Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Pages: [1] 2  All

Author Topic: Hunting Party  (Read 34278 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

WanderingWinder

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5275
  • ...doesn't really matter to me
  • Respect: +4381
    • View Profile
    • WanderingWinder YouTube Page
Hunting Party
« on: June 13, 2011, 04:08:56 pm »
+1

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

  • Herbalist
  • **
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 6
  • Respect: 0
    • View Profile
    • Gruntled Coder
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #1 on: June 13, 2011, 07:48:45 pm »
0

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.
Logged

theory

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 3603
  • Respect: +6121
    • View Profile
    • Dominion Strategy
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #2 on: June 13, 2011, 07:50:46 pm »
0

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.
Logged

Teproc

  • Jester
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 765
  • Shuffle iT Username: Teproc
  • aka Le Teproc
  • Respect: +356
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #3 on: June 13, 2011, 08:03:59 pm »
0

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.
Logged
Mafia play advice: If you are not content with the way the game is going, always assume that it is your fault.

rrenaud

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 991
  • Uncivilized Barbarian of Statistics
  • Respect: +1197
    • View Profile
    • CouncilRoom
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #4 on: June 13, 2011, 09:29:34 pm »
0

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.
Logged

Kirian

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 7096
  • Shuffle iT Username: Kirian
  • An Unbalanced Equation
  • Respect: +9411
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #5 on: June 13, 2011, 10:27:24 pm »
0

I think the Chancellor effect of HP is further underrated.  Near the start of the game, HP can act like a partial chancellor that leaves you an action to play and drew two cards.  That's gigantic if you can get it in the first shuffle, and still great if you wait until the second shuffle.  Only a few 5s overpower it early--the attacks, mainly, Vault with GM available, possibly a couple others.

And to RR:  yeah, I just got outplayed in a HP/Village/Goons game.  Boloni was hitting 4 or 5 Goons almost every turn the last couple turns.  Amazing.
Logged
Kirian's Law of f.DS jokes:  Any sufficiently unexplained joke is indistinguishable from serious conversation.

papaHav

  • Navigator
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 76
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #6 on: June 13, 2011, 11:13:27 pm »
0

HP is one of the best engine lubricants for spammed terminals.
Hunt for a village/goon pair. Play them out of hand... hunt again... etcetc ad nauseam
Logged

papaHav

  • Navigator
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 76
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #7 on: June 13, 2011, 11:15:17 pm »
0

i.e. it skips over goons when u need the farming village, finds the goons when u dont have one.

Drawing multiple goons and no farming village is half as likely than with a lab... and thats just with 1 HP
Logged

WanderingWinder

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5275
  • ...doesn't really matter to me
  • Respect: +4381
    • View Profile
    • WanderingWinder YouTube Page
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #8 on: June 13, 2011, 11:26:18 pm »
0

Yeah, thinking about it, rrenaud is totally right here - all the situations where I said HP isn't good, it's really that it's not ridiculously good there, but even then it's almost always better than Lab, which is itself a really strong 5. The couple situations where I still don't like HP so much are a) with chapel, b) with coppersmith decks, where you want a lot of copper, and c) bank and/or venture decks, though you'd probably prioritize HP over venture.
Let me repeat that: HP better than what I think is the most underrated and on of the top 10 5s. So a bank/Tactician deck is the biggest, clearest place that both is good and prefers Lab to HP. On the chapel thing, HP is good as an opener, better than silver, but there are, I think, a number of 5s, 4s, and even some 3s maybe that I'd rather have than it, including lab, as an opener with chapel.
Overall, I think it's on average the 3rd best 5 behind Mountebank and Witch, and actually even with them, I'd start buying it after only the 1st of those, in lieu of multiples.

papaHav

  • Navigator
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 76
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #9 on: June 14, 2011, 12:17:02 am »
0

HP fails when you open huntingparty/-

=]
Logged

ycz6

  • Minion
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 676
  • Respect: +412
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #10 on: June 14, 2011, 03:27:34 am »
0

Oh man, someone made an example of my Dominion play! :O I vaguely remember that game, I wtf'd pretty hard when I realized your strategy was working.

Hunting Party works pretty well with Tournament!
Logged

rspeer

  • Witch
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 469
  • Respect: +877
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #11 on: June 14, 2011, 05:01:51 am »
0

HP fails when you open huntingparty/-

And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.
Logged

painted_cow

  • Moneylender
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 151
  • Respect: +20
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #12 on: June 14, 2011, 06:13:53 am »
0

Hunting Party overrated???

This is such a great card, sometimes you even dont have to trash your deck out, cause the coppers and estates are discarded anyway. Its a perfect tutor (sry for Magic-terms) for combo- and chain-like decks. You only have to keep in mind that you dont need 5 golds in the deck anymore, and get for example a royal seal over a gold to keep hitting both.
Logged

boloni

  • Steward
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 25
  • Respect: +8
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #13 on: June 14, 2011, 08:43:40 am »
0

You only have to keep in mind that you dont need 5 golds in the deck anymore, and get for example a royal seal over a gold to keep hitting both.
I think this is a very important point. If copper, silver and gold are your only sources of coins, you will have a hard time reaching 8 for a province.

HP fails when you open huntingparty/-
And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.
I think opening Huntingparty/- is not as bad as it seems. If you play the hunting party in turn 3, it draws you one card and puts your deck into your discard pile. If you play it in turn 4, it draws the card you bought on turn 3. I would say it's more like a chancellor at the beginning of the game and turns into a lab later.
Overall I would say that it's as good as a laboratory. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse.
Logged

WanderingWinder

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 5275
  • ...doesn't really matter to me
  • Respect: +4381
    • View Profile
    • WanderingWinder YouTube Page
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #14 on: June 14, 2011, 09:32:00 am »
0

This is such a great card, sometimes you even dont have to trash your deck out, cause the coppers and estates are discarded anyway.
Quote from: boloni
I think this is a very important point. If copper, silver and gold are your only sources of coins, you will have a hard time reaching 8 for a province.
The game I linked to is a good example of both these things, and I think where HP really shines. copper+silver+gold+(useful action that gives +2, optimally probably militia)+ a zillion HPs is a really, really powerful deck. Obviously Goons is better than militia, but it slows you down to pick one up. But also, there are tons of cards that work here. Militia, Goons, Cutpurse, Monument, Baron, Bridge, Black Market (though you don't really want to go there), Steward, Chancellor, Conspirator, Festival, Fortune Teller, Harem, Grand Market, Hoard (there's a little anti-synergy here, but so much raw power), Jester (again some anti-synergy), Stash, Navigator, Merchant Ship... in short, there are so many good cards, I'm almost always going to be able to play this deck in a non-colony HP game, and win with it.

rrenaud

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 991
  • Uncivilized Barbarian of Statistics
  • Respect: +1197
    • View Profile
    • CouncilRoom
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #15 on: June 14, 2011, 12:39:13 pm »
0

And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.

The first HP will fail less than you think.  If you draw it on turn 4 or 5 rather than turn 3 (which is more than half the time), and you also buy something on turn 3 like a Silver, it will actually still draw 2 cards and find that Silver.
Logged

DG

  • Governor
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 4074
  • Respect: +2624
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #16 on: June 14, 2011, 02:13:55 pm »
0

Here's a game where got badly beaten up by one hunting party and a transmute. My opponent got near perfect draws (assisted by my council room ) but it shows again how a hunting party can match up key cards. In this case it matched a transmute to the three estates, turning them to gold, then finding the potion and turning it into another transmute. I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.

There are certainly some bad cards to use with hunting parties but in general I'd skip those bad partners and keep using the hunting parties. I actually have quite a bad record with hunting parties and rather than telling myself I'm playing them wrong, I'm telling myself that my opponents are using hunting labs to short cut deck building, allowing them to perform better than they might do otherwise. Some day I might even stop calling them hunting labs.
Logged

HiveMindEmulator

  • Mountebank
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2222
  • Respect: +2118
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #17 on: June 14, 2011, 08:25:57 pm »
0

It's only natural to want to compare hunting party to lab, because they are both non-terminals that increase hand-size by 1. But really, the comparison ends there. A lab-based deck looks very different from a hunting party-based deck, because the best part of hunting party is not the lab-like part -- it's the fact that it's guaranteed to not just draw a bunch of copper *even if you don't trash*. This is key. To get labs going, you need to buy a trasher and use multiple turns playing it. Hunting party allows you to really shorten this set-up phase. It gives you the advantages of big money decks (fast startup and the ability to work in the absence of trashing) in decks with card combos.
Logged

Reyk

  • Young Witch
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 146
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #18 on: June 15, 2011, 03:20:17 am »
0

I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.

These links seem to be temporary - there are similar problems in other threads. It seems to be generally better to link to councilroom game links.
Logged

boloni

  • Steward
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 25
  • Respect: +8
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #19 on: June 15, 2011, 08:29:51 am »
0

I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.
These links seem to be temporary - there are similar problems in other threads. It seems to be generally better to link to councilroom game links.
What makes you think that?
I can still access logs from November. E.g. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html.gz
Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.
Logged

Reyk

  • Young Witch
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 146
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #20 on: June 15, 2011, 08:47:12 am »
0

Both these link don't work in my browsers (neither Firefox nor IE):
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html

They give a 404 not found error. Or is there something wrong with my browser settings and you can open the links from above?
I can download and unzip die gz-Version - but why not use the councilroom version:

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html

I think it's more comfortable anyway - showing the current decks and colored. In addition you can link directly to a specific turn.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2011, 08:50:18 am by Reyk »
Logged

Reyk

  • Young Witch
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 146
  • Respect: +24
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #21 on: June 15, 2011, 08:56:24 am »
0

At FAQ I found this (at the very end):

Quote
# don't scrape individual game logs (the individual .html.gz URLs; I will probably start making these expire after a week or so anyway) — if you want all or most of them then downloading the daily tarball is much more efficient.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/faq/

We are a little off topic now - sorry for that.
Logged

rrenaud

  • Administrator
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 991
  • Uncivilized Barbarian of Statistics
  • Respect: +1197
    • View Profile
    • CouncilRoom
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #22 on: June 15, 2011, 02:22:12 pm »
0

I am happy to have links to the cr.com versions, but I don't think Doug will follow through and expire his game links.  He just didn't want people to go and download all million game pages one at a time, instead he'd rather have you download ~200 compressed tarballs.

If you want to download the all the tarballs, I wrote a script that will first try to download the tarballs from cr.com, and then from isotropic if my server doesn't have them, which minimizes load on Doug's server.  https://github.com/rrenaud/dominionstats/blob/master/scrape.py
Logged

Not a Cylon

  • Steward
  • ***
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 28
  • Respect: 0
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #23 on: June 15, 2011, 03:29:08 pm »
0

Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.

!! Heh, it never occurred to me that the .html.gz files weren't meant for browsers — Firefox and Chrome always loaded them quite happily. But I just tried a gzipped link with my iPad, and it no worky …

That seems weird. Wouldn't people want to encourage widespread support for gzipped stuff? It's quick, and it saves on bandwidth; what's to lose?
Logged

painted_cow

  • Moneylender
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 151
  • Respect: +20
    • View Profile
Re: Hunting Party
« Reply #24 on: June 15, 2011, 04:26:00 pm »
0

Logged
Pages: [1] 2  All
 

Page created in 1.261 seconds with 21 queries.