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Let the Kingdom Guide You - A Way to Increase Your Dominion Skills
Simon Jester:
First off: I’m still merely a medium player but the results in the Dominion League recently has given me the confidence to say that I’m soon heading to actually be a “good” player quite soon. Still, I don’t expect this article to be too meaningful for the expert crowd here on f.ds, instead I’m aiming at the 40-rank people, and to write an article I myself would have benefitted from say a year ago from now.
Introduction
Dominion is a difficult game. There is so much to do, so many cards to know, the options are endless. Still, you have managed to be a proper player. You know how to build what the pros are calling “engines”. You don’t really know exactly how it works constructing them, but looking at your results you seem to manage to do it from time to time. But something is missing. Sometimes your opponent just outrace you without you knowing really why, sometimes they are doing something that seems just plain silly to you and then ending up crushing you - leaving you in the dust with a great “How in the earth did that happen?” on your face.
This is a modest attempt to guide you towards taking another step in viewing Dominion and how to play the game. As always, the best advice to advance as a player is simply “play more”, but to be able to learn as much as possible from your games it’s good to bring some guidelines into them.
Analyzing the Kingdom - Sideway cards
You know already how important it is to do a proper analyse of the kingdom before the opening. You need to spot your engine pieces, are there splitters, draws, trashing, strong attacks and everything like that but in Dominion of today there is also something else: The sideway cards; Events from Adventures and Empires, Landmarks from Empires and now Projects from Renaissance. These are important. Really important. Sure, it varies how impactful they are, nothing is certain and without edge cases in Dominion, but as a general rule it’s good to recognise the sideway cards and try to follow what they encourage, or discourage, you to do.
Landmarks
For Landmarks, it’s pretty straightforward how to play in line with them. Just merely follow what they reward: Go for treasures with Palace and Keep, collect all the cards with Museum and Orchard and so on. You will get a benefit towards your non-mirroring opponents and almost more importantly, you will learn to play in ways that you are not as used to. If you can’t see the point with treasures, Keep will teach you how efficient they can be. If you on the other hand found engines too difficult to create on a higher level, Bandit Fort will force you to construct a treasure less deck. Let the Landmarks teach you, maybe you won’t win as much following this as heavily as I here suggest, but you will see different style of play emerge and stumble on insights you otherwise never would have found.
A small disclaimer though: Landmarks with added VP chips as a setup is not recommended to follow blindly in this way. Don’t buy a $3 card with your opening 5/2 for Basilisk, don’t deliberately skip playable turns for Baths and don’t open Duchy/Estate for Battlefield (I have already done this, it was with Silk Road and there was no good five and… No, there is no excuses. That was not a good idea.). Consider them however and try to build something that can grab a few points quickly, but even if you lose the split you will recover quite easily if you have built your deck correctly and the other players have wasted time grabbing chips unnecessarily.
Projects
Projects are good. Really good. Buy them, ASAP. Yes, even in the openings if you have the chance. You might think they don’t seem too impressive and admittedly some of them will be obsolete in certain kingdoms (e.g Fair in a kingdom with lots of +buy) but as a learning exercise it doesn’t matter too much. How can you utilise these virtually free resources that comes to you often every turn? How do they change your deck and your play and can you think of ways that standard kingdom cards give you the same kind of benefits? Projects gives the game an extra dimension and if you spend time exploring what they do for you, you will gain a lot of information of what kind of possibilities there truly are in the game. Focus your strategy on them when it’s possible: Are there treasure gainers available with Guild Hall? Are there actions giving coins with Capitalism? Can you find ways to gain rather than buying cards when Exploration is around? Go out of your ways to utilise them, again, it's not certain the winning strategy to do so, but it very well might be.
Events
Events is a little bit of a different beast. More than the two categories above, Events have more similarities with kingdom cards, that naturally also can act as guides in how to play the game but much more so in context with each other. There is two strong exceptions I’d like to mention a bit more though and that is Conquest, Raid and Delve. These three encourages silver flooding and when that is viable it’s really something to consider. The point with silver flooding is not very fancy, you will not spend much time building anything and when you are done your deck is a silvery mess which you can’t have much control over. The upside is though that once you have drained yourself with silvers it’s a piece of cake to buy provinces almost every turn. If your opponents aren’t competent enough to build something monstrously good, an activated silver flood will most likely sweep away them before they can do anything about it. Silver flooding, even though an easy enough concept, is tricky to perform correctly and to utilise to a strong enough effect but these events gives you a chance to practice so the next time, say, Feodum comes up in a viable scenario you know what to do and how your deck will function with that amass of silvers in your deck.
There is as said other Events that changes the gameplay a lot, but they vary so much in strength and impact that my advice have to be a general: Don’t ignore them automatically, see if they have something to offer to the kingdom and don’t be afraid to try new things even if it feels off, but this is indeed true for every card in Dominion.
Alternative VP cards
This is not the right place to give detailed instructions in how to play with every specific VP-card in the game, but you may remember this: VP-cards are good. Really good. They will not always be viable and if you misjudge the kingdom they can definitely be a trap, but the times they are good You can rest assure they will be dominating. They are made to compete and beat Provinces on a regular basis so when you roll a kingdom with victory cards, do your best to spot if you can make use for them and what you need to do to make it happen. If you are not sure or if you struggle to see the point with Duke, Gardens or Silk Road there is plenty of strategy tips for you out there. They have been around for a long time and many of the strongest combo decks in the history of the game involves alt-VP strategies. Check them out and play them to get a feel for how they function, it will give you a better eye for the situations when they will be the winning path.
Regular Kingdom cards
This is likely where you already know what there is to be said. Some Kingdom cards are so powerful they will demand all your attention and if you fail to do so you will be punished heavily. There is too many of these kind of cards to discuss them specifically, so what I will say is when you spot such a card in the kingdom try to construct all your deck around it. Don’t do too many things at the same time. Focus on winning the amb- war, the race to the Torturer-pin, the Wild Hunt frenzy at all cost. This will teach you how to optimise your deck and how to get to the key elements of your strategy as quickly as possible. With that ability you have a lot more options in your arsenal when approaching a kingdom.
Summary
There are many ways and reasons to play Dominion. If you are playing more or less casually and your current play style is sufficient to you everything is good and well, but if you like to be competitive and struggle to understand how to play this game on a constantly higher level I warmly suggest to you to start experimenting more. Let the Kingdom tell you what it wants to be done and do it even if you are not sure how. You may stumble and fall many, many times but I bet you’ll be surprised how often the seemingly unorthodox ways to play the game truly is the right move.
Good Luck, and may the shuffle luck always be in your fortune (as long as you are not playing against me..)
faust:
I think it is backwards to try to help medium players by talking extensively about sideways card-shaped things. The first thing they should master is the core game. Specifically giving advice on projects which are still super new and likely not very well understood is extremely premature. And how many of your target audience actually own all the relevant expansions? Half the article discusses stuff from 3 expansions.
Plus, it you want people to check something out (like articles on alt-VP stuff), it would be helpful to actually provide links.
Simon Jester:
--- Quote from: faust on November 21, 2018, 10:15:59 am ---I think it is backwards to try to help medium players by talking extensively about sideways card-shaped things. The first thing they should master is the core game. Specifically giving advice on projects which are still super new and likely not very well understood is extremely premature. And how many of your target audience actually own all the relevant expansions? Half the article discusses stuff from 3 expansions.
Plus, it you want people to check something out (like articles on alt-VP stuff), it would be helpful to actually provide links.
--- End quote ---
Well, what "medium" players mean is a question of definitions I suppose but when I meet 40-ranks they are surprisingly good at building standard engines and when I beat them in mirrors it's a question of efficiency rather than knowledge. Practice will help them more than anything I could say on the matter.
But, as soon as something different comes up, as the things I'm talking about in the article, they often miss it if not completely then not far off. They are also not very good at countering my alternate strategy, suggesting that they actually don't see what I'm doing at all.
Yeah, they might not own the expansions, but they will likely meet people who own them relatively often (No idea how likely that is honestly) and the newness of Projects and such is not very relevant since my main point is to dare to explore more, who knows, they might found something nobody knows about yet.
Providing links were a good suggestion, I'll see what I can do, thanks.
Beyond Awesome:
A lot of times, Landmark VPs can be traps such as Palace points or musuem points. The goal, usually, is still to build the best deck. Though, alt. VP often means you can build longer which means you should try and green later.
Simon Jester:
--- Quote from: Beyond Awesome on November 21, 2018, 02:36:31 pm ---A lot of times, Landmark VPs can be traps such as Palace points or musuem points. The goal, usually, is still to build the best deck. Though, slt. VP often means you can build longer which means you should try and green later.
--- End quote ---
Yup, but so can power cards and your usual way to approach the game. I just have got a bit fed up with players not even trying to do something different when the board practically scream at you to do it and tried to pinpoint my attitude in this.. Dominion- session.. I have been having this fall. It has worked for me, trying to make these things work so many times have made me so much more aware of when they work and when they won't be. I don't know if you can get there without trying again and again. Or at least you are a more natural player than I if you get the eye for those things without it.
But hey, I'm not complaining, doing oddball things is easy the most enjoyable aspect of the game so..
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