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Hunting Party

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WanderingWinder:
Hunting Party is one of the "Power Cards" which emerged from the new Cornucopia release. The obvious comparison is to Laboratory, against which it is usually better but sometimes worse. Like Laboratory, it usually nets you +1 card (+2 cards +1action -1card and action for actually playing it). But the ability here is really key, in that it gets you a card you don't already have in your hand. This makes it look like it would combo well with Menagerie, but it can also get your hand so big, and you often want so many Hunting Parties, that the synergy is not so strong as it might be.
The cons of Hunting Party are, in addition to the uselessness of Lab when you're drawing your whole deck every turn, when there are no more cards in your deck that you don't have in your hand, it turns into a cantrip with the chancellor effect. This is still not so horrible, but not really what we're looking for in a power $5. So naturally, Hunting Party is at its weakest in a very trimmed deck and/or a deck where you have one card (especially a treasure or terminal) that you want to spam a lot. Hunting Party is also not so resilient against handsize-reducing attacks, as the cards you're dumping away are probably going to be the ones you want Hunting Party to skip over anyway, and now it won't.
On the other hand, Hunting party is at its best when you have a handful of cards that you want to all draw at once. Want to be able to play KC and Bridge in the same turn? Hunting Party is your card. Want to have multiples of each? Not so much. But generally a good Hunting party strategy is to use it to need only one of the top money (gold or platinum, depending on whether or not there are colonies) card and still be able to draw it every turn. For instance, in a non-colony game, I'll often get a single gold, an attack or useful card that nets me $2, at least one silver, and then a bunch of Hunting parties. This nets $8 pretty reliably, with an attack every turn to boot. It's important to note that in this kind of deck, every turn you get $5-$7 after you have your one Gold, you want to go Hunting party until either a) they run out or b) it's time to turn for duchies. But this is extremely powerful. Check out this game where I smash my opponent's Chapel(!) opening  with a good Hunting party deck of this type, with Cutpurse as my $2-gaining terminal.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110610-211238-aabfd032.html
Obviously you'd rather have Militia, Monument, or Mountebank for this spot, but even Cutpurse is pretty good.
You can also play every Conspirator in a deck with pretty good frequency in a HP deck, which is a fairly good combo to have. Just remember to play your Conspirators BEFORE your HPs after they're non-terminal. It's to remember that if you do get the chancellor-effect out of HP because you have everything, you probably don't want to play that last card-drawer in your hand without another HP, as then all of the actions you've just played in your chain will miss out on the reshuffle, and your next time through you'll see only the cards you've got multiples of - your coppers, estates, and maybe silvers - without having a shot at any HPs to restart the chain.

Works With:
Other Hunting Parties
Spammable non-terminals (see Conspirator)
Fairly tight decks where you want to get exactly 1 of every card
Attacks, which it lets you play very often
Opponents' curse-givers (sort of), which it helps you sift through


Conflicts With:
Spammable terminals (see Goons, Wharf)
Opponents' Handsize-reducing attacks
Your own trashers

keithjgrant:
Hunting Party really strengthens the Baron, too.  If you have either a Baron or Estate in your hand with it, it gives you strong chance of drawing the other.

theory:
I think Hunting Party might be one of those rare good cards that is still underrated.  Its drawing power is incredibly useful when you have one particular card in your deck you need to hammer over and over again.

Teproc:
Really ? I feel like it's overrated actually. Most people seem to think that it's just better than Laboratory when it often isn't.

Of course when there's an insanely powerful card in your deck, such as Mountebank/Witch, Chapel, Ambassador Possession or arguably Platinum it's very good, but it can also be very lackluster.

rrenaud:
I think it's basically better than a Lab, except in rare situations.  Certainly a super trashed deck might be one of those situations, but I still would like opening HP + chapel, since the HP is going to hunt down and find that chapel so I can get to play it more early, even if the HP eventually becomes a pearl diver in my super trim deck.

http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=Laboratory%2CHunting%20Party

Certainly, you can more easily overdose on HPs than labs.  You want to be careful about not having so many of them that you play until you cycle your deck (turning the remaining draw into mostly copper/estate garbage) and then draw further, turning the garbage from discard (fine) into garbage in your deck and killing your next turn.  And you also want to be careful that you are actually almost always getting +2 cards with the HPs, so you can't have all that many HPs in a small deck.

It's fine to have multiple copies of non-terminals with the HP, just play the non-terminal before the next HP so you can draw other non-terminals of the same kind. 

It's great with Goons or other nasty attacks because it so quickly turns them from purchased in discard to in hand. And it's fine to a have a pretty terminal heavy deck (as long as you have corresponding village types).  Indeed, for the mixed terminal and +action deck, HPs are probably better than labs.  With a terminal heavy deck, if you were free to order your deck in anyway that you wanted, you would put infrastructure (village, throne rooms, etc) cards first and then terminals last.  In fact, HP pushes your deck in this direction.  Start with a hand of 4 junk cards and a Lab or HP.  If the next sequence of cards on your deck was Goons, Goons, Village, Village, and you had one Lab in hand, you'd draw into two Goons, never hit the Villages, and be sad.  With the HP, you skip the second Goons and hit the juicy Village chain, and you can possibly draw through the deck and find the Goons that was discarded earlier in your turn.  You can keep one of the terminal in your hand for most of your turn, and use the HPs to hunt down +action cards, and then unleash the nasty terminals after you've got enough actions (because you used it to find your infrastructure) to play the nasty terminals and still keep your turn going.

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