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Monastery

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Chris is me:
I've been meaning to write more short and simple articles in order to try and jump start content creation here and hopefully get more good stuff onto the blog (or wiki). Here's an article about Monastery, a trasher that new players seem to underestimate. If you've been itching to write stuff and want to contribute to the online resources, give something like this a try.

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Monastery is a far more powerful trasher than it may appear to be at first glance. An obvious point of comparison is to how Forager plays in the early game. Like Forager, Monastery does not take an Action, trashes Estates for no (other) benefit, and trashes Coppers without hurting your economy for that turn. Where Monastery shines is that it allows you to trash without sacrificing momentum at all - you don’t give up economy, you don’t have to worry about drawing it dead, and it even trashes faster when used in tandem with gainers or +Buy.

Monastery’s properties allow for more aggressive openings than one would typically do with a trasher. Consider an opening of Smithy / trasher. Normally this is a bit risky - the Smithy could dead draw the other trasher, wasting a shuffle’s worth of trashing, but with Monastery, there is no such risk as it is played after the Buy phase. In addition, you get all of the benefits of Smithy’s extra cycling and economy, leading to more frequent trashing and faster gains. This can quickly snowball into a very potent deck that trashes seemingly without effort.

The synergy with gainers such as Ironworks or Engineer are obvious - gain a card, ideally buy another card, use Monastery to trash twice as much as you normally could. But this synergy often enables even weaker cards such as Silver gainers which you may not otherwise consider. Squire is an interesting example, where it can gain Silvers early to give Monastery an extra trash, provide multiple Buys later for a similar purpose, and can even be upgraded into an Attack card if need be.

The main takeaway from this is that you should adjust how you pace your deck when using Monastery instead of other trashers. In games where you need to get very thin very quickly, opening two trashers is often wise, but that is usually incorrect with Monastery as the collision case risks you being unable to gain a desirable card and you sacrifice some momentum. You do often want two Monastery, but you generally want to pair each Monastery with more aggressive enablers such as draw or gainers to keep things moving.

Awaclus:
Great article.

In general, I think a lot of people are playing all trashers as though they were just weaker versions of Chapel, which is super wrong because Chapel interferes with your deckbuilding and gets you into a very awkward position in a way that no other trasher necessarily does (and it's worth it only because Chapel is very strong). If you try to mimic that behavior with other trashers, you're wasting your tempo.

markusin:
The only tempo loss you get with Monastery is a card slot in hand. At its price point, the only deck thinners that compare in terms of tempo are Native Village and maybe Flame's Gift off Pixie (as well as Goat).

The fact that you can't draw it dead also gives it a Counterfeit feel, but without the +buy of extra coins.

Edit: There's also Ratcatcher that maintains high tempo, but has the drawback of being a bit slower than other single-card trashers

crj:
Hmm. I've only played with Monastery three or four times so far, but I've tended to find I want two, unless there's a good early gainer available.

Yes, you occasionally draw CCEMM which isn't great unless there's a(nother) good $2 in the kingdom. But But at least that turn you'll be reducing the risk of it happening again, and CCCMM is OK once in a while. Normally, you're trashing two cards per shuffle rather than one, and that feels important enough to be worth the downsides.

Particularly, though, I'd rather have two Monasteries in hand and $1 less to spend than try to line up a single Monastery with gaining/+Buy, then gain/buy something crummy so I can trash two cards.

McGarnacle:
Good Article! I also like the idea of just a few paragraphs on a card if, like me, you don't want to sit through a few pages on a card. I'll see if I can right some of these myself.

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