I'll start by setting a kind of a low standard for these. There's stuff out there that's much more worthy of an MDMA article than my Scout advice, but it's the thing that made me think of this whole idea, so I'm going to do this one. I think this is still worthy of an MDMA though, because I just explained the exact same idea to someone who had been previously unaware of it so it is probably not common knowledge, and I'm fairly certain that this advice is very correct based on both my own experiences playing Dominion at a high level and the fact that some other high level players also supported it in the original thread.
The original thread was Scout Archives.
No deck ever has greened so hard that Scout would have been better than nothing in it just because of that reason. Really, you need to be able to utilize the fact that it's a non-terminal Action card, the ability to remove green cards from the top of your deck and the ability to reorder your deck before you actually want to pick up a Scout on a spare gain, and then you still need that spare gain too. It can happen in Scrying Pool games for instance, but it's unusual even when both Scout and Scrying Pool are on the kingdom. The other way Scout can be better than nothing is that you desperately need any non-terminal Actions you can possibly get in your deck no matter what they do (I guess it can happen with Golem in extremely rare situations) or that you just want to increase your Vineyard/Gardens/Fairgrounds points and you don't care about junking your deck, but those situations are exactly as common as Ruined Village being better than nothing so that's not super amazing.
The Green-Grab Function
This is the trademark element of Scout. It can siphon off as many as four victory cards, which are often useless other than their point values, paving the way for your key draw cards to get at the good stuff. In most decks, this effect doesn't make much of a difference, since, for example, a well-constructed engine draws past the green without much effort, or a slog deck doesn't mind having low-income turns anyway. By the time most decks are clogging themselves with green cards, it's too late for Scout to matter. But there are a few times when green-grabbing can get you places you want. Most obviously, with a deck heavy in functional alt-VP, a Scout can get up to that sweet, sweet double-Lab effect. Silk road works too. With a spare buy or two in an Apothecary deck, it can helpfully avoid that nasty pile of victory cards left when you pull all the coppers out from in between them. And then there's the counter to things like Rabble or Bureaucrat, where it can sift right past the attack and get your deck running again.
The Deck Inspection Function
Although it doesn't give the benefits of something like Cartographer, Scout does give you advance knowledge of up to four cards. This gives it great synergy with cards like Wishing Well and Mystic, and also their cousins like Vagrant and Magpie which depend on a certain type of card being there. Even if there's no card that directly benefits from deck inspection, an extra Scout could give you an insight into whether it's worth it to play that big terminal draw card with your last action or not.
The Non-Terminality
Hey, it doesn't waste an action to play it! In this respect, it's vastly superior to other "useless" cards such as Chancellor or Duchess. (I actually made a kingdom with the two lowest-rated cards from each coin price category - Scout was the only non-terminal on the board.) This can lead to some interesting considerations on boards when it's the only non-terminal. Prince it, and you have a permanent village. Have Golem hit it, similar story. And unlike Ruined Village, there's something it does besides give you another action. Speaking as someone who's directly benefited from a Princed Scout, it feels good when you can get that extra action in play and know what's coming next.
The Opportunity Cost
All of this ignores the downside of Scout - it takes four coins and a buy just to stick one in your deck, and even then there's no guarantee you'll draw it at the right time. Sure, outside of a big money deck (with dead-draw tendency) it might pass the silver test, but it rarely passes the other-cards-on-the-board-at-similar-prices test. I'd much rather spend a $4 hand on a Village, or a Vagrant, or a Conspirator, or a Sage, or... the list goes on. There are very few times when a Scout would be essential to someone's deck, no matter how helpful it might be otherwise. This is why it's a card that is often reserved for spare $4 buys, which don't often happen. The strategies that really take advantage of the three functions I mentioned earlier are the exceptions, and even then the nature of a game might not allow time to get enough Scouts to make a difference.
Edit: How the heck could I forget gainers? In games with Ironworks or Workshop or something, Scouts get a lot closer to free, so the opportunity cost can get low enough for you to get the small (sometimes not so small) help that Scout gives without having to pass up something more essential. I agree that if the only important pile of $2-4 actions runs out in an engine game with Ironworks and no victory chips, some Scouts should DEFINITELY leave the pile.
It doesn't pass the Silver test. It doesn't even pass the nothing test. It doesn't get better than nothing until you can take significant advantage of all of the three categories you mentioned above. In other words, before you even consider buying or gaining a Scout over nothing, you should expect your draw pile to contain at least 25% Victory cards when you play Scout, you should have a card that cares about the order of the top of your deck and it should be essential that said card works correctly as much as possible, and you should have a card that benefits from $4 non-terminal Actions named Scout being in your deck. If one of these three is not true, you don't want to gain Scout over nothing, and even if all three are true, you probably don't want to gain Scout over the other alternatives unless there are no other alternatives.
My gf and I both made a deck to make Scout work. I guess on both of these you might be incentivized to buy a scout, no?
No.
Mine was, obviously, created with 'let's put everything that works with scout in one deck'.
That's not how it works, though. It doesn't matter how many different cards there are that synergize with Scout's deck ordering ability or the Victory card drawing ability, what matters is that in the dominant strategy that you're already going for regardless of Scout, there must be a reason to expect the top cards of your deck to have a significant amount of Victory cards, there must be a way to significantly benefit from the deck ordering, there must be a way to benefit from the fact that Scout is a non-terminal Action, and there must be a way to gain Scout for no opportunity cost at all.
I also don't think you are right in saying that all of these need to be present, if some of these are *strongly* present. Given the amount of green cards (and the other card that synergizes with green: crossroads), I'd say that compensates for the lesser importance of 3. (Although that's still possible, if you buy wishingwell/mystic.)
Like I said, it doesn't matter how many different green cards there are in the kingdom. If you just suddenly had all of them in your deck, you would want Scout, but you're not going to buy enough of them for Scout to be better than nothing.
In fact, I recently played a game where all of those four were true, and Scout was just good enough to be better than nothing. My opponent got it too early and it sucked for him. http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160113/log.0.1452694196857.txt
Scrying Pool benefited from the deck ordering very significantly, Scrying Pool + Vault benefited from an extra Action card being in my deck, the combined lack of Estate trashing and +buy and the presence of Nobles meant that I would need to have a lot of green cards in my deck at some point before the end of the game, and I could gain Scouts with the Border Villages that I wanted to buy anyway just for being $6 Villages after I felt like I had enough (i.e. 3) Young Witches.
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Topic: MDMA: When is Scout good? (spoiler: not very often) (Read 2995 times)