:49:36 pm »
0

When weak cards work, it's nice, and if they don't, you still can have a good game of Dominion with the remaining kingdom. In fact, i count many "weak" cards as my favourites, including Chancellor, Counting House and Philosopher's Stone.

Along those lines, can anybody point to some real games where Chancellor was truly a star? In theory, you can kind sort of guess what they might look like, but I think a concrete example or two would be interesting.
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Asper

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #61 on: June 03, 2015, 06:59:36 pm »
0

When weak cards work, it's nice, and if they don't, you still can have a good game of Dominion with the remaining kingdom. In fact, i count many "weak" cards as my favourites, including Chancellor, Counting House and Philosopher's Stone.

Along those lines, can anybody point to some real games where Chancellor was truly a star? In theory, you can kind sort of guess what they might look like, but I think a concrete example or two would be interesting.

Can't give a log, because i play IRL mostly. I have stated a few times that Potion cost cards tend to go relatively well with Chancellor, though, as most (relevant) Potion cards are nonterminal, you want to get many of them (less terminals to collide with Chancellor) and you can open Potion/Chancellor. Chancellor/Stash also is a known combo (or is it still considered one?). Apart from that, any kingdom where you'd want Silver (for the payload, not Feodum and stuff) and where Chancellor is the only terminal (or maybe one of very few terminals) has an advantage if you exchange one of those Silvers for a Chancellor.

But yeah, Stash/Chancellor is the only concrete example i can think of.
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jaybeez

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #62 on: June 03, 2015, 07:12:38 pm »
+2

I'm not entirely sure I get all this fear of Cultist, though.  Maybe we're playing it wrong or there has been some *serious* long-tail probability weirdness involving it just so happening to always show up with its strong counters, but I'm pretty sure that the last five or six games we've had including Cultists have been won by the person who got zero/fewer of them.  It's starting to get a serious aura of "trap card" on our table.

It might not be fear so much as just hate.  I can't really explain your experience because my experience has been very different.  Maybe it is a weird coincidence that you keep getting boards where Cultist is weak(er), I don't know.  But the issue is, Cultist tends to push you towards simpler strategies because when Cultist is on the board, way too often the best strategy seems to be to open double-Silver, go for a bunch of Cultists, then shift to buying just VP and money (maybe more Cultists at exactly $5) at the opportune time.  If you don't contest Cultists you'll have 10 Ruins in your deck before you can say Jack Robinson, and good luck digging yourself out from under that pile and then beating what is effectively a Lab-BM deck, which can get to half the standard VP reasonably quickly.  It's sort of similar to Rebuild in that sense (cf. JW's post).
« Last Edit: June 03, 2015, 07:14:30 pm by jaybeez »
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jomini

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #63 on: June 03, 2015, 10:52:06 pm »
+5



I just mean, like, you shuffle your deck each time you go through it. It's a game with a nontrivial luck element. There are ways to mitigate that. You can decide not to play with "swingy" cards. You can decide to force common opening hands. You can always play best-of-15 matches. You can play chess instead. Or you can just enjoy it for what it is.

Oh come on, you may as well say if you like swingyness you can play Snakes and Ladders instead.

Swinginess exists on a continuum. There are perfect information, deterministic games like chess that have no swing at all and there are games like Snakes and Ladders that have zero skill and all luck. Dominion occupies a pretty happy place with enough luck to keep the game highly replayable and require tactical adaption at highly skilled levels of play. The real swingy cards don't add that much to replayability and eliminate tactical adapation (well Swindler is out, if I get a $5 curse I can adapt by ...?). Dominion is extremely well balanced so these sorts of big swings that hinge on the timing of single cards is the exception (and even with the worst offenders they don't completely destroy strategic choice making). It it is precisely because Dominion is well enough balanced that shuffle luck often requires play adaption; that swingy cards that eliminate the option for adaption are not favored follows quite well.

The worst offenders, like Possession, create scenarios where you literally cannot adapt and the entire game can boiled down to maybe one shuffle - do I draw my Possession in the first two hands of this shuffle and win or in the last three and lose.
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SCSN

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #64 on: June 04, 2015, 12:41:00 am »
+2

Anything that's too swingy -- e.g. if you are lucky and you get one, then getting all of the rest of them is even easier, like Grand Market, or if you're going for multiple Mercenaries. I had a game recently where I opened Urchin/Urchin and never got them to collide.

That's why you should always have a third Urchin. To quote an Urchin master:

Two Mercenaries are simply mandatory, and getting two should be your top priority whenever you want one at all.

One of the biggest recurring mistakes I see is people not buying a 3rd Urchin after connecting on T3 or 4. The purpose of the 3rd Urchin is not to speed up the time of your first connection, but to get to a deck containing two Mercs as quickly as possible.

Pretty much the only exception to this is if you already trashed down with e.g. Chapel and only use the Mercenary for its discard attack.

As is the case with almost everything that comes out of SCSN's mouth and/or keyboard, I really don't think you should take this seriously.

This is really uncalled for.

I stand behind the veracity of the quoted post. I still see mid- to high-level players grossly blundering in this area on a somewhat regular basis, and one really should be able to count the times one has deviated from its prescription on a single hand.

Note that I did not say to always get a third Urchin, I said to make two Mercs your top priority; whether you do that via 3 Urchins or 2 Urchins and a Militia doesn't matter much. And the exception of only using Merc for its discard attack was even covered in the post itself.
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Gherald

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #65 on: June 04, 2015, 01:12:31 am »
0

Rebuild, Cultist, Ill Gotten Gains, Tournament (often okay, but man there's those games...) Transmute, Scout, Harvest, Feast, Chancellor

Somewhat related: I hate Wharf having the +1 Buy instead of Merchant Ship

---
I disagree with SCSN that double Mercenary is almost always desirable.  Overall I'm about 50/50 on whether I want a second; it's board-dependent.  I do however agree that keeping an extra Urchin around is very often a good idea--if only to make your opponent's Mercenary-containing hands a little less effective.
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Marcory

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #66 on: June 04, 2015, 01:34:33 am »
+1

When weak cards work, it's nice, and if they don't, you still can have a good game of Dominion with the remaining kingdom. In fact, i count many "weak" cards as my favourites, including Chancellor, Counting House and Philosopher's Stone.

Along those lines, can anybody point to some real games where Chancellor was truly a star? In theory, you can kind sort of guess what they might look like, but I think a concrete example or two would be interesting.

Aside from Stash, Chancellor also enhances Inn's on-gain ability, and is also a decent counter to top-deck attacks like Rabble, Ghost Ship, and Sea Hag. Sure, it's not a world-beater, but neither are the other $3 Base cards (Woodcutter, Village, and Workshop). Depending on the board, it can certainly be better than Woodcutter, Workshop, or Silver when you only have $3 to spend.

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Seprix

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #67 on: June 04, 2015, 01:48:23 am »
0

Rebuild, Cultist, Ill Gotten Gains, Tournament (often okay, but man there's those games...) Transmute, Scout, Harvest, Feast, Chancellor

Somewhat related: I hate Wharf having the +1 Buy instead of Merchant Ship

---
I disagree with SCSN that double Mercenary is almost always desirable.  Overall I'm about 50/50 on whether I want a second; it's board-dependent.  I do however agree that keeping an extra Urchin around is very often a good idea--if only to make your opponent's Mercenary-containing hands a little less effective.





I dunno, I think I'll side with SCSN here. Thinning faster is always better.
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pacovf

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #68 on: June 04, 2015, 01:50:03 am »
+8

Man, Dominion is a weird favorite game for some of you folks who hate swingy-ness so much.
Why? Dominion really isn't that swingy. It's only particularly swingy when two good players play the best strategy on the board close to optimally. And well, how else are you going to decide who wins at that point?

Yahtzee!


The only one that I'd say is definitely more balanced is Puzzle Strike



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RTT

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #69 on: June 04, 2015, 04:31:58 am »
+11

Rebuild, Cultist, Ill Gotten Gains, Tournament (often okay, but man there's those games...) Transmute, Scout, Harvest, Feast, Chancellor

Somewhat related: I hate Wharf having the +1 Buy instead of Merchant Ship

---
I disagree with SCSN that double Mercenary is almost always desirable.  Overall I'm about 50/50 on whether I want a second; it's board-dependent.  I do however agree that keeping an extra Urchin around is very often a good idea--if only to make your opponent's Mercenary-containing hands a little less effective.





I dunno, I think I'll side with SCSN here. Thinning faster is always better.

what is this? are we now judging oppinions based on marginal differences in ranking of the players. thats sad :(
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SCSN

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #70 on: June 04, 2015, 04:47:33 am »
+3

I agree. Me being right is self-evident, it doesn't need my rating as support!
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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #71 on: June 04, 2015, 06:09:33 am »
0

You definitely want two Mercs. If you can hit your opponent's Merc hand with your own Merc more often than he can hit yours, that's super good because it means you trash more and buy $5 cards more than he does. I mean, maybe you don't always want two, but that's pretty much just an edge case.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2015, 06:10:40 am by Awaclus »
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cactus

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #72 on: June 04, 2015, 06:17:06 am »
0

Rebuild.

I used to hate Hunting Party because every game with it just seemed to descend into a Hunting Party race ... But this seems much less of a problem since dark ages came out.
because since then the rebuild and cultist races were more annoying ? :)

OT: I hate scryiing pool

Because of the shelters. The added card variety means Hunting Party is not quite such a lock. They also reduce the power of Remake which used to seem borderline overpowered.

The cultist races I don't mind so much I think because the game often goes on for so long after all the ruins have been handed out. Depending on the deck there is still time for the game to play out interesting based on other decisions. Well sometimes anyway.

Fair call on scrying pool. Tedious online. All but unplayable IRL.

Asper

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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #73 on: June 04, 2015, 06:54:37 am »
0

Rebuild.

I used to hate Hunting Party because every game with it just seemed to descend into a Hunting Party race ... But this seems much less of a problem since dark ages came out.
because since then the rebuild and cultist races were more annoying ? :)

OT: I hate scryiing pool

Because of the shelters. The added card variety means Hunting Party is not quite such a lock. They also reduce the power of Remake which used to seem borderline overpowered.

Funny, i immediately thought of Ruins. Shelters didn't even cross my mind.


Somewhat related: I hate Wharf having the +1 Buy instead of Merchant Ship

Agree.


Chancellor

 :'( *sobs*
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Re: Cards you hate!
« Reply #74 on: June 04, 2015, 08:38:54 am »
+1

The only one that I'd say is definitely more balanced is Puzzle Strike





That's the one with the douchebag creator who ripped off a Dominion fan's artwork, right?
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