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Three Things You Need and Two Things You Want for Draw Engines.

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Jfrisch:
   Draw engines, Decks where you aim to draw either all or much of your deck every turn,  are the most important Deck Archetype in Dominion. In high level play, more games will be Draw engines than any other type of deck and most of the key concepts of Dominion (Tempo/buy order/endgame play) show up in crystal clear form when playing one. Understanding which cards to buy in which order and with which proportions in order to optimally build a draw engine is something that every Dominion player, regardless of their strength, struggles with. The point of this article is much more modest. I want to give an idea of when Draw Engines exists, and what Kingdom Cards you need for them to be a strategy worth pursuing. Here are 3 things you need, and two things that, while not strictly necessary, are very useful for a Draw engine.

Needs:

1. Drawing power

   A draw engine is fundamentally based on drawing lots of cards so obviously you need cards that draw in order to power a draw engine. There are two different types of draw cards which can be used for a draw engine terminal and non-terminal. If the only type of draw card is Terminal, a card that which gives you no +actions, usually it needs to give you at least 3 cards1 (For example, Smithy or Council Room) for a draw engine to be worthwhile. Building a draw engine on Witch, Moat, Steward, or Embassy alone is a losing proposition most of the time2. With non-Terminal draw, drawing 2 cards, like Lab Hunting Party and Advisor is good enough. Sometimes, even a variable number of cards like Menagerie,Herald, City Quarters, or scrying pool,  will suffice.

2. Villages (Splitters)

   Almost always when you are building a draw engine you will want villages, (cards which give extra +actions), or other cards that let you play multiple actions (i.e. non-village splitters like Throne room or Herald). These are strictly necessary when your draw is terminal and, even when draw is non-terminal, there are almost always terminal actions you want to include in your engine. Ideally your village will give you extra effects (like workers village) but, to a surprising extent, different villages are often interchangeable. Village, Farming Village,  Bazaar, and Mining village, in particular often function same way in engines.

   If you do not see a village or another splitter you will usually need a very compelling reason, along with non-terminal draw to consider going for a draw engine.

3. Payload

   Draw Engines usually take time to build up. In general for an engine to be worthwhile there  needs to be something you can do with it better than just buying a single province per turn. This usually comes in at least one of the following forms; a Kingdom Cards that lets you buy multiple cards (+buy cards), an attack that you can play almost every turn, or an alternate form of victory points. While you need at least one of these payloads, It is even better to have multiple of them (for example, having both Militia and Market in the Kingdom).

   Strictly speaking, your +buy card does not need to say +buy. Black Market, Outpost, Possession, Horn of Plenty, and Duplicate can often be used as a payoff to make your engine. Being able to buy multiple cards is often very useful for building your engine as well, only gaining a single card a turn makes engines slower to build up. In some circumstances, a remodeller can also function as a +Buy. For example, Butcher will sometimes let you gain multiple provinces a turn.

   Attacks are a classic engine enabler. By slowing down your opponent, you gain more time to build up your engine before your opponent gains 6 provinces (the amount a non-engine player needs to win). While most attacks are good for engines, Trashing attacks (like Knights) and Discard attacks (Like Militia) and the stronger deck inspection attacks (Haunted Woods and Rabble) tend to be especially good. Cursing attacks tend to be more of a mixed bag because they also substantially inhibit the engine. Engines typically require some form of trashing or cycling in the presence of cursing attacks. However when both cycling and cursing or cycling and trashing are present Draw Engines are frequently a good idea.
Alternative VP is a classic engine enabler because it is much harder for your opponent to gain half of the VP on the board when there is more of it. When +buy is  present, essentially any Kingdom VP card will help an engine to thrive (Feodum excepted). When there is no +buy present, however, the Alt-VP must be valuable enough to be worthwhile. Examples of Alt-VP which can enable engines even with a lack of +buy are Castles/Fairgrounds/Colony/Conquest and Distant lands. The key point here, is that each of them will give 4 or more VP per card. (Duke, while theoretically enough points, is often too slow with a single buy for an engine to be worthwhile). Cards which give VP Tokens, like Monument and Bishop, are usually engine enablers to. Goons in particular deserves to be mentioned because Goons draw engines are almost always worthwhile whenever both a village and draw card are present.

Wants:

The following, while not strictly necessary for a draw engine, are very often useful for determining whether it is worth going for.

1. Trashing/cyclers:
   The principal difficulty with most draw engines is your initial cards. For a draw engine to be effective you need to be able to consistently play a village and a draw card from your starting hand. Coppers and Estates, simply put, get in the way. Trashing these cards gets them out of the way permanently and indeed even very weak trashers (like Remodel or Trade Route) can help enable engines. Non-terminal trashers (like forager or Rat Catcher)  or cards that trash more than one card (Like Amulet,Chapel or Steward) are very strong engine enablers. In general, when there is a non-terminal or multi-card trasher, along with the 3 necessary Draw engine components, a Draw Engine will be the best strategy.

   Cyclers, (cards which draw more than 1 card, but also discard at least 1), often function similarly to trashers, although they are generally weaker. Warehouse, Dungeon, Stables, and Cellar are examples of Cycling cards which will help you build an engine. Even cards which don’t discard from your hand can sometimes function like cyclers if they let you discard cards from the top of your deck (Wandering Minstrel and Cartographer are examples)

2:A way to get multiple engine components

   As mentioned earlier, it is harder to build an engine if you can only gain 1 engine piece per turn. Being able to quickly acquire many is therefore a huge boon. Gainers, for example Workshop, Ironworks ,Artisan, and Horn of Plenty, are an obvious and effective way to help build an engine. Remodelers (Remodel/Butcher/Salvager etc) are also effective at gaining a few cheap engine pieces and are helpful as trashers as well. Price decreasers (Bridge Troll/Bridge/Quarry/Highway) also are very useful for this purpose if plus buy is available on the board (as is always the case with Bridge and Bridge Troll).


When to Go for Draw engines:

   Draw engines,are the most powerful, and most played Deck type. Figuring out whether or not to go for a draw engine is very difficult and even the very best players regularly make mistakes. The following advice is thus, by its very nature, limited and often wrong. There will be exceptions where you should ignore it.

   First of all do not for a draw engine unless all 3 of the necessary components are present.
   When all 3 components are present and strong trashing is also present, go for the draw engine. When all 3 components are present, there is cycling, and there are gainers, go for the engine. When all 3 components are present and there is either cycling or ways to gain cheap engine components , and multiple types of payloads (i.e. attacks and multiple gains/ attacks and Alt VP)   go for the draw engine. When there are not cheap ways to gain multiple engine components and  there is not trashing or cycling, go for the engine only if there is a large potential payout (like Goons,Kings Court, or Colony) or if all three payouts are present along with high quality engine components (fishing village or royal carriage for example). Finally if in doubt, go for the draw engine because you will learn more if you do.


*1 Technically 2.5 cards per turn is fine (Ranger being the example). Also the cards drawn don’t all need to be in the same turn. Haunted Woods and Wharves are great for engines
*2 There are exceptions. Kings Court, Goons, and fishing village in particular often suffice to make these engines worthwhile.

Jfrisch:
This is my first article in a while. It is designed more for beginners so while Thoughts are very much appreciated corner cases are fine and I don't feel the need to mentioned. Any suggestions for things I missed would be great. (Obviously other types of cards can be great for engines but I felt like this covered the core).

Jack Rudd:
Cultist is, or at least can be, an exception to the +2 Cards rule, because of its special ability.

Chris is me:
I don't think villages are a need, that depends on the drawing card itself and not inherently required for strategies that draw lots of cards. A strict reading of your article would have someone skip the draw engine on a Hunting Party + cantrip payload board for example. This isn't really a small corner case but a sizeable chunk of engines and boards.

Qvist:
While I agree that for new player they should for terminal draw with +3 cards, +2 cards terminal draw engines can be the right thing to do, mostly if both the draw card and the village can easily be gained, e.g. with a Workshop variant, or even only one of them. And of course you need trashing, but that should be obvious. Like for example if the opponent plays a BM variant with an attack, then building a Moat engine is quite a reasonable thing to do as you are save from his attack AND can attack him every turn with this specific attack as well.

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