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[jotheonah]

EDITS are below.

I was astounded to see this has never been Combo of the Day.  Or maybe you're all about to school me on how it's not nearly as awesome as I think it is.

Combo: Fishing Village-Torturer

   So this is sort of a cheat since any village-Torturer is a killer combo. The whole point of Torturer is to chain as many as you can together to make your opponent either discard their whole hand or gain a pile of curses, after all.

   But Fishing Village, the best village, takes it to another level.  The biggest problem with Village-Torturer chains is that they can stall out. Either you draw 3 Torturers with no village, or you play your torturer and draw nothing but money or VP cards.  But if you managed to play even one FV the previous turn, your Torturers won't dead-draw, so that takes care of the first problem. For the second, the fact that your Fishing Villages remain out of your deck gives you a functionally smaller deck that makes your Torturers more likely to hit more Torturers, particularly if you dedicate enough turns to building the engine before you start to green.

   On top of all that, your Fishing Villages generate money, which your Torturer engine needs more than it needs the extra card. This gives you the freedom to trash more of your coppers and clutter up less of your deck with treasure.  And you have less to fear from your opponents' torturers.  Go ahead, discard your hand down to a single Torturer. You've got two Fishing VIllages in play, so no matter what you draw you're good to go.

   So how do you play this Combo? Step 1, get as many of the Fishing Villages as you possibly can and cheat your opponent out of them! Don't even worry about the Torturers yet. Step 1, get as many Fishing Villages as you can.  Particularly in 3+ player games these go fast and you need a critical density of them.  Buy your first Torturer when you hit $5 - the draw will up your buying power - but then go back and mop up the FVs. Step 2, get 3 - 5 Torturers. Step 3, play it out, buy Provinces, and wait for your opponent to rage quit. (Step 2 1/2 is buy some money or a +buy if you feel the situation warrants it, but if you got the better of the FV split, and you haven't had to take many Curses yourself, you should be able to get a Province every turn with just your FV money and your coppers.)

[timchen]

Your how to play this combo is probably wrong...

I personally like the FV+FV opening, but this really risks not being able to buy a $5 on turn 3 and 4. There is ~ 50% of the chance that you won't get a $5 if you draw 3 estates in turn 3 and 4, whereas a FV+ silver opening improves this to ~25%. An earlier torturer can hinder the opponent's ability to get the torturer quite a bit.

[Forge!!!]

How does an early torturer hinder your opponents ability to get a torturer?

If you don't have 5 in your hand -> discard 2 cards
If you do have 5 in your hand -> gain a curse

I am also struggling to find a situation where discarding two cards would keep you from being able to buy another FV/silver, though there probably is one.

[jotheonah]

I'm with Forge here. You really want most of the FVs. Now if your opponent buys his or her second Torturer, and has village support, well then maybe you want to slam on the brakes and get in the Torturer game.  But in the long haul, winning the FV split here is going to make a huge difference in the long run.

[RisingJaguar]

How does an early torturer hinder your opponents ability to get a torturer?

If you don't have 5 in your hand -> discard 2 cards
If you do have 5 in your hand -> gain a curse

I am also struggling to find a situation where discarding two cards would keep you from being able to buy another FV/silver, though there probably is one.

In your example, you are correct, but gaining a curse isn't something to overlook, its a pretty big deal in a torturer game.

I agree that gaining most of the FV is an important part of the battle, but its not that simple. I know this wasn't what you meant, but if FV and torturers were equal, then it wouldn't matter if you bought a torturer or FV (part of your reasoning for saying early torturer isn't a huge deal). Torturers though provide an attack + more buying power to make it easier to not only buy consistent cards, but launch consistent attacks.  Put simply, the early torturer is actually quite important, and FV+FV does struggle with that (i do agree it is more than likely the right move).   

Also, the early torturer becomes a larger deal with a + buy, even as simple as a woodcutter. 

[jotheonah]

I'll edit to make it a little less cut and dry.

[Asklepios]

How does an early torturer hinder your opponents ability to get a torturer?

If you don't have 5 in your hand -> discard 2 cards
If you do have 5 in your hand -> gain a curse

I am also struggling to find a situation where discarding two cards would keep you from being able to buy another FV/silver, though there probably is one.

Sure, that works, until you reshuffle and find you're not reaching $5 because of the curses in your hand...

Returning to the OP, however, I'd agree with others who have said it isn't a good idea to buy just fishing villages till they run out. For one thing, Fishing Villages alone don't provide much pace, and you'll be behind in the tempo of the game before you hit torturer. Say you spend six to eight turns emptying the fishing village pile. Then you need another turn to buy at least one torturer, and a turn or two to hit the reshuffle so that torturer activates.

Meanwhile the player who played big money with 2 torturers has already got a province or two and a deck full of money.

I'm not denying that those two cards work well together, and certainly fishing village is the best village because you don't need to get it in the same turn as your drawing card to still have an action spare. But its exactly because of that reason that you don't need all the fishing villages before you start getting torturers. And with all those +action, there's no reason not to pick up other good terminal actions along the way too, like say, a Remake (estates-> fishing villages, copper trashed) or a Bishop, or Smithy, any other card that will up your tempo enough to remain competitive. As for Torturer, I'd get at least one as soon as I can, and if I draw $6 while building that engine, I'd get a gold. Fishing Villages are great, but golds are better.

[jotheonah]

Yeah, this is a good point. You want to focus on the Fishing Villages if someone is fighting you for them. You don't want to buy 10 and no Torturer.

[Asklepios]

With regards to the game you played before posting this combo (http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120225-085836-60e9939d.html) I can see a few specific counters. Your opponent made a lot of weak plays, and generally his overall strategy lacked the focus yours had.

He tried using Ventures but never bothered to trash his coppers. Had he trashed his coppers, he could have easily got to the point where drawing oen or two ventures would net him Venture or Duchy. In fact, when he first bought his Venture, the odds were it was going to give him $2 when next played, and he never did anythign to rectify that.

On turn 10 he had three coppers, a torturer and a fishing village in hand. You hit him with a torturer. He discards. You hit him again. He gains a curse.

If he'd been smart enough to reverse that, he'd have ended up 1 copper down instead of two. Hell, in all likelihood he should have just gained two curses, kept the extra $ and bought a province the next turn. In fact, what he probably ought to have been doing is using two bishops to clean the deck of coppers and curses, and using Ventures to reach for money, and just accepted a curse hit each time you attacked him. Its painful, but sometimes its the right thing to do.

I'd also observe that in your own game you didn't follow your own advice: you bought your first torturer as soon as you hit $5, even though there were fishing villages left. That was the right thing to do, certainly, but does contradict your own advice

[jotheonah]

Edited the OP. You're right that what I do > what I say here.

Regarding the game, I chose not to post it because I didn't feel it made a rock-solid case for some of the reasons you described - and also because game logs that end in resignations really bug me aesthetically.

Oh, also because I didn't save the log. Actually, I played the game, I thought "that was a really good combo, I want to read about how I could have done it better on DS.com," I discovered there was no article, and I thought "I'll write one, and if I've got stuff wrong people will tell me."

[Asklepios]

That's fair enough. I'm probably not very good at playing Torturer engines myself - I always get distracted by VP before getting an abdolute lockdown.

[DG]

Just to stimulate some debate, if there are both fishing villages and another type of village in the supply then how important are the fishing villages?

[rod-]

If the other village is border village, it is clearly the most important.  Otherwise, other villages are not as good as fishing village (typically) but still perfectly functional.

A properly-built village+torturer engine does not need too many villages, particularly ones as efficient as fishing village.  Fighting your opponent for fishing village (unless playing against more than one opponent) is quite silly, as you can build a quite functional deck capable of emptying out the curse pile with as few as 3 villages.  It's far more important to get an early edge by hitting 5 for torturer first and then managing to chain 2-3 of them together first. 

[tlloyd]

Just to stimulate some debate, if there are both fishing villages and another type of village in the supply then how important are the fishing villages?

I'd generally go for Fishing Villages over any other, but Walled Village is also particularly useful in Torturer games, where being the first to play two Torturers in a turn is the key.

[jotheonah]

A Worker's Village (or Hamlet) is often a good pick up if you think you're going to find yourself with enough money to make use of the +buy.

[Asklepios]

Even better is a single Margrave. If you can hit with the Margrave and then a Torturer, then you've instantly forced the first "torture" to be a discard, you've netted some extra cards, and you've got that all important extra buy.

Of course, unlike Torturer, Margrave usually gets worse as an attack the more you play it, so I'd only drift away from Torturer to get the Margrave the once. Odds are in a Fishing Village / Torturer deck you'll rarely need more than two buys anyway

[Jimmmmm]

Of course, with a single Margrave in a Torturer chain, more often than not you'll play at least one Torturer before you get to the Margrave, and if they chose the discard option as very often happens with the first Torturer, then you're usually helping them, and if they're down to less than 3 cards, the attack part of Margrave reads "Each other player draws a card."