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Author Topic: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth  (Read 1684 times)

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Iras

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A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« on: March 22, 2022, 06:27:38 pm »
+3

Hi guys,

I would like to share with you an interesting combo/strategy that I came up with a while ago, and I haven't seen it being discussed anywhere. I tested it with a friend of mine and it works surprisingly well.

As you might expect the idea is to rush down Provinces by trashing them with Salt.

After some experimentation the best way to do the rush seems to be as follows.

1) In the first 2 shuffles you only buy Stockpiles. In most cases you can buy 5 Stockpiles this way.

2) Then by default you just buy Salts except right before your 3rd shuffle (or maybe even the 4th one) when you buy another Stockpile. If your opponent buys a Province you buy a Province whenever you would buy 2 Salts.

Playing this against the bot almost always wins, and finishes the game in 9 or 10 turns. I'm only writing this for reference, obviously playing against humans is quite different. So what can go wrong?

a) Maybe your opponent builds fast enough (either regular Big Money or some superfast engine), and they can buy a couple of Provinces before you finish.

Well, you can't really defend against a rush by speeding it up. As I mentioned above whenever they buy a Province you can also buy one and at the end they are only winning 1 extra VP (by you not getting the Salt point).

b) What if your opponent also buys a couple of Duchies?

Too slow/not enough points.

c) Here comes the real question: what happens if they also get some Stockpiles?

This is where this is getting a bit tricky. You combo is quite sensitive. If you can only buy 5 Stockpiles it is not quite fast enough, I think, so interestingly the mirror would never play out: most probably both player would pick up the first 10 Stockpiles quickly and then build normally. Still even without trying to mirror the strategy you might want to pick up a couple of Stockpiles. The question is how many is needed to defend? Based on some testing picking up 3 in the first the 2 shuffles doesn't seems to be affecting this strategy that much, so you kind of need to pick up at least 4, and then we are back in the self-inhibitting mirror setting again.

Some further comments: junking slows down the combo a bit, but I don't think it is ever fast enough. On the other hand, any discard attack probably kills the combo since hitting price points early is crucial for the strategy to work. Another thing which probably kills the combo is a 5/2 opening. I don't think opening with one Stockpile is good enough, so I guess in this case you just try to defend (or you just lose :)).

My questions are:
1) Are you familiar with any similar strategy?
2) Is there any way to kill this combo which works on most kingdoms?
3) In general what is the optimal strategy to play this?
Obviously this highly depends on the concrete kingdom (and also shuffles).

I appreciate any feedback.
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Jack Rudd

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #1 on: March 22, 2022, 07:16:05 pm »
+1

Part of the issue this strategy has is that it's very low-scoring; you might not be able to make it work against a deck working on alt-VP.

It also might be vulnerable to trashing attacks. (Stockpile, being both a Treasure and a card costing $3-$6, is a prime target for most of those.)
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Iras

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2022, 07:43:10 pm »
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There is no alt-VP which scores more than Duchy within 10 turns, so I don't see how it matters. Maybe if there is Colony on the board that might be a problem, though.

As for trashing attacks there is not too many of them and they are usually slow. An exception could be Swindler, but it is quite unreliable and it might actually help by speeding up the shuffles.
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vidicate

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2022, 07:55:07 pm »
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I wonder how a Shepherd deck with sufficient payload would do against this, since they’re adding Pasture points early and often.
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Gherald

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2022, 08:27:33 pm »
+3

I don't think I've ever played a game where Stockpile is uncontested, you always want to contest Stockpile otherwise your opponent is getting too much mileage out of theirs.
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Iras

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #5 on: April 02, 2022, 05:56:30 pm »
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I don't think I've ever played a game where Stockpile is uncontested, you always want to contest Stockpile otherwise your opponent is getting too much mileage out of theirs.

True, but usually you don't want to buy 4 Stockpiles in your first 4 turns. Or even 3. And then this rush strategy seems to be working (based on my tests).

Again, this doesn't mean that the strategy works automatically, but you might want to buy more Stockpiles than you normally would.
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Gherald

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #6 on: April 02, 2022, 10:03:32 pm »
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Ah I see, you need 4 early ones to defend (preventing a discard from exile at turn 7 before the 3rd shuffle) and at that point it's practically a mirror.

I might have an improvement if your opponent is mirroring the 4+ stockpile rush to defend but not necessarily going to be full mirroring the salt buys: buy 1 less stockpile than you normally would (get a silver or equivalent) on either turn 3 or 4.  The point of this tweak is that even if they got 4-5 stockpiles themselves there's now still at least one left for you to discard from exile on or before turn 7 before the last shuffle of the game.
« Last Edit: April 03, 2022, 12:25:32 am by Gherald »
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Iras

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #7 on: April 03, 2022, 10:33:36 am »
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I also thought about something like this, and it might be better. Alternatively you could try to start salting a turn earlier. The problem with the latter is that you kind of want to have 15 cards in your deck after the second shuffle so that third one is triggered later (and you have one more turn for buying the 5th/6th Stockpile). (Of course this argument doesn't apply if anything is affecting your shuffles).
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Honkeyfresh

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #8 on: April 08, 2022, 02:30:37 am »
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Part of the issue this strategy has is that it's very low-scoring; you might not be able to make it work against a deck working on alt-VP.

It also might be vulnerable to trashing attacks. (Stockpile, being both a Treasure and a card costing $3-$6, is a prime target for most of those.)

I would think that handsize attacks would kill this viz a viz any decent engine.
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Gherald

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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #9 on: April 08, 2022, 02:52:38 am »
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Yeah that got noted, "any discard attack probably kills the combo"
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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #10 on: April 08, 2022, 10:26:21 pm »
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That is irrelevant.  My point was that I would think that.  That we agree is literally of little consequence



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« Last Edit: April 08, 2022, 10:27:40 pm by Honkeyfresh »
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Re: A weird combo: Stockpile+Salt the Earth
« Reply #11 on: April 09, 2022, 04:58:52 pm »
+1

That is irrelevant.  My point was that I would think that.  That we agree is literally of little consequence

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