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Author Topic: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards  (Read 80457 times)

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LibraryAdventurer

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #225 on: January 13, 2017, 07:23:10 pm »
0

I had Herald #28. (I love the card, I just don't think it's top #10 in strength.)
Villa #19
and Jack of all Trades #18

...even if some people think a card being a splitter means any other value it has must automatically be negligible...
I agree with you, but bury the dead horse man.

aku_chi

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #226 on: January 14, 2017, 04:08:55 pm »
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Say you have an Action density of 50%, and assume the average thing happens with 2 Heralds. You play one Herald, hitting C/E (so it's a cantrip), and then another, hitting an Action card (so it's basically a Lost City). Vanilla Cantrip + Lost City = Village + Laboratory. So your two Heralds are as good as a Village and a Lab, which I wouldn't call mediocre. And as you add more and more Action cards, your odds of hitting one with Herald increases, meaning you get more Lost Cities and fewer vanilla cantrips.

This is a good point.  Herald can also be pretty good in the absence of trashing if there is a way to gain multiple actions per turn in the building phase.  Herald can also be good in combination with the few cards that let you set up the second card in your deck (e.g. Secret Passage, Apothecary, Cartographer).  Herald does get worse again once you start to green, of course.

Of course, the other extreme case is where you trash all your starting cards, in which case every Herald is a Lost City without the drawback of giving your opponent +1 Card upon buying it. That's pretty insane for $4.

Herald is amazing in a thin deck with a lot of actions, but it isn't as good as a Lost City for a few reasons:
  • Play order often matters.  You don't want to play that Junk Dealer until you have your junk in hand.  You don't want to play your Baron until you have your Estate in hand.  You don't want to play your Throne Room until you have your payload card in hand.  These are a few of the many examples.
  • It's harder to set up your next turn with a Herald stack.  Sometimes you want to stop before drawing your deck because you have all of your payload and want to save the redundant engine components to kick off the next turn.  This problem is compounded with actions that can help you save cards for your next turn (e.g. Gear, Courtyard, Haven): they might be played before you have what you want to save.
  • Herald doesn't provide +action once you've drawn your deck.
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weety4

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #227 on: January 15, 2017, 04:04:03 am »
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I'm beginning to resist the Herald hype.  I'm doubtful that it's a top 10 $4 card.  Herald can help make engines that are lacking either +actions or +card (or both), which is powerful, of course.  But it is a mediocre card on boards where you can't get thin, or there isn't good payload.  I feel like that is almost ~50% of games where Herald is mediocre.

In general, I have a higher opinion of the cards that are great in all decks: Ironmonger, Jack of all Trades, and Magpie.

Herald is not a mediocre card on boards where you can't get thin. I mean, sure, you don't want it in BM or slogs, but engines have been getting more and more common over the past few expansions, and it's one of the best engine cards in the game.

Say you're running an engine without any form of trashing - they are fairly rare, but do exist, especially if there's some other form of guaranteeing consistency (for example: delayed draw, Scheme, Summon, Prince on a Colony board). In those cases, you'll probably buy an Action card every turn, and it's likely there are gainers or +Buy so you'll acquire them even faster. So after 7 or 8 turns, you probably have 10 Action cards and your Action density is 50%, and it only goes up from there.

Say you have an Action density of 50%, and assume the average thing happens with 2 Heralds. You play one Herald, hitting C/E (so it's a cantrip), and then another, hitting an Action card (so it's basically a Lost City). Vanilla Cantrip + Lost City = Village + Laboratory. So your two Heralds are as good as a Village and a Lab, which I wouldn't call mediocre. And as you add more and more Action cards, your odds of hitting one with Herald increases, meaning you get more Lost Cities and fewer vanilla cantrips.

Of course, the other extreme case is where you trash all your starting cards, in which case every Herald is a Lost City without the drawback of giving your opponent +1 Card upon buying it. That's pretty insane for $4.
Herald is very good but only after some time and definitely not in all Kingdoms. Furthermore, it is risky; e.g. the presence of trashers makes it easier to increase the Action card density but if you have a forced trasher in your deck Herald's autoplay can backfire.
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Dingan

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #228 on: January 16, 2017, 02:33:51 am »
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Herald pretty much needs thinning -- thinning of both the starting 10 cards plus any additional junk.  Yes, it's awesome when you have 80% action cards and can reliably chain 7 Heralds in a row.  But how strong can a card that relies on other cards be?  Ambassador, Masquerade, Tournament, etc. are good just by themselves.

I just played a game where Explorer/Bureaucrat/Masterpiece big money handily beat a deck that had 8 Heralds, 5 Highways, and like 6 Market Squares. [sidenote: can we get logs for games w/ the new client???]

A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards.  My 2 cents.
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faust

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #229 on: January 16, 2017, 12:11:17 pm »
+2

Herald pretty much needs thinning -- thinning of both the starting 10 cards plus any additional junk.  Yes, it's awesome when you have 80% action cards and can reliably chain 7 Heralds in a row.  But how strong can a card that relies on other cards be?  Ambassador, Masquerade, Tournament, etc. are good just by themselves.

I just played a game where Explorer/Bureaucrat/Masterpiece big money handily beat a deck that had 8 Heralds, 5 Highways, and like 6 Market Squares. [sidenote: can we get logs for games w/ the new client???]

A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards.  My 2 cents.

1. Herald doesn't need thinning, but it's definitely more likely to be a game-changer if thinning is available. Even for this, Estate-trashing is more than enough to make Herald really good.
2. Herald relies on other cards, yes. But the thing is, every game of Dominion has other cards.
3. "A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards" - so how would you rate Chapel?
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Witherweaver

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #230 on: January 18, 2017, 10:07:32 am »
+3

Herald pretty much needs thinning -- thinning of both the starting 10 cards plus any additional junk.  Yes, it's awesome when you have 80% action cards and can reliably chain 7 Heralds in a row.  But how strong can a card that relies on other cards be?  Ambassador, Masquerade, Tournament, etc. are good just by themselves.

I just played a game where Explorer/Bureaucrat/Masterpiece big money handily beat a deck that had 8 Heralds, 5 Highways, and like 6 Market Squares. [sidenote: can we get logs for games w/ the new client???]

A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards.  My 2 cents.

Wouldn't that necessitate all Villages are at the bottom of lists?
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Witherweaver

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #231 on: January 18, 2017, 10:10:53 am »
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Herald can take a while to be useful; you have to get the Heralds and some other stuff to play, and that might take time.   That's true of engines in general, though.
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Chris is me

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #232 on: January 18, 2017, 11:11:43 am »
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Herald pretty much needs thinning -- thinning of both the starting 10 cards plus any additional junk.  Yes, it's awesome when you have 80% action cards and can reliably chain 7 Heralds in a row.  But how strong can a card that relies on other cards be?  Ambassador, Masquerade, Tournament, etc. are good just by themselves.

I just played a game where Explorer/Bureaucrat/Masterpiece big money handily beat a deck that had 8 Heralds, 5 Highways, and like 6 Market Squares. [sidenote: can we get logs for games w/ the new client???]

A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards.  My 2 cents.

Herald can work with modest thinning. It doesn't need to connect every time to be worth it.

Remake is barely good if it's the only engine card on the board, and most Villages are useless without other Actions. Therefore, they can't be upper tier, right?
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Aleimon Thimble

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #233 on: January 19, 2017, 05:47:44 am »
+1

For that matter, King's Court is also useless by itself, but it's still one of the strongest cards in the game.

The thing that makes Herald so strong is that it can function as both a Village and draw in an engine, so with Herald present, you have 2 of the most important elements for an engine already. Basically, you only need some kind of payload and preferably some modest (non-forced) trashing, and your engine will flow smoothly. Ironmonger can do that too in theory, but it's not quite as reliable, unless you have a ton of Nobles/Mills.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2017, 05:53:20 am by Aleimon Thimble »
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weety4

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #234 on: January 19, 2017, 12:52:33 pm »
+1

For that matter, King's Court is also useless by itself, but it's still one of the strongest cards in the game.

The thing that makes Herald so strong is that it can function as both a Village and draw in an engine, so with Herald present, you have 2 of the most important elements for an engine already. Basically, you only need some kind of payload and preferably some modest (non-forced) trashing, and your engine will flow smoothly. Ironmonger can do that too in theory, but it's not quite as reliable, unless you have a ton of Nobles/Mills.
Herald is good but it is not as super powerful as it is often made out to be. It is a Lost City with forced Action play which is probably similar in strength to a double Peddler aka triggered Conspirator. Conspirator also hits more often that Herald but when it misses it is a terminal Silver instead of a cantrip, i.e. the risk is larger. This is IMO the actual strength of Herald: it plays smoothly with low risk.
« Last Edit: January 19, 2017, 12:54:26 pm by weety4 »
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Oyvind

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #235 on: May 08, 2017, 10:24:13 am »
+2

Feodum should have been seen by now.

I respectfully disagree.  Feodum can be a game-winning card if it appears with a good silver-gainer or with trash-for benefit.

Are any of these cards in the bottom rank ever game-winners?  Counting House if combined with Travelling Fair, sure, but that's a very specific circumstance.  I guess Pirate Ship in 3-4 player, but who plays 3-4 player?

Lots of people play 3-4 player, they just don't come here to talk about it.

I agree! Almost all my games are 3p or 4p. Sure, I play some two-player online, because it takes forever and a day to get enough people for multiplayer games. I feel that the newest implementation of the online game almost prefers that everyone plays 2p, which is not half the fun of a 3p game, as the starting page let you play an "Equal opponent" or "Any opponent". Whatever you choose, you can only play 2p games without switching to "New table" or "Tables", and 90 % of the listed games there are abandoned. So they're really not tables you can just join and play. Pretty frustrating. I occasionally even play 5p and 6p, but of course that takes a lot of time. To me, nothing beats face-to-face three-player games of Dominion, and I even prefer four-player games to duels.
« Last Edit: May 08, 2017, 01:22:39 pm by Oyvind »
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Omastar68

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Re: The Dominion Cards Lists 2016 Edition: $4 Cards
« Reply #236 on: May 10, 2017, 07:03:29 pm »
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Quote
A card shouldn't be upper-tier if it depends on other cards.  My 2 cents.

Is this reasoning why all the $4 alt-VP cards are so low? I don't know enough to really agree or disagree strongly with any ranking, and they're all board dependent, but Feodum, Gardens, and Silk Road being quite low seems odd. If most people are playing on Shuffle iT then you're also going to see cards that combo with these three in games where they show up, at least most of the time.

Ofc, these kinds of lists are never foolproof. Some blanket statements are still pretty watertight ofc, you'd be hard pressed to make a board where Duchess is better than Chapel for instance. But for the most part the usefulness of any card will vary greatly depending on the board, so evaluating them like this doesn't work great. So I feel like these cards just might be too hard to evaluate, since they all can be pretty crumby on some boards. Anyone else feel the ranks for these are kinda random?
« Last Edit: May 10, 2017, 07:04:43 pm by Omastar68 »
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