Print

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

[Deadlock39]

Haggler might be a $5 worth grabbing before IGG, but I am guessing probably not.  If Border Village is also on the board, it definitely is worth grabbing first, but that is a 3 card combo, so it is a bit of an edge case.

[HiveMindEmulator]

I'm with WW.  There's way better cards to complain about than IGG.  It's no DoubleJack or Envoy/BM.  At least it costs 5, so when you hit 2, 3, or 4, you have things to think about.

I disagree. The fact that you have to buy it every time you have $5 makes it worse. With JoaT, you only have to buy 1-2 of them, leaving you all of your other buys to potentially do something different. There is often not really that much to think about when you have less than $5, because there are simply not a lot of cards in that price range that can do interesting things. Usually there is not much of a choice.

[tlloyd]

But in a typical IGG rush you prefer consistent $5 hands. That suggests that more coppers are beneficial. Early on the extra coppers (in combination with your IGGs) help you win the IGG/Curse split, and later they help you win the Duchy split.

[Deadlock39]

Buying nothing buy IGG and Silvers for several turns pushes your average card value much higher than $1.  Gaining Coppers you do not need is almost always going to be reducing the average value of your deck.  Geronimoo has simulated this and stated that gaining extra Coppers reduces the win rate.

[Tables]

Buying nothing buy IGG and Silvers for several turns pushes your average card value much higher than $1.  Gaining Coppers you do not need is almost always going to be reducing the average value of your deck.  Geronimoo has simulated this and stated that gaining extra Coppers reduces the win rate.

That's strange. I've just tested vs. the IGG bot in the simulator, and IGG rush gaining coppers beats out the normal IGG rush, scoring 46.6-44.6. Of course, it's possible that this IGG isn't optimal, or that he's talking about win rate vs. other strategies, but that seems pretty vague and hard to define.

[popsofctown]

I'm with WW.  There's way better cards to complain about than IGG.  It's no DoubleJack or Envoy/BM.  At least it costs 5, so when you hit 2, 3, or 4, you have things to think about.

I disagree. The fact that you have to buy it every time you have $5 makes it worse. With JoaT, you only have to buy 1-2 of them, leaving you all of your other buys to potentially do something different. There is often not really that much to think about when you have less than $5, because there are simply not a lot of cards in that price range that can do interesting things. Usually there is not much of a choice.

Huh?  The dead draw on Jack requires you to stick to treasure, until you decide you can add another dead draw/double terminal card, at which point you add a Jack.  IGG doesn't have any dead draw

[Deadlock39]

That's strange. I've just tested vs. the IGG bot in the simulator, and IGG rush gaining coppers beats out the normal IGG rush, scoring 46.6-44.6. Of course, it's possible that this IGG isn't optimal, or that he's talking about win rate vs. other strategies, but that seems pretty vague and hard to define.

I wasn't aware that gaining Copper off of IGG was something you could actually control in the simulator.  I see the rules now in the link behind my second link.

I don't spend much time in the simulator, but I generally trust Geronimoo's results
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=1061.msg16919#msg16919

I don't follow his comments here, but maybe someone else can decipher
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=842.msg13314#msg13314

[dondon151]

Huh?  The dead draw on Jack requires you to stick to treasure, until you decide you can add another dead draw/double terminal card, at which point you add a Jack.  IGG doesn't have any dead draw

But you get to look at your draw. If it's going to be a collision, then discard it.

[AJD]

Huh?  The dead draw on Jack requires you to stick to treasure, until you decide you can add another dead draw/double terminal card, at which point you add a Jack.  IGG doesn't have any dead draw

But you get to look at your draw. If it's going to be a collision, then discard it.

One of my most annoying recent Dominion moments was playing a Jack, looking at and discarding a Grand Market, and then drawing my other Grand Market.

[popsofctown]

It's still a dead draw.  You look at an estate, discard it, then draw your market.  Yes, it's a bit more flexible than drawing one card, but you're still shooting yourself in foot quite a bit.  You'd rather use it to discard coppers from the top of your deck to find silvers, not discard terminal silvers from the top of your deck to find Coppers.  (or nonterminals, you get the point).

[kn1tt3r]

Huh?  The dead draw on Jack requires you to stick to treasure, until you decide you can add another dead draw/double terminal card, at which point you add a Jack.  IGG doesn't have any dead draw

But you get to look at your draw. If it's going to be a collision, then discard it.

One of my most annoying recent Dominion moments was playing a Jack, looking at and discarding a Grand Market, and then drawing my other Grand Market.

I don't know the game obviously, but presumably it was a mistake to buy GMs at all.

[rod-]

Jack's not an engine card, don't treat it like one.  These complaints about the *FILTERED* draw occasionally drawing a card dead is like complaining that smithy sometimes draws cards dead.  Sure it can, but if it does, you're not playing the best strategy for that card.  DoubleJack is even more of an unalterable strategy than SingleSmithy.

[Titandrake]

I think the easier comparison might be IGG-Ambassador. IGG isn't anywhere as dominant as Ambassador, but it has a similar effect of warping opening buys. For Ambassador, getting Ambassador. For IGG, getting $5 as often as possible.

There are some subtleties to IGG games, just as there are for Ambassador. Admittedly, I don't think there are as many, but you do have various situations like

* With $8, Province or IGG?
* When do you start buying Estates? Once IGG is gone and you can't get a Duchy? Near the end of the race when you don't have $5? Maybe even the middle/early portion, with IGG adding coppers the hurt starts to get reduced.
* When are trashers worth sidetracking for? Chapel discourages going IGG at all, but Steward less so. Is Lookout worth picking up when you only have $3 or $4?

I still don't like IGG games. Engine possibilities just die a lot of the time, and you lose so many diverging options in the mid-game that the game starts to dull down. But it's not horrible.

[kn1tt3r]

Jack's not an engine card, don't treat it like one.  These complaints about the *FILTERED* draw occasionally drawing a card dead is like complaining that smithy sometimes draws cards dead.  Sure it can, but if it does, you're not playing the best strategy for that card.  DoubleJack is even more of an unalterable strategy than SingleSmithy.

Basically that's what I was saying about the mistake to buy GMs.

However, I feel that DoubleJack has more supporting cards you can buy than single Smithy (or even more for Envoy), which are basically most non-terminal, non-self-replacing cards that either trash or give money, like Lookout (trash priority Copper > Estate), Fishing Village, Festival(!), Lighthouse etc... This is not the case for single Smithy, since you will often draw those cards dead, which you can prevent with Jack to a great extend.

[dondon151]

It's still a dead draw.  You look at an estate, discard it, then draw your market.  Yes, it's a bit more flexible than drawing one card, but you're still shooting yourself in foot quite a bit.  You'd rather use it to discard coppers from the top of your deck to find silvers, not discard terminal silvers from the top of your deck to find Coppers.  (or nonterminals, you get the point).

Nothing that a little bit of deck management and card counting can't minimize; I'd wager that on average, the benefit gained from adding Fishing Villages or Warehouses or whatnot is a net positive (according to the thread on Jack "combos," it's true). Geronimoo asserts that the optimal buy rules when playing FV/Jack is to buy FV instead of Silver whenever possible. Granted, FV itself remedies Jack's terminal-ness, but the point is that Jack's typical +1 card draw with a preceding inspection prevents a large majority of cases of drawing Action cards dead.

Also, in most cases you'd want to draw the Estate into your hand so that you can trash it. Exceptions being, of course, needing a Copper to get to $8 or something.

Jack's not an engine card, don't treat it like one.  These complaints about the *FILTERED* draw occasionally drawing a card dead is like complaining that smithy sometimes draws cards dead.  Sure it can, but if it does, you're not playing the best strategy for that card.  DoubleJack is even more of an unalterable strategy than SingleSmithy.

Well, yeah, of course it's not an engine card. It doesn't draw adequately, it doesn't trash adequately, and it gunks up your deck with non-engine components. But you can definitely improve DoubleJack by adding a smattering of Action cards (non-terminal or terminal).

[krawhitham]

Games where Ill-Gotten Gains is the dominant strategy are uninteresting and not fun. 

I would say that any game with one dominant strategy is no fun. A mirror match where shuffle luck decide the game. Fortunately Dominion games are usually short enough for it not to matter.

[HiveMindEmulator]

Of course jack can draw stuff dead, but that doesn't mean you can't add other actions. It's not like envoy which draws 5 cards. Most of the time it only draws 1 card. The chance of this being your other card are small enough that if the other card does something good, you should get it. In fact, at least in the simulator, almost any random reasonably good $5 card + 1 jack beats the double jack bot.

[popsofctown]

hey, getting back to the root of things:  I was arguing Jack of all Trades has more dead draw than IGG.  Can we concede that it does?

That's also what the thread's about in the first place, I don't know how this tangent got so crazy. 

[dondon151]

I was arguing Jack of all Trades has more dead draw than IGG.  Can we concede that it does?

No one was arguing about this obviously trivial detail in the first place; the point of contention was that you said that because Jack has a dead draw, Jack players have to stick to treasure, which is not true.

[^_^_^_^]

And this is why we shouldn't bump threads without reason. Seriously, this is a days old point that wasn't even argued very well. Just let the thread die until someone searches for IGG and gets this thread and bumps it for a good reason (example being a new expansion that has counters to IGG)

[def]

And this is why we shouldn't bump threads without reason. Seriously, this is a days old point that wasn't even argued very well. Just let the thread die until someone searches for IGG and gets this thread and bumps it for a good reason (example being a new expansion that has counters to IGG)

And you are who to decide what we should do and what not or which thread has to die and which may live? Likewise, I'm noone to give you advice, but I read quite a few of your posts like this over the last time, sounding a bit arrogant - don't, you don't need to, stick with constructive posts with a more positive connotation.

[HiveMindEmulator]

hey, getting back to the root of things:  I was arguing Jack of all Trades has more dead draw than IGG.  Can we concede that it does?

That's also what the thread's about in the first place, I don't know how this tangent got so crazy.

That's not at all what the thread was about in the first place. The thread is about IGG leading to boring games. I guess TINAS said it's not as bad as other cards, including Jack and Ambassador (in terms of causing boring games). Then the discussion forked to whether or not these cards cause more boring games.

My opinion is that neither do, because you only buy 1-2 Ambassadors or 1-2 Jacks, and then transition. Ambassador transitions into really interesting stuff, and while Jack might not transition into engines, there are definitely a variety of choices for midgame cards since you can buy stuff for $5, so you end up with less mirrors.

The idea that doubleJack is unbeatable and immutable is completely ridiculous. People saw some simulation thread where it beats a lot of strategies which don't involve Jack and blew it out of proportion. If you add a Jack to any of those strategies, a lot of them beat doubleJack. Jack is an opening which can lead into any sort of action-light, money-heavy strategy. IGG is basically a complete strategy, since it dictates all your $5 buys for the whole game.

[chwhite]

hey, getting back to the root of things:  I was arguing Jack of all Trades has more dead draw than IGG.  Can we concede that it does?

That's also what the thread's about in the first place, I don't know how this tangent got so crazy.

That's not at all what the thread was about in the first place. The thread is about IGG leading to boring games. I guess TINAS said it's not as bad as other cards, including Jack and Ambassador (in terms of causing boring games). Then the discussion forked to whether or not these cards cause more boring games.

My opinion is that neither do, because you only buy 1-2 Ambassadors or 1-2 Jacks, and then transition. Ambassador transitions into really interesting stuff, and while Jack might not transition into engines, there are definitely a variety of choices for midgame cards since you can buy stuff for $5, so you end up with less mirrors.

The idea that doubleJack is unbeatable and immutable is completely ridiculous. People saw some simulation thread where it beats a lot of strategies which don't involve Jack and blew it out of proportion. If you add a Jack to any of those strategies, a lot of them beat doubleJack. Jack is an opening which can lead into any sort of action-light, money-heavy strategy. IGG is basically a complete strategy, since it dictates all your $5 buys for the whole game.

This, this, this.  Jack is indeed a strong enabler for money strategies, and good against many attacks, but there are many things that beat DoubleJack- sometimes a good engine, sometimes a single Jack plus a couple other useful actions.  I know many of us got caught up in the simulator results and just started assuming that JoaT was super-powerful and made the game boring, I know I sure did.  But we were wrong.  Jack is good but it's not that strong, and there are things you can add to it. 

But as much as Jack doesn't bother me nearly as much as it used to, IGG still sucks.  Yes, there is a little bit of room for strategy in IGG rushes: what to open on 4/3 (Cutpurse is an absolutely elite opener in IGG games BTW), how much copper to get, when to transition to green.  And the card's okay on the 20 or so percent of boards where IGG is worth buying but not rushing (I'd say 55 percent of the time the rush is obviously dominant, and 25 percent of the time it's completely skippable).  But there's very little room for creativity in IGG games beyond these few little tweaks; what strategy it permits is stunted and one-dimensional compared to other cards.  I agree that IGG leads to boring games; it is my least-favorite card in all of Dominion (in terms of "fun" rather than strength, obviously).

ETA: I have to also admit that there's another good thing about Jack: its presence made me realize that Bureaucrat could be used effectively, in much the same way Vault led me to start buying Secret Chamber in the right situations.

[^_^_^_^]

And this is why we shouldn't bump threads without reason. Seriously, this is a days old point that wasn't even argued very well. Just let the thread die until someone searches for IGG and gets this thread and bumps it for a good reason (example being a new expansion that has counters to IGG)

And you are who to decide what we should do and what not or which thread has to die and which may live? Likewise, I'm noone to give you advice, but I read quite a few of your posts like this over the last time, sounding a bit arrogant - don't, you don't need to, stick with constructive posts with a more positive connotation.

The main reason is that I'm used to strict, active, forums. Forums where there are mediocre posts, good posts, and great posts, and the bad posters get warned/temp banned until they either fix their bad posting and make it good or get banned for not attempting to improve their posting. For example of where I come from with these types of posts:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=302492
My Profile there: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/profile.php?user=3FFA
I've also had my fair share of bans/warnings and also gained a "report" button after 1 year of learning how to post and how not to post(prevents a new member/bot from spamming reports right away at random posts, thus making mods/admins jobs harder than they already are there). Thus allowing me to report bad posts.

There is also a great habit of making posts just like I do here at times of pointing out where people went wrong in their posting so they may improve it in the future.
And there is The Ten Commandments(Rules) http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=17883
If you read it you'll notice how strict it is. Do note however that when playing with me I am generally quite fun

[popsofctown]

Comparing IGG and Jack was a valid way to get somewhere.  People later started comparing Jack and Envoy and that seems like it's getting kind of irrelevant to the OP.


Of course the dead draw on Jack doesn't make you buy no other actions, ever ever ever ever ever.  Otherwise DoubleJack itself would be incorrect, because you might dead draw the other Jack.  It just raises the bar a lot on what other actions you include in your deck.  IGG doesn't raise that bar as much, and thus it doesn't make games as boring as Jack does.