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[Forge!!!]

The top card is Hunting party, if you can't figure it out. Full link:

http://dominionstrategy.com/2011/04/21/cornucopia-spoilers-from-the-gathering-initial-thoughts/#more-1912

[rrenaud]

You want to make fun of theory?  Watch him try to eat spicy food.

[Forge!!!]

I can't stomach Chipotle, I can't say anything about people's ability to eat spicy food.

[Razzishi]

Theory certainly wasn't the only one to be well off the mark about Cornucopia - just check the comments to that article.

[Forge!!!]

Theory certainly wasn't the only one to be well off the mark about Cornucopia - just check the comments to that article.

Oh I'm well aware, and I'm sure I wouldn't have been able to do any better. I just think it's fun to look at older things like this.

[chwhite]

Yeah, I was all like "whoa, Jester's going to be bonkers crazy good" and "Remake is just a crappy Upgrade". 

In Remake's case, it only took one game with it out to disabuse me of that ridiculous notion.  Jester took no more than three or four.  Hunting Party we all knew was good, of course, but it took quite awhile to get the hang of the Unstoppable Hunting Party Stack, where you do want to stack it with minimal variety.  "Better than Lab" took a little bit of time to realize, "better than Minion/Torturer" even more.

At least I pegged Menagerie as a power card from Day 0.

...

If you want to make fun of me, try and dig up what I first said about JoaT and Fool's Gold.  It might be on BGG rather than here.

[olneyce]

My comment about Hinterlands:

"Jack of All Trades seems like a card that's great to have one of but absolute death to get two or more.  It's a nice early game enabler, but by the mid or end-game it's a pretty big drag.  It adds silver to the deck which can disrupt your ability to draw the whole deck, once it's wiped out the estates it doesn't trash anything else, and drawing back to five is often not that helpful.

It's a good and useful card - but I think you need to be in a game where all the various talents have some utility for it to be a strong purchase.  If you're getting it just for the trashing, the other trashers are better.  If you really want silver, you can just buy silver.  If you want to draw cards, any card that just lets you draw two is usually going to be better.  It's only when the talents synergize that it becomes great."

Oooof.

[theory]

I made the list with Captain_Frisk fully knowing that the two of us were likely going to have to eat crow about it.  It's nice to see how far off your first impressions can be: everyone went through a period of Pirate Ship love, and no one understood Sea Hag.

Even now, I think some cards are underrated and starting to show their strength.  Venture, for a long time.  The alternative VP cards are coming around (as I alluded to in the Duke article).  Courtyard, Masquerade, Bureaucrat, KC, IGG were all cards that the community rather underrated at first I think.  (Some cards can be very strong and still initially underrated.  KC is a good example.)  CouncilRoom and the simulators helped with a lot of this: I'm not sure that anyone would have caught onto DoubleJack as quickly as we did were it not for the simulators.

Also, it is not fair to compare my tolerance for spicy foods with the Renauds, because rrenaud and my wife are the kinds of people that add hot sauce on everything they eat.  That having been said, for most of my life I was the kind of person for whom BBQ sauce was about as spicy as I could handle.  I like to think that my time in London has helped build up my tolerance somewhat, though.

[Forge!!!]

I'm not entirely sure why, but I think Cornucopia might have been the hardest to judge of all the sets. I know I also thought Jester was absolutely amazing, but was underwhelmed by a lot of the other cards, which is pretty much the opposite of reality. Perhaps because of the many different card function, which hadn't really been seen before?

[Captain_Frisk]

Thanks for bringing this back up!

I just went through this... just to see my updated thoughts:

I was wrong on Farming Village (Workers Village is the bomb!), Horn of Plenty (sortof), Menagerie (NOT HARD TO USE AT ALL!), Young Witch (I'm still not sure whether this is good or not).  Otherwise, I'm pretty happy with my initial reads.  Re: Jester, I still think my statement is accurate.  It's crazy.  Whether that's good or not... who the hell knows.

Theory (IMHO) was wrong on:
Fortune Teller (and Rabble too - both terrible early purchases!), Hunting Party (comment regarding getting WORSE when stacked), Jester (not incredible), Menagerie (situation: EVERY TIME!), Remake (note: I dislike remake because of the treasure map aspect of Turn 3 / 4 estate collision / luck, but there's no doubt that it's a strong opener, especially if you can engine up your deck)

I think the biggest thing I've taken from cornucopia is how much I absolutely hate tournament.  Treasure map doesn't bother me, because its usually a bad buy.  Ditto for Saboteur.  I know that some players don't agree with me, but I find it incredibly frustrating how much the game swings on who can win a tournament first.  Unlike King's Court / Bridge mega combos, the game doesn't end right then, but then frequently limps on while one player goes on a prize rampage, and the other person has to sit around for his chance to discard 2 cards to followers.

That said, it was SUPER FUN the first <X> times that I played with it... so mission accomplished.  It's a little unreasonable to gripe about a few cards when this game has apparently provided me with enough stimulation to play it at least FIVE THOUSAND TIMES.

[jotheonah]

The whole idea of a "Hunting Party Deck" where you intentionally buy as few things as possible and then as many HPs as you can get was definitely not obvious to me until I read about it here.  Huge eye-opener about the power of that card.

[^_^_^_^]

Heh, everything I've ever seen about the cards HERE was correct. On BGG, well... I don't look at that site anymore

And yes, I just saw this after my computer broke and I had to take a break from the internet =P

[theory]

Somewhat on topic, I was looking through my old emails and found this, dating to October 2010: the first seeds of DominionStrategy:

From: theory
To: rrenaud
Subject: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"
Body: today's entry: haven + explorer + king's court = 10 golds in deck by turn 21

From: rrenaud
To: theory
Subject: Re: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"
Body: I'd actually be interested in doing something like that.  Maybe take one game from isotropic per day that had something cool happen, given some commentary on the game and the strategy employed, etc.

I think you like haven a lot more than I do.

I really need to make dominionstats.com.

Some jerk still owns dominionstats.com I think.  It was my wife that suggested the name "Council Room".  And boy, 10 Golds by Turn 21!  Hahaha...

[Ozle]

Nope, dominionstats.com looks free to me

[WanderingWinder]

Somewhat on topic, I was looking through my old emails and found this, dating to October 2010: the first seeds of DominionStrategy:

From: theory
To: rrenaud
Subject: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"
Body: today's entry: haven + explorer + king's court = 10 golds in deck by turn 21

From: rrenaud
To: theory
Subject: Re: you could probably run a blog called "Dominion Combos of the Day"
Body: I'd actually be interested in doing something like that.  Maybe take one game from isotropic per day that had something cool happen, given some commentary on the game and the strategy employed, etc.

I think you like haven a lot more than I do.

I really need to make dominionstats.com.

Some jerk still owns dominionstats.com I think.  It was my wife that suggested the name "Council Room".  And boy, 10 Golds by Turn 21!  Hahaha...

Meanwhile, I have 10 provinces by then, in our 2-player game.






I'm not above cheating in totally hypothetical scenarios

[rrenaud]

I run rftgstats.com .  I vaguely recall theory made fun of me for dominionstats.com being incredibly boring sounding.

More email digging..

from theory:

Let's split the costs. And what name would we reg? Dominionstats or dominionstrategy ... would that be redundant? Like TeamLiquid isn't called Starcraftstrats. But dominionstrategy and dominionstats is easy to remember.

www.kingscourt.com is available

Potential problems: it's a Prosperity card, so people aren't as familiar with it (though Throne Room doesn't sound as good IMO); King's Court and Kingscourt are far from Google-unique

If you don't think those are problems (I don't think they are dealbreaking) and can't think of another name we can go with that.  I think "domtheory" or "how to dom" or "guide to dom" might be a little misleading ;-)

As for alternative card names:

PearlDiver (but the card sucks!)
Watchtower (same name as a Jehovah's Witness magazine)
____ Village (Strategy Village, etc.  Seems kinda lame)
Council Room (maybe?)

dominionstrategy.com used to be taken by some republican politicial advisor, but I got it as soon as it was free.

[Lekkit]

You should've renamed DS to Pearl Diver as an april fool's joke.

[Kuildeous]

Meanwhile, I'll go hang out at the "how to dom" forum.

[^_^_^_^]

Thought this might be a fun topic to revive Also love that you guys mentioned TeamLiquid in your discussions. How did you guys first meet anyways?

[theory]

I haven't done any speculation on these Dark Ages cards since I've actually played with them (as opposed to Cornucopia), so I wouldn't really be giving a pure blind opinion.

rrenaud and I went to the same undergraduate university (though we didn't know each other there), and then he stomped me a couple times PvP on B.net.  And that was about it, until I went to NYC and he reached out to me via AIM (boy, remember AIM?) to come play boardgames.  (I very, very nearly didn't go, because I was like, wtf, that sounds lame, who the hell plays boardgames?  And as Donald X. would say, there's a lesson for all of us.)

[^_^_^_^]

Haha sweet! So basically, we should be thanking Rrenaud even more than you since without him you wouldn't be here!

[Forge!!!]

Good work, old topic. Good work.