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Author Topic: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?  (Read 4917 times)

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mumposaur

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What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« on: November 05, 2015, 02:15:09 pm »
+7

Played this game during my league match with SaintO yesterday.



Code: [Select]
Crossroads, Oracle (bane), Philosopher's Stone, Young Witch, Bandit Camp, Cultist, Margrave, Market, Venture, Harem, Bank

Link to log

I opened: Young Witch/silver
SaintO opened: Young Witch/oracle

I proceeded to buy some more silver and focus on racing the cultists, while trying to give out curses in the process. My thought process was that junking him was more important and that I could grab some P stones in the mid game.

He skipped cultist altogether, went potion on turn 5, and then just bought as many P stones as he could, while cursing me with Young Witch and buying silver and crossroads when he couldn't get P stone.

I ended up giving him all the ruins, and bought my first of two P stones on turn 14. I lost the curse split 7/3 due to my cultists drawing my young witch dead (and him blocking with a bane or two). By the end it was very hard for me to get anything but duchies, while he had 5 p stones that could spike him provinces. I had no hope. I feel like skipping cultist has to be wrong, but I could be over-estimating it here.

I think I went wrong in one of these ways:

1) Should have gotten p stones earlier, skipping or focusing less on cultists... maybe p stone is really that good here

2) Should have just skipped p stone altogether and just bought money and cultists... may be the case that mixing two strategies is worse than going all in on either one

3) There was something better here altogether that we both missed!

Would love to hear your thoughts!
 
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ehunt

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #1 on: November 05, 2015, 02:27:00 pm »
+2

This is one of the more interesting boards that I remember seeing. A few ideas:
1) with both curses and ruins available for the giving-out, and no trashing, there's no hope of an engine. This is one of the best possible scenarios for PStone.
2) the curse-split of 7-3 is about what I'd expect giving the openings. (he uses the Oracle to dump your Young Witch once and to block it a bunch).

So the question is: would you be willing to take 10 ruins in order to split curses 3-7 and invest in P-Stones many turns ahead of the opponent? And honestly, if you hadn't shown the results, in my head I'd say it's still close, largely because the PStone strategy is just really not good (they tend to clump, you tend to draw 2P). But the results seem pretty clear; the game isn't particularly close, and you don't seem to make big tactical mistakes -- it really does seem to be significant evidence for the PStone strategy over the Cultist strategy on this board. (Note that avoiding Young Witch would be horrible for the PStone strategy as it would give the junker strategy time to build an engine.)

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DG

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #2 on: November 05, 2015, 04:14:28 pm »
+3

Skip the crossroads here. The opponent is bound to junk your deck so it will be very weak (and it's not worth going crazy for harems). If you open with oracle you are taking a sizable risk that the two drawing cards will collide and leave you short of income.
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SaintO

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #3 on: November 09, 2015, 05:27:10 pm »
+5

So, for what it's worth, I had played a game similar to this layout earlier in the week, the key similarities being relative difficulty in getting any kind of real drawing engine going with p stone on the board. In that game I avoided p stone until it was too late (i.e. I went for something like mumposaur's strategy) and the results proved similar as to this match. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you get the idea...

Basically, the logic was this: ruins and curses meant deck size was going to grow quickly. P stone being 3P is going to be difficult to get later with all the junk unless I've already got some in the deck so getting them earlier is critical and I knew they were going to be valuable enough to snag provinces with by end game. Ruins suck but they don't cost VP so if I'm going to fight I'll just fight on the curses with young witch. Having oracle as bane wasn't even really so much about the offensive capabilities against my opponent as simply improving my means of sifting through the junk to get to treasure cards and the fact that it was young witch's bane just was gravy to seal the deal.

I find more and more with decks that are heavy on terminal actions that big money just becomes more and more the way to go. It's sexy to build an engine and set it loose but sexy doesn't win games, VP do. And in this setup what's an engine really going to get you? It's doubtful even if you can pull an extra buy that you're going to be able to really utilize that second (or third) buy for anything worthwhile so just focus on making one good purchase. I opted for crossroads only because the extra actions on the first play meant that if I ended up with some ruined libraries or survivors I could at least make some paltry use of them. It wasn't super complicated, it wasn't particularly slick, but it won the game.

Hats off to mumposaur btw for being my first ever Dominion League tournament opponent
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Polk5440

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #4 on: February 04, 2016, 01:03:25 pm »
+2

I would definitely get YW and definitely skip Cultist in favor of Venture on $5. I really like Oracle, YW, and Venture with PStone here. All three cards help find Potion and PStone, and sift through the extra junk.
 
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Limetime

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #5 on: February 04, 2016, 02:15:13 pm »
0

Why play the slog if you arn't being junked by cultist. There is a village,+buy, massize payload(bank), and draw. You can easily triple province when you kick off. It won't be reliable but I am pretty sure its good.
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Polk5440

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #6 on: February 04, 2016, 04:00:44 pm »
0

Why play the slog if you arn't being junked by cultist. There is a village,+buy, massize payload(bank), and draw. You can easily triple province when you kick off. It won't be reliable but I am pretty sure its good.

Well, YW junks. And if someone is really invested in the engine, and it's working, ok, I pick up a cultist and start junking them more. It just seems like 7 coppers, 3 estates, and 5-ish curses is a lot....

It's not clear the Margrave attack hurts the PStone player very much, either. 

You are correct that there are a lot of engine components there, so maybe an optimal engine really would have some legs. Triple Province in time, though? I don't know...
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dedicateddan

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #7 on: February 05, 2016, 01:46:27 am »
0

With multiple junkers, decks are going to get big fast and it's going to be hard to assemble an engine.

I like an early potion followed by light cultist support. Philo stone is the most reliable way to province here.
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theJester

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #8 on: February 09, 2016, 02:04:53 pm »
0

Engine here has IMO no chances of working. Despite "ruining" his opponent to death (10-0 split), mumposaur had 17 stop cards (3 estates, 7 coppers and 7 curses) and no way of trashing them. Your only source of +buy is Market, and with 17 stop cards around, how are you ever going to amass enough money to invest in 2 or more buys?

Theoretically, if you had like 15 turns of built up phase, you could perhaps make an engine strong and reliable enough to compensate for 17 stop cards, but the actual game will finish long before that. Especially given how 2 out of 3 piles will empty by themselves (without anyone buying them).

An interesting board, though. It's always nice to see usually less-than-good cards shining every now and then. Kudos to SaintO for successfully pulling off PS-based strategy.
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Limetime

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #9 on: February 09, 2016, 02:10:51 pm »
0

Your only source of +buy is Market
Margrave?
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theJester

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #10 on: February 09, 2016, 03:28:25 pm »
0

Ah, yes, Margrave as well. I failed to notice.
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Davio

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #11 on: February 10, 2016, 05:58:14 am »
0

All junk and no trash makes Jack a dull boy. :(
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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #12 on: February 10, 2016, 06:50:41 am »
0

All junk and no trash makes Jack a dull boy. :(

But Jack is pretty good at dealing with junk though.
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Limetime

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #13 on: February 10, 2016, 08:44:07 am »
0

You could definitely play the engine. Give him 10 ruins, 7 curses and then add banks and mangroves. The problem with the slog is it won't hit 3 p enough to get 3 pstones fast enough.
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theJester

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Re: What should I have done differently in this slog with P stone?
« Reply #14 on: February 12, 2016, 05:45:28 am »
0

You could definitely play the engine. Give him 10 ruins, 7 curses and then add banks and mangroves. The problem with the slog is it won't hit 3 p enough to get 3 pstones fast enough.
How do you think your opponent will allow you to split curses 7/3 and ruins 10/0 ? When deciding whether to go for an engine or not, you can't count on your opponent to play in such an awful way.
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