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werothegreat

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Weak Cards
« on: October 17, 2015, 01:42:03 pm »
+7

What makes a card weak?  Pretty much every card that has faced derision at one point or another has had its defenders (some more vocal than others), and the popularity of cards can rise and wane as new expansions are released.  But a few cards have consistently been regarded as the worst at their price point.  This is inevitable - if you have a category of things, there has to be something that is the least best thing.  But are these weak cards just "least best", or are they actively terrible?

Opportunity Cost



This is the main reason for card weakness.  While you're buying your Harvest or your Chancellor, your opponent picked up a Witch or a Masquerade, and, well, you've pretty much lost at this point.  Many cards are weak not because they're intrinsically bad, but because there are so many better cards that can show up in a kingdom.  And if terminal space is at a premium (many Kingdoms don't even have a Village or Throne Room variant), you have to go with the best thing on the board, or you will lose.  Now, if the board is littered with +Action and +Buy, than maybe you might consider picking up that weaker card later on down the line, and if you have the +Action to spare, a Chancellor can often be more useful than a Silver.  But unless it is literally the best thing on the board, you're certainly not going to open with Chancellor.

Narrowness



Here's where things get more interesting.  Let's say there aren't any strong Attacks, you have plenty of +Action, and Counting House is the only .  You still probably won't even buy one, because usually even a Silver is better to have in your deck.  All it takes is one game where you get Counting House immediately after a reshuffle to know how terrible this card can be.  But then you see that glorious, one in a million board: there's great sifting and/or Mountebank and/or Chancellor and/or Golem and/or even Travelling Fair, and on this board, Counting House is great!  Perhaps even the best thing to buy!  But in order for you to think to yourself "Hey, Counting House is awesome here!" there have to be a fair amount of preconditions.  On most boards, you're more likely to think "Ew, Counting House, guess I'm playing a 9-card kingdom today."  Counting House is highly dependent on other cards in order to be a card worth having, whereas strong cards tend to be worth picking up regardless of what else is on the board.

Just plain badness



Some weak cards really are just bad.  They may have a couple situations where they're worth picking up (Thief in a 4-player Gardens game, for instance), but in most Kingdoms, unlike narrow cards which are just not as good as everything else on the board, some cards actively hurt you.  Thief will usually just trash your opponent's Coppers, which is something they're usually perfectly happy to have happen to them.  Contraband can prevent you from buying a winning Province.  Once they've trashed their starting Estates, Fortune Teller is basically a Chancellor for your opponent's - not too shabby for them!

Conclusion

Keep these three ideas in mind when looking at Qvist's rankings.  Really think about why a card is at the bottom of its list.  Is it purely due to opportunity cost, like poor old Chancellor?  Is it due to narrowness, like the much maligned Counting House?  Or is it really, truly, just a terrible card?  These rankings are certainly useful, particularly for newer players as they try to gauge what to pick up in a Kingdom, but I think the better question to ask is not "Is this card good or bad?" but "Is this card useful to me now?"
« Last Edit: October 17, 2015, 01:43:41 pm by werothegreat »
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TrojH

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #1 on: October 17, 2015, 01:55:06 pm »
+1

I'm having a hard time figuring out which category Scout falls into...
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werothegreat

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2015, 02:08:13 pm »
0

I'm having a hard time figuring out which category Scout falls into...

Somewhere between narrow and bad, I think.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2015, 02:10:20 pm »
0

I'm having a hard time figuring out which category Scout falls into...

Somewhere between narrow and bad, I think.

It's just bad.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2015, 02:11:24 pm »
0

Well, aren't all cards at least narrow? Thief, the example you give for the 'bad' category very rarely has its uses, as you say yourself. I think the gist of the article-thingy is pretty good though, just, it's a bit vague what the exact distinctions are. 

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werothegreat

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2015, 02:20:27 pm »
0

The point is that, yes, Thief is narrow, but it's also usually actively bad for you in a way that Counting House is not.  The worst CH can be is a dead card in hand; the worst Thief can do is help activate your opponent's engine.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #6 on: October 17, 2015, 02:25:10 pm »
+5

So are the categories somewhat like this?

Opportunity cost - I wouldn't mind having this in my deck, but I'm not going to go through the effort of buying/gaining it because there are better things.

Narrow - mostly I would mind having this in my deck, but if somehow I had to play a princed version of this each turn, that would be okay. Sometimes it's good.

Bad - mostly I would mind having this in my deck, and I would even mind having a princed version of this played each turn. In some rare cases, it is good.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #7 on: October 17, 2015, 04:56:12 pm »
+3

I think you should be really careful about "just plain badness"

Any card that says "Attack" on it can usually be used to wreck Big Money. I lost a League match because Bureaucrat is an attack (and I didn't play around it properly, Catacombs is much more effective than Island for this, but that's not relevant). If you can play an attack enough, it will have its effect and it will need to be played around. This is certainly true of Thief, but Thief is pretty good even in 2P when your opponent builds a deck that's particularly vulnerable to it. Unfortunately most of my examples are IRL games -- most of the time online people just build a deck that isn't vulnerable to Thief and then it never gets bought (that doesn't mean it didn't have an effect on the game). The best example I have is this game where Noble Brigand was the big winner here, but Thief would have done the exact same thing.

I used to think the only card you could legitimately put in this category was Scout, but recently I'm questioning that as well

The thing is, I don't think it's healthy to say that a card is always bad and you can always dismiss it, because sometimes you just lose games because of that. I think it's a more common thing to ignore them and then you miss out on strategies that could potentially be very good, you know? My objective in most of the games I play has always been to get better at the game, so I advocate for trying out bad cards and "creative" strategies whenever you think they might have a chance at working. If it succeeds, you've learned something and you have an amazing story. If it doesn't succeed, just take a hard look at why not and you've gotten even better at the game from it.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #8 on: October 17, 2015, 04:58:07 pm »
+2

I'm having a hard time figuring out which category Scout falls into...

Somewhere between narrow and bad, I think.

It's just bad.
:'( Well, maybe you're just bad!  :'(
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Elanchana

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #9 on: October 18, 2015, 12:29:46 am »
+11

I think there's more to say than just having those three groups. There's a lot of things to consider when buying a card, but for our purposes let's boil it down to:
1. how likely it is to help you
2. how likely it is to indirectly hurt you/be dead weight
3. how likely it is to directly hurt you/help your opponent
None of these are ever really irrelevant - every card has the potential to help (otherwise why would it exist), weigh down (dead draw or stop card or something), or hurt (unwanted shuffle, overtrashing, TMI, antisynergy, etc.) a player. But it's the different levels of each of the factors that's why we have the card rankings in the first place.

Obviously, since the answer to every question ever is "depends on the board", I'll be talking in a very general sense.

The "Opportunity Cost" category deals with factor 2. These cards are just going to get in the way a lot - they're often taking the place of better cards. Doesn't mean they can't be useful! Factor 1 can get kinda high for these cards, but factor 2 will always be more. (I'd put Scout in this category, by the way. It does close to nothing most of the time but hey, it's nonterminal!)

The "Narrowness" category deals with factor 1 and when it's really low. These are the cards that will almost never directly help you. They won't actively hurt you very much but they definitely won't do much for you either. Factor 2 is mostly high here too but there's a bigger gap.

And the "Just Plain Badness" category (or, as I like to call it, "High Risk") deals with factor 3. You have a good chance of screwing yourself over with these cards - Thief can thin your opponent, Duchess helps them sift, Cache junks you, etc. But that doesn't mean that they can't be hella useful at some points. Duchess could give you the $2 you need to buy the last Province. Thief could cripple your opponent's thin big money deck. And don't even get me started on how much pain Saboteur can cause. This category is mostly just narrowness with risk attached. They aren't good except for in a few choice situations and they can work against you directly.
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #10 on: October 18, 2015, 11:59:57 am »
0

@Elanchana:  Wow, that may have been the best post of yours I've read!!  That is proof positive you have grown as a Dominion player. +1'd!

@OP: I've been much more willing to pick up "weak cards" with a strong engine.  Contraband may be a "weak" 5 for example, but when multiple engine components are available and it's the only +Buy, it's amazing.  I don't hesitate to pick up a Chancellor if it has even 1-2 turns of expected tempo acceleration vs a silver or a Harvest if i'm desperate for Kingable or Thronable payload.  The presence of gainers changes things a lot as well.

So to me the question is really, "How will this card help me accelerate the game state toward a winning position faster than my opponent?"  Usually the weaker cards don't do this well, but when they do you can pick up a big edge by exploiting it.
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Elanchana

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #11 on: October 18, 2015, 12:34:46 pm »
0

@Elanchana:  Wow, that may have been the best post of yours I've read!!  That is proof positive you have grown as a Dominion player. +1'd!



I've been wanting to write a post like that for a while, and this finally gave me the chance to do it. I'm just glad that I managed to be coherent enough.

Butsrslytho, I hope you can imagine my surprise when I saw the card that made me win my first game (Chancellor) and the card that annihilated a deck I built early on (Thief) placed dead last on the rankings.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 12:36:18 pm by Elanchana »
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #12 on: October 18, 2015, 12:56:45 pm »
0

If Scout were to fall into one of these, I would for sure say opportunity cost. There are many boards where you don't want Scout. But on the boards that you do want Scout, it really shines IMO.
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Awaclus

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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #13 on: October 18, 2015, 02:46:50 pm »
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If Scout were to fall into one of these, I would for sure say opportunity cost. There are many boards where you don't want Scout. But on the boards that you do want Scout, it really shines IMO.

Well, sometimes it falls into opportunity cost. For example, you might not mind having a Scout around in a Mystic-heavy deck, but you don't want to spend a $4 buy on it. But usually it's just so bad it's worth it to go through some trouble in order to get rid of it.

And sure, the Scout really does shine on the 1 out of 10 000 of boards where you actually want it.
« Last Edit: October 18, 2015, 02:48:06 pm by Awaclus »
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Re: Weak Cards
« Reply #14 on: October 18, 2015, 11:27:24 pm »
+23

Opportunity Cost
Narrowness
Just plain badness
I would divide this differently.

I don't think any published cards are so bad that I never want them. Some come close. Anyway "just plain badness" to me is just not coming out and saying the real reason the card is bad.

Meanwhile I would divide up opportunity cost into two things. And then I have a different third thing, which is related to narrowness but a better category. Then we can note that cards are only weak relative to other cards (though those other cards include base cards).

A card is weak when it's costly, relative to other cards, in one or more of three ways:
- the cost to get the card
- the cost to play the card
- the cost to support the card

The cost to play Pearl Diver is low. If you Ambassador me a Pearl Diver you are helping me a little bit. The opportunity cost to buying it is too high though. We compare Pearl Diver to other cards you can afford, and immediately it's a weak choice unless you just have $2, and even there it's not great. Note that cost-to-get includes a buy; it's not that Pearl Diver becomes good at $0.

Chancellor meanwhile has a low opportunity cost to get; it costs $3 and makes +$2, like Silver, and you often pick up at least one Silver with a $3 hand, and can just get Chancellor instead then. Its cost is for using it: it eats an action, and you can only have so many terminal actions, or need to spend time supporting more. For what Chancellor does, the cost to play it is usually too high relative to other cards. We compare Chancellor, not to other $3's, but to other terminal actions; most terminal actions are better, even (and especially) ones that cost more.

Those are the two kinds of opportunity costs: the cost to get a card and the cost to play it. You get to play one action each turn and buy one card! It's those two costs.

There is a third factor though, which is that cards vary in power level with the rest of your deck. Coppersmith requires Coppers; to have it be good, you have to draw enough Coppers with it, which means not trashing those Coppers, having card-drawing, supporting the card-drawing (or, getting rid of the Coppersmith when your deck stops being good for it, since your deck initially draws lots of Coppers). It's not just about spending an action on playing it and a buy phase on buying it; it costs more than that. Pearl Diver and Chancellor have much lower costs here; I might draw them dead with a Smithy but that's about the extent to which my deck needs to be something special to have them.

These three costs vary from game to game. Your opponents affect them too. The cost to play a card is never completely out of reach (though something else may be much better), but the cost to get a card can be, and the cost to support a card may be obviously out of reach from turn one.

It's easy and convenient to think about cards as if you are buying cards, to do your own thing. In fact you are building a deck, and playing it against opponents. Scout isn't weak because of the cost to get it or play it; it's weak because you need the deck for it. Thief is weak because your opponents don't tend to make it good for you. Some cards do end up weak just because of opportunity costs, like Pearl Diver being too costly to get and Chancellor too costly to play; but obv. other factors can still boost them, e.g. Mystic, Stash.
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