From the moment combo-hungry players lay eyes on Tactician, they dream of playing with 10 cards every turn. Then they realize they have to discard their existing hand to keep the combo going, making the hard choice between another combo turn and actually spending the money in their hand. So they're left needing the right +$ actions in the supply to make Double Tactician work consistently. Often, this also requires the right amount of trashing to filter enough money out of the deck so the combo can work reliably, since the Treasure cards become dead in a typical Double Tactician strategy. But with Black Market, your Treasures get new life.
Black Market has the unique property of allowing players to play Treasures during their action phase. Here are some quotes from Dominion creator Donald X. about Black Market, taken from this Board Game Geek post:
http://boardgamegeek.com/article/3138507#3138507Black Market allows you to Buy a card during the Action phase. You can use coins provided by other Action cards played earlier in the Action phase and you can also play Treasure cards from your hand to pay the cost of the bought card. The Treasure cards are played to the table in your play area, just as you would during the Buy phase. If a Treasure card provides more coins than required for the purchase, the extra coins are available to use during your Buy phase.
I expect it to eventually be a general rule that, if you get a chance to spend money in the Action phase, you get to play treasures to do so and so on. That wasn't needed for the main set though.
Some quick experimentation on Isotropic confirms that any and all Treasures in your hand can be played immediately after you play a Black Market. So what does this mean for Double Tactician? There are at least three significant impacts:
First, Black Market can accelerate your Double Tactician strategy. You generally want a sufficient source of action-based money before you risk Tactician collisions and Black Market turns your Treasure into action-based money. You can feel more comfortable buying extra Tacticians earlier; as long as you draw a Black Market, you don't have to choose between the combo and spending.
Second, your Double Tactician engine can work with a focus on +Cards and +Actions; it no longer requires a critical mass of +$ actions, as well. This broadens the number of kingdom sets in which Double Tactician is viable (assuming there's a Black Market, of course).
Third, in general, Black Market allows you to combine the benefits of Double Tactician with the benefits of almost any Treasure-based strategy. Double Tactician + Black Market + Big Money becomes a reality because you can spend your Silver, Gold, and Platinum. Horn of Plenty also gets a big boost from Double Tactician + Black Market (and since you should always have a Tactician in play, it always adds +1 to your HoP).
I'd love to get feedback about this and other interactions that I may have missed. Any thoughts?
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Topic: Combo: Double Tactician + Black Market + [Treasure] (Read 2722 times)