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why cultist shouldn't be top 3 in the $5 list

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funkdoc:
game #5005045

i get worst possible draws on 2nd shuffle (double silver -> no $5), while my opponent gets the best possible draws (opened silver/temple, trashed hovel & overgrown estate, bought cultist).  i lose the ruins split something like 8-2 or maybe even 9-1...then i decide to pivot to a hunting party stack with temples.  i kept necropolis around for this.

meanwhile, opponent sticks to the standard theory of cultist-BM, and that allows me to gradually climb back into the game and eventually steal it.  cultist-BM is just too slow against any deck that can draw a bunch of cards and clean itself up decently, even if there isn't a lot of payload to be had.

Chris is me:
I mean yes a junker BM strategy generally doesn't perform well against a sloggy strategy where you can trash cards to score a lot of victory points? but this has a lot to do with the specific circumstances of Temple needing to trash differently named cards and hunting party being there to draw them

but why play cultist BM exclusively when there's hunting party, necro, and trashing? cultist is too 3, not "cultist BM"

funkdoc:
well, if winning the junking war doesn't win the game, i don't think it makes for a top 3 card.  do you think i would've had a hope in hell if cultist were replaced with mountebank and i lost the curse split even 7-3?

dunno, i just see more boards now where cultist is outright ignorable.  that's still on the rarer side, but much more common are the boards where winning ruins 6-4 doesn't matter much at all - it's what you do afterward that counts.  i feel comfortable saying that the majority of boards have a stronger engine possible than what we had here!

actually, as i think about it further, ignoring cultist was probably correct on that board!  i mean, the ruins split for me was almost as if i *had* ignored it, but probably worse since i did buy cultists.  i would've won that game more easily had those cultists been hunting parties, no?

ConMan:
This is a bold claim, but I suspect that for any card in the top 3 of its respective list, there are ample boards on which it is the wrong card to go for. In fact, I would be kind of disappointed if that wasn't the case. Doesn't make the cards bad, any more than finding that mythical board where you should open Scout makes it a good card.

funkdoc:
counterpoint: donate

(in before "that's not a ~card~")

but more seriously, i'm positive there are 3 other $5 cards with fewer hard counters than cultist.  this board didn't even have any of the main ones!  i'm thinking of stuff like city quarter, advance, and vineyards.  even page doesn't counter mountebank as much as those do with cultist - you still want an early mountebank to slow down your opponent's path to champion.

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