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Dominion ULTIMATE experiment: which are the best cards in Dominion?

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boardgametheories.com:
To find out what cards are the strongest in Dominion, we came up with an experiment: Dominion Ultimate.

Normally Dominion is played with ten kingdom cards, but in Dominion Ultimate we play with all cards of an expansion. This way, all cards have to compete with one another, and the strongest cards and combos in Dominion Ultimate are simply the strongest cards in the set.

We have played Dominion Ultimate a few times now using the Prosperity expansion. The number of possibilities in Dominion is quite overwhelming so we can’t claim with certainty that we found the strongest strategy already. But, the combination of cards that has been dominating in our games so far is King’s court + Mountebank.

King’s court + Mountebank is extremely powerful because your opponent receives three Curses and three Coppers in one turn. Six bad cards ruin a deck so badly, that even getting hit with King’s court Mountebank only once is very hard o come back from. Moreover, hitting your opponent with this combination slows him down so much, that you will have all the time in the world to keep hitting him with it until his deck is mostly Coppers and Curses.

We should note that even if we already found the strongest card combination in King’s court + Mountebank, we aren’t done playing Dominion Ultimate yet, because we are still looking for the quickest way to obtain and play this combination. So far, we use Quarry because it discounts both King’s court and Mountebank. This helps to obtain King’s Court and Mountebank quickly. We simultaneously use Forge and Mint to thin our deck so than we have a higher likelihood to draw King’s court and Mountebank in the same hand once we have obtained them. But we are sure that there is room for improvement in this setup.

The results of the Dominion Ultimate experiment are thus that King’s court with Mountebank is the strongest card combination in Dominion Prosperity. We will soon run this experiment for the other expansions as well.

We encourage everyone to try out Dominion Ultimate! It is a slightly overwhelming, but very interesting game mode and it offers endless room for improvement. We would love to hear what your results are!

Originally posted at http://boardgametheories.com/dominion-ultimate-what-are-the-strongest-cards-in-dominion-prosperity/

Donald X.:
It sounds like a fun premise for some games. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily telling you the strongest cards or combos; the different environments the expansions provide matter for how strong the cards are, the strongest cards might be bunched together in a few expansions, and of course the strongest combos may involve multiple expansions.

It's pretty nice to King's Court a Mountebank, but I suspect strongly that you can do better here. I would look for the fastest path to a crazy Goons deck. There are nice toys for it. You can use Watchtower for some of your draw if you are scared of Mountebanks.

boardgametheories.com:
Goons and Watchtower would be interesting as a counter indeed, I will try that. I tried a Goons deck a few times before but because Mountebank happens sooner than Goons I didn't find it too promising.

And yes, we still need to try 'ultimate dominion ultimate'; i.e. with all expansions. Of course there is some consideration as to whether you put in Platinum and Colonies or not, but I think this will give a proxy of what the strongest cards in Dominion are.

Dingan:

--- Quote from: boardgametheories.com on January 31, 2019, 10:44:17 am ---And yes, we still need to try 'ultimate dominion ultimate'; i.e. with all expansions. Of course there is some consideration as to whether you put in Platinum and Colonies or not,

--- End quote ---

Are you sure about that? I can certainly imagine a "best possible deck" as not involving any Platina or Colonies (or Golds or Provinces).

faust:

--- Quote from: boardgametheories.com on January 31, 2019, 10:44:17 am ---And yes, we still need to try 'ultimate dominion ultimate'; i.e. with all expansions. Of course there is some consideration as to whether you put in Platinum and Colonies or not, but I think this will give a proxy of what the strongest cards in Dominion are.

--- End quote ---
Ultimate Dominion Ultimate will be over after the first turn.

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