Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Titandrake]

Disclaimer: I'm secretly not actually good at this game. I just pretend I am. I fully expect some debate over whether some of the points made here are valid.

Bureaucrat is a bad card. It's bad enough that it used to be ranked the worst $4 cost. But, opinion about it has changed recently, such that now it's considered closer to mediocre than terrible. Let's minutely look at every part of Bureaucrat, and see if we can figure out why Bureaucrat is bad and why Bureaucrat is good.

The bad

• Does not directly improve your current hand.
  
  This is probably the biggest turn-off of Bureaucrat. When you open Smithy, you get to draw a big hand. When you open Masquerade, you get to pass junk and trash the junk you receive, all while maintaining the same hand size. When you open JoAT, you at least draw back up to 5 cards in hand while gaining that Silver. Bureaucrat gives you nothing at all. You effectively play that turn with a 4 card hand.
  
  What distinguishes Bureaucrat from JoAT is that the Silver is gained on top of the deck, rather than in the discard. So, it's somewhat unfair to look at how it affects the current hand. To get the full picture, you have to look at the benefit added to the next hand. The problem is...
• The improvement to your next hand is weak.
  
  Because the Silver is gained on top of your deck, you essentially draw 4 cards from the top of your deck, then draw a Silver. At first glance, this might look like +$2 to your next hand. But it isn't. Consider the following scenarios, from best to worst.
  
  
  • 5th card from top of deck is Estate. Drawing a Silver instead of an Estate has improved your hand by +$2. Yay!
  • 5th card from top of deck is Copper. Your next hand improved in value by +$1. Well, better than nothing...
  • 5th card from top is Silver. Next hand has not improved in value. Effectively slows down your reshuffle while doing nothing
  • 5th card from top is Gold. Next hand value -$1. Well that sucks.
  • 5th card from top was an engine component you needed to go off this turn. You kinda deserve this one for playing Bureaucrat in an engine deck.
  
  I haven't accounted for the hands two turns, three turns, etc. after you play Bureaucrat, or cases where you want weaker hand values (i.e. you'd rather have $6, $8 than $7, $7), but overall my feeling is that on average the net effect is much weaker than a straight up +$2
  
• Engine possibilities are dulled down.
  
  Straightforward. You're gaining more money, which reduces the chance of engine components colliding. Except it's not straightforward. More on that later.
  

So, if Bureaucrat has all these downsides, why play it?

The good

• You gain a Silver instead of getting straight up +$2
  
  Sure, the marginal benefit this shuffle is not very good. But the point of Bureaucrat is that it offers a way to pick up extra Silver on the cheap. The benefits of Bureaucrat increases over time. Consider the money density contributed by Bureaucrat. With 0 plays, it adds +$0 per card. 1 play boosts it to $1 per card. 2 plays brings it to $4/3 per card. The more you play Bureaucrat, the more it improves your money density. However, tellingly, it never quite manages to bring it up to $2 per card that just buying Silver would do. It'll get asymptotically close to $2, but it won't reach $2/card. But if your deck is satisfied with not-quite $2/card over many cards, Bureaucrat gets appealing.
  
  There's also an interesting engine dynamic to this: if you can gain money from Bureaucrat, you don't have to spend buys picking up the Silver needed to buy engine components. There's going to be a point where Bureaucrat will become a hindrance, but early on picking up a Bureaucrat on an engine board could give you the edge to build up faster. This works out best in a game with early and heavy trashing, where Bureaucrat Silver-gaining can happen even if you turn your current hands into messes that can't buy anything. Trash late and the economy sustaining effects won't matter. Little or weak trashing will cause Bureaucrat to negate most of the benefits of trashing you'll get. This early + strong trashing leaves 2 cards that could synergize: Chapel and Steward. All other trashers will only trash 1 card, or cost $5 or more. But Steward will provide the money you need anyways (which is why Steward feels so useful, now that I think about it). So, Chapel is pretty much your only option for this scenario
  
  
  
• The attack slows down your opponent.
  
  Let's get this out of the way first: You aren't going to chain Bureaucrats. If you can reliably chain Bureaucrats, there are just sooooo many better actions you could be chaining in a deck that manages to keep firing while gaining large amounts of Silver. So, we'll only consider the one play of Bureaucrat.
  
  Similarly to how Bureaucrat affects you, playing Bureaucrat does not affect your opponent's turn. S/he really didn't need that Victory card to play their hand. Bureaucrat turns your opponent's next hand into a 4 card hand, as a mini-Ghost Ship.
  
  A 4 card hand isn't a particularly strong attack. So, when is Bureaucrat's attack useful? Well, it's primarily useful when it actually hits. In most games, the odds of Bureaucrat hitting a Victory card decrease sharply. So, the attack gets better when your opponent does a strategy that gets Victory cards fast. Hybrid cards, Gardens, and Silk Road come to mind.
  
  It's also useful when Victory cards are good to have in hand. The main three cases for this are when you want to play a hybrid card, when you have a trasher in hand, and when you have something like Vault, Cellar, or Warehouse to change a useless card in hand into a benefit. However, it's worth noting that you have just as good a chance to push a green card from a hand that doesn't want it to a hand that does.
  

In conclusion, Bureaucrat isn't for every game. In Big Money, there's usually a much better card to get over Bureaucrat: It takes Bureaucrat 4 plays to contribute the $1.6/card baseline Province decks want, and by then the game should wrapping up. In engine games, Bureaucrat can be useful, but usually requires some good trashing support, which has the unfortunate tendency to make the attack part of Bureaucrat not work. The case where it seems to shine the most is in alternative VP strategies. The lower money density doesn't matter as much, the smoothing out effect over multiple cards is a strong point, and the attack is relevant for much of the game. But apart from those games, Bureaucrat just doesn't cut it.

Works with:

• Duke
• Gardens
• Silk Road
• Engine games with Chapel.
• Opponents going for strategies that are helped by Victory cards

Conflicts with:

• Engine boards with any other trashing card whatsoever
• Most BM boards. There's usually a stronger alternative, and the Bureaucrat attack will do little.
• Loan. Reveals the Silver you just gained

[DStu]

Until here I think I mostly agree..
The good

• You gain a Silver instead of getting straight up +$2
  
  Sure, the marginal benefit this shuffle is not very good. But the point of Bureaucrat is that it offers a way to pick up extra Silver on the cheap. The benefits of Bureaucrat increases over time. Consider the money density contributed by Bureaucrat. With 0 plays, it adds +$0 per card. 1 play boosts it to $1 per card. 2 plays brings it to $4/3 per card. The more you play Bureaucrat, the more it improves your money density. However, tellingly, it never quite manages to bring it up to $2 per card that just buying Silver would do. It'll get asymptotically close to $2, but it won't reach $2/card. But if your deck is satisfied with not-quite $2/card over many cards, Bureaucrat gets appealing.
  

I wouldn't focus on the money density of just the cards that come to your deck with the Bureaucrat. Your deck consists of more cards than this, and in a BigMoney Province game, their average card value is also below $2. So now with a Silver buy, you add 1 card with average value $2 to the deck, with a Bureaucrat you add n cards with average value $2*(n-1)/n to your deck. With the latter, the money density of you total deck increases way more than with just one card for $2

This early + strong trashing leaves 2 cards that could synergize: Chapel and Steward. All other trashers will only trash 1 card, or cost $5 $4 (Remake) or more. But Steward will provide the money you need anyways (which is why Steward feels so useful, now that I think about it). So, Chapel is pretty much your only option for this scenario

Otherwise true, a Silver gainer is often worth considering whith the Chapel, even if you want to transition into an engine.[/list]

[dondon151]

Similarly to how Bureaucrat affects you, playing Bureaucrat does not affect your opponent's turn. S/he really didn't need that Victory card to play their hand. Bureaucrat turns your opponent's next hand into a 4 card hand, as a mini-Ghost Ship.

Eh, this isn't always true, especially in cases where Bureaucrat is stronger than usual. If the opponent was planning on trashing that Victory card (either outright like Chapel, or for benefit like Salvager), then you've kind of hurt his current hand. In the former case, it's 1 less card trashed on his turn - you'll usually trash cards 4 at a time with Chapel anyway, so you've reduced the effectiveness of his Chapel play. In the latter case, you've directly prevented your opponent from gaining the benefit of trashing the card on that turn.

You should also mention that Bureaucrat conflicts with Loan, because you'll just end up revealing the Silver that you just gained.

[Titandrake]

Similarly to how Bureaucrat affects you, playing Bureaucrat does not affect your opponent's turn. S/he really didn't need that Victory card to play their hand. Bureaucrat turns your opponent's next hand into a 4 card hand, as a mini-Ghost Ship.

Eh, this isn't always true, especially in cases where Bureaucrat is stronger than usual. If the opponent was planning on trashing that Victory card (either outright like Chapel, or for benefit like Salvager), then you've kind of hurt his current hand. In the former case, it's 1 less card trashed on his turn - you'll usually trash cards 4 at a time with Chapel anyway, so you've reduced the effectiveness of his Chapel play. In the latter case, you've directly prevented your opponent from gaining the benefit of trashing the card on that turn.

You should also mention that Bureaucrat conflicts with Loan, because you'll just end up revealing the Silver that you just gained.

This is lightly touched upon in the later paragraphs, as you want Victory cards in hand if you're planning to trash them. I'll make this clearer, and also I'll add the Loan thing: forgot all about that particular "nonbo".

[DG]

I think there a few other features here
 - the speed at which a deck cycles is important and the bureaucrat slows down everyone's deck but mostly the users
 - the silver on top of the deck is very good near the end of the game when you're hoping not to reshuffle
 - the bureaucrat is only useful if silver is useful and there are certainly times when it is not
 - big drawing actions can make use of silver, so bureaucrat + council room is a good base set combo
 - the attack changes in multiplayer games due to cumulative effect

[jomini]

A few other points:

Remake is a two card trasher that costs 4. It works quite well with B if you have good 4s and strong fives as you can either remake the B into a 5 & remake a silver into a B or trash estates & coppers.


B is also a strong in settings with good high end trash for benefit cards as it adds 3 coins of value to the deck. I'll sometimes add B to a mid game 4 deck (i.e. after getting the forge, but before I've stopped have 4 coin hands) as it can provide a steady stream of silvers to forge into golds, engine components, or provinces. Likewise upgrading to an engine likes a B opening as the upgrades can later turn the B into a 5 component or keep turning silvers into 4 coin components. Apprentice + B is also decent as you can trash the silvers for draw, regain them with B and save your buy for apprentice/gold/province. A lot of the high end trash for benefit boards hurt for a way to add value quickly and B does exactly that.


One final near unique thing about B is that is a potentially unlimited discard attack. Repetitive plays of most discard attacks don't hurt the opponent, particularly in the late game where you have enough variance to either keep the coin for a province or the needed engine components. B on the other stacks for as long as they have green in hand. If you can attack with B 5 times reliably and the opponent has a sufficient clutch of green in their deck, you can pin them for the rest of the game with 0 card hands. Unlike the KC/masq pins, this one is a lot harder to pull off as you need a lot of green in the opponent's deck, you need to have a way to reliably deal with the silver accumulation, and you need to have the opponent lack a way to cycle past the green with one or two cards until you can fully pin them. A setup that works, though rarely without a weak opponent or good reason to acquire alternate VP cards, is apprentice/TR/B which allows you to chain TR/apprentice for +actions and play B several times. The apprentices can also trash silvers for draw to get you some combination of TR/B that lets you push back 5 cards. Other options include using watchtower to trash the silver, upgrades to turn silvers into TR or some other engine card, and less generally with other strong trashers like forge & governor. Oddly enough, loan can actually be useful here to clear out some dead silver to keep the pin reliable.

Take, for instance a 3 player game with 2 players going B/gardens. You can go B/apprentice/TR and set up an engine that can reliably attack with B 5 times per hand. Because your opponents lack draw and  you will attack 5 times, they will never clear the top of their decks and eventually they will draw a hand of 5 green that has them facing the choice buy a copper or buy a curse for the rest of the game.

At present, the B pins are pretty shoddy. They take a good number of cards to setup, have trouble being both reliable & point gaining, and often need draw that makes it very hard to lock in the pin. However, as expansions keep coming out, we keeping seeing more cards that can help set this up (apprentice, watchtower, spice merchant, etc.) and more alternate VP that can get green card densities high enough make this work (Great Hall, Nobles, Harems, Farmland, Fairgrounds, and Silk Roads). So this is definitely something to keep in mind for the future.

[MasterAir]

You can't realistically pin with Bureaucrats - if you successfully hit with 5 bureaucrats, your next hand is 5 silvers.  An engine that wants to play 5 (non-drawing) terminals per turn doesn't want all that silver.  I guess if you try really hard you could trash the silver with a Watchtower, or put it in your discard pile with Trader, but bureaucrats can't be used to pin your opponents.

[Deadlock39]

Here is a random Bureaucrat pin idea... King's Court, King's Court, Scheme, Scheme, Bureaucrat.  (Throw in another KC, Scheme and Bureaucrat for a full 5 card pin.)  The real combo here is KC/Scheme, but it gets around the Silver gaining issue.

[RisingJaguar]

Here is a random Bureaucrat pin idea... King's Court, King's Court, Scheme, Scheme, Bureaucrat.  (Throw in another KC, Scheme and Bureaucrat for a full 5 card pin.)  The real combo here is KC/Scheme, but it gets around the Silver gaining issue.

This realistically should work once the pin begins, not easy to get to the pinning stage though.  I presume you can end the game on duchy/estate/silver.  The full version should be able to even get provinces/colonies easily too, although I may have my math wrong.

Fun idea!

[ecq]

Here is a random Bureaucrat pin idea... King's Court, King's Court, Scheme, Scheme, Bureaucrat.  (Throw in another KC, Scheme and Bureaucrat for a full 5 card pin.)  The real combo here is KC/Scheme, but it gets around the Silver gaining issue.

This realistically should work once the pin begins, not easy to get to the pinning stage though.  I presume you can end the game on duchy/estate/silver.  The full version should be able to even get provinces/colonies easily too, although I may have my math wrong.

Fun idea!

It's not as hard to set up as you might imagine.  Use Scheme to return itself to the deck until it finds your KC.  Then KC / Scheme to cycle around your deck and pick up the other cards.  It shouldn't take more than about one pass through the deck to line all the cards up.  Though do avoid KC / Bureaucrat until you have the cards ready or you'll never get to them.  KC / KC / Bureaucrat / Scheme / Scheme (in that order) is almost guaranteed to buy a Province every turn.  You end up with a 6 card hand, 3 of which are Silver until the Silver pile runs out.  Once the Silver pile runs out, you just get the 6 card hand but your deck is probably 90% Silver at that point.

[RisingJaguar]

Here is a random Bureaucrat pin idea... King's Court, King's Court, Scheme, Scheme, Bureaucrat.  (Throw in another KC, Scheme and Bureaucrat for a full 5 card pin.)  The real combo here is KC/Scheme, but it gets around the Silver gaining issue.

This realistically should work once the pin begins, not easy to get to the pinning stage though.  I presume you can end the game on duchy/estate/silver.  The full version should be able to even get provinces/colonies easily too, although I may have my math wrong.

Fun idea!

It's not as hard to set up as you might imagine.  Use Scheme to return itself to the deck until it finds your KC.  Then KC / Scheme to cycle around your deck and pick up the other cards.  It shouldn't take more than about one pass through the deck to line all the cards up.  Though do avoid KC / Bureaucrat until you have the cards ready or you'll never get to them.  KC / KC / Bureaucrat / Scheme / Scheme (in that order) is almost guaranteed to buy a Province every turn.  You end up with a 6 card hand, 3 of which are Silver until the Silver pile runs out.  Once the Silver pile runs out, you just get the 6 card hand but your deck is probably 90% Silver at that point.

Sorry I should clarify, it will take a little time to actually begin the pinning (not get the cards in place to pin).  I imagine you don't get instant pin, although the effect would still be felt.  I imagine warehouse blows this right up though. 

[WanderingWinder]

You can't realistically pin with Bureaucrats - if you successfully hit with 5 bureaucrats, your next hand is 5 silvers.  An engine that wants to play 5 (non-drawing) terminals per turn doesn't want all that silver.  I guess if you try really hard you could trash the silver with a Watchtower, or put it in your discard pile with Trader, but bureaucrats can't be used to pin your opponents.

Nonsense, you just need to have run the silver pile out. Say, use apprentices to make your engine work. Okay, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's possible. And the kind of pin that I'd actually not mind getting hit with, because it's so impossible to set up.

[WanderingWinder]

You can do it pretty quick, but you have to be a little careful and, moreover, I have to think there's usually going to be something better....
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/01/game-20120301-090455-bf66f9ae.html
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/01/game-20120301-090950-0bc7ab51.html

[jomini]

You can't realistically pin with Bureaucrats - if you successfully hit with 5 bureaucrats, your next hand is 5 silvers.  An engine that wants to play 5 (non-drawing) terminals per turn doesn't want all that silver.  I guess if you try really hard you could trash the silver with a Watchtower, or put it in your discard pile with Trader, but bureaucrats can't be used to pin your opponents.

Sure it can be done,  you normally have better odds winning doing something else. For instance KC/KC/B/B/Watchtower will eventually pin an opponent who lacks good odds of hitting big draw before getting a 5 green hand. Of course if you have that setup if would have to be a really crappy board to make KC/B your combo of choice not to mention needing islands on a helpful opponent with a bishop playing like a moron.

There are other ways to deal with silver accumulation, for instance suppose I have a had of TR/TR/B/apprentice/Silver, I can play TR -> TR -> B (drop 2 silvers on top of deck) -> apprentice (trash my silver & draw 3 cards - including the two silvers and trash one of them to draw another 4 cards). This then leaves me with a silver, 2 actions and 4 new cards like say TR/TR/App/B. which allows me to do the whole cycle again. Now, obviously, this takes forever to setup and needs some help like lab, menage, cartographer, scheme, etc. to make the engine hit reliably, but as proof of concept it works.


Other options exist like using schemes or golems to ignore the silver.

And this is more the point, the range of possibilities keeps increasing with each new release. Take an early card: bridge. When bridge first came out the cutest trick you could reliably hit was village/bridge/IW and grab a duchy and then later dukes. Sure in theory you could find a way to TR 5 or 6 bridges and have the megaturn that ends the game ... but that was horridly unreliable and required heavy trashing. Then along comes seaside with an innocent little card called native village. Now rather than having to string together a bunch of villages, thrones, etc. in hopes of eventually hitting a 8 (or whatever) card combo you'd need with just base & intrigue ... you'd just send the bridges off to the mat and then pull it all back when you hit the megaturn. Also, you could set up mass bridge/tactician. Alchemy gave us golems so we could hit bridge/IW with our eyes closed and pile out duchies & dukes nice and easy (or chain 4 golems & start IW'ing provinces). Prosperity gave us KC for the KC/KC/Bridge/Bridge/Bridge hand. And now Hinterlands let's use schemes so we can throw something like KC/scheme back on top deck greatly easing the combo.

I suspect the same thing may be true for B pins. There was no real way to get the components set up in the base game, but we now have things like KC so you need fewer component cards, watchtower to perpetually trash silvers on arrival, apprentice to neatly trash silvers & draw, scheme to top deck continiously, etc. We aren't there yet, where I'd say that this pin could be a generally viable option, but we appear to be getting there.

This will never be as strong as a masq pin - too many cards disrupt it hard (e.g. farming village); but it may eventually be a viable option from early on (e.g. you see your opponent going gardens or dukes or silk roads) or as a recovery option when you are falling behind. It is something unique about B and Cutpurse that bears watching.

[DStu]

You can do it pretty quick, but you have to be a little careful and, moreover, I have to think there's usually going to be something better....
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/01/game-20120301-090455-bf66f9ae.html
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201203/01/game-20120301-090950-0bc7ab51.html

so probably just something to look out for.

I think it's not much danger to fall into this trap, especially when it includes KC. Either you are playing some BigMoney against a KC-engine. Then you anyway have to look out for not getting megaturned. Or you're playing KC yourself, than you really shouldn't get problems with this.

Of course there might be the unlucky turn where you start with 5 greens, and then that's it. But I don't see that the pile-up will work against you playing some KC-engine, even against someone playing BM-drawer it is quite unlikely. The green cards only pile up on your deck if you have no possibility to draw into them. If you just keep a Smithy in hand, you can just draw into 3 greens and discard them this turn, and all the work piling them up is gone. So buying drawers is a good defence against it.  Of course, if there is a pile of 3 greens on your deck, you're significantly slowed down, and it takes some time to find this Smithy, but actually getting a real pin against 3 Smithies in the deck needs lots of bad luck.
Now when you play KC, you most likely have lots of drawers anyway, and you are not really likely to swim in greens. Especially as with Scheme on the board, you should pick them up no matter what you plan to do with your KC. so there shouldn't be much green in your hand, and if it is it should be not much work to draw over it.

[ehunt]

The pin seems cool, but in practice, the opponent just needs two king's courts, a scheme, and any other action card to break it (which is not much given that

a. the pin also needs these cards

and

b. kc/scheme is such a powerhouse that even an opponent who doesn't know about the pin is very likely to stumble into the break.

)

[ftl]

In theory, you can make the pin unbreakable by playing rabbles to make the top of the deck green cards, and then playing a minion to make them draw those cards. Of course, then you need mandarins to control your own hand after you minion yourself to be able to play bureaucrats after the minion, making this a combo requiring six or seven different cards, of which four need to be KCed multiple times. And since the pin does not destroy their deck, you have to do it before they get half the vp, not just before they end the game. Not too practical.

Heres a way! Play enough kced council rooms or governors to make them draw their whole deck. Then play the bureaucrats. Then play a minion.

The first pin ever that requires your opponent to draw their whole deck on your turn.

[RisingJaguar]

In theory, you can make the pin unbreakable by playing rabbles to make the top of the deck green cards, and then playing a minion to make them draw those cards. Of course, then you need mandarins to control your own hand after you minion yourself to be able to play bureaucrats after the minion, making this a combo requiring six or seven different cards, of which four need to be KCed multiple times. And since the pin does not destroy their deck, you have to do it before they get half the vp, not just before they end the game. Not too practical.

Heres a way! Play enough kced council rooms or governors to make them draw their whole deck. Then play the bureaucrats. Then play a minion.

The first pin ever that requires your opponent to draw their whole deck on your turn.

Some guy is building this sexy engine with KC/Scheme/govenor/minions/council room.  Then you walk in with this silly pin.  That would make my day!