Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Pages: [1]

Author Topic: Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn  (Read 2711 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

blueblimp

  • Margrave
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2849
  • Respect: +1559
    • View Profile
Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn
« on: February 13, 2012, 05:38:35 pm »
+1

The puzzle is to gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn: more precisely, use a finite, fixed-size deck to gain a number of cards in one turn that is limited by the supply only. So if the supply limits were increased by 10x, then the same deck could gain around 10x as many cards in one turn.

This is pretty easy using King's Court, so there are really two puzzles: do it with King's Court and without.

A King's Court solution:
Have 4 Highways or Bridges in play, have your entire deck in your hand, and have King's Court, Ironworks, and Smithy in hand.

KC-Ironworks to gain KC, Ironworks, Smithy. Then play the Smithy to draw the three cards you just gained. Repeat until supplies run out. Each iteration actually also nets you +1 action.


A solution without King's Court:
Have 2 Highways or Bridges in play. Have your entire deck in your hand. Your hand must contain Black Market, 2 Border Villages, Crossroads, 3 Horns of Plenty, and 8 green cards.

Play BV twice, play BM and use it play the horns to gain: Black Market, Border Village+Crossroads, Border Village+Mandarin. (This is possible because BV costs 4 after the Highway effect, and you have BV, BM, Horn, and Highway in play.) The on-gain effect of the Mandarin causes the horns to go on top of your deck. Now, play Crossroads to draw 8 cards from your deck: three horns, a Black Market, two BVs, a Crossroads, and a Mandarin. Repeat until supplies run out.
Logged

O

  • Jester
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 836
  • Respect: +605
    • View Profile
Re: Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn
« Reply #1 on: February 13, 2012, 07:13:38 pm »
0

The bane of all puzzles: Embargo for arbitrarily many turns under possession, then buy said card (with/without trader per your problems specifications)
Logged

blueblimp

  • Margrave
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2849
  • Respect: +1559
    • View Profile
Re: Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn
« Reply #2 on: February 13, 2012, 11:16:37 pm »
0

The bane of all puzzles: Embargo for arbitrarily many turns under possession, then buy said card (with/without trader per your problems specifications)

While that's clever and the rules are ambiguous enough that maybe it can slip through, it's not really a solution because the more cards you want to gain during the turn, the more pre-turn setup you need to do. The point of the puzzle is to do a fixed amount of pre-turn setup that's the same no matter how many cards you end up gaining during the turn--that was what I was trying to enforce by requiring a "fixed-size deck". That said, if you can find a way to abuse a fixed number of embargo tokens, say by converting the curses to silvers with Trader and then applying a card like Develop, that would be awesome.

The reason I think the puzzle is interesting is that creating this sort of gaining loop without KC is actually pretty tricky. Dominion generally does a pretty good job of preventing gaining loops, by design. I can't think of a substantially different way to do it from the solution I gave in the first post.

Edit: Let me see if I can formalize a bit, if that helps. The puzzle is to find a finite sequence of actions and shuffles Q such that for every specified number G of cards to gain, there is a supply number S such that if the game begins with at least S of every card in the supply, then in the game state resulting from applying the actions and shuffles Q, the player may subsequently gain at least G many cards (of any type) before ending his turn.

I don't know if that made it any clearer, but the point is that the pre-turn setup you do is not allowed to depend on how many cards you plan to gain.
« Last Edit: February 13, 2012, 11:32:16 pm by blueblimp »
Logged

ghostofmars

  • Moneylender
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 162
  • Respect: +71
    • View Profile
Re: Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn
« Reply #3 on: February 16, 2012, 05:22:01 am »
+2

If we restrict us to non-KC solutions, I see only a few ways to realize it

1) cards that have a positive net effect
Treasure Map (2x) -> 4 Gold
Trader on card costing 3 or more


2) clever attacks which gain more cards than it cost to play them (probably only possible with more than 1 opponent)
Thief/Noble Brigand steal money cards
Mountebank deals out lot of cards
Jester copies arbitrary cards
Ambassador in combination with Masquerade could create copies, too


3) coupled gains, i.e., gain a card to gain more cards
cache, border village, duchess


4) special tricks
a) HOP Mandarin Black Market - combination
b) Tunnel + discard = lots of Gold


examples
3player game: all my deck is in hand, I have two actions left
play Jester, one opponents has only Lab, the other one only Jester
play Lab, draw gained Lab and Jester
repeat

complete deck in hand: (lots of VP to activate crossroads) + 1 gold + 6 silver + 1 Trader + 5x Throne Room + 3x Develop + 1Oasis + 1 Tunnel
in play: Black Market + Quarry (and actions left)
play trader trash gold gain 6 silver
play oasis, discard tunnel, gain gold
TR chain to develop (6x) silver in border village + develop(3)/Crossroads/Oasis/X + TR(5)/trader
rest of TR actions on crossroads to draw all new cards
repeat
Logged

blueblimp

  • Margrave
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 2849
  • Respect: +1559
    • View Profile
Re: Gain "infinitely-many" cards in one turn
« Reply #4 on: February 17, 2012, 05:37:55 am »
0


complete deck in hand: (lots of VP to activate crossroads) + 1 gold + 6 silver + 1 Trader + 5x Throne Room + 3x Develop + 1Oasis + 1 Tunnel
in play: Black Market + Quarry (and actions left)
play trader trash gold gain 6 silver
play oasis, discard tunnel, gain gold
TR chain to develop (6x) silver in border village + develop(3)/Crossroads/Oasis/X + TR(5)/trader
rest of TR actions on crossroads to draw all new cards
repeat


Very nice solution, but I'm a bit lost by the line describing the TR chain. I'll look again later.
Logged
Pages: [1]
 

Page created in 0.076 seconds with 21 queries.