Print

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

[HiveMindEmulator]

Yeah, I guess I was wrong to say it's not really competitive with Spice Merchant. It actually is, and if you're going pure FG+X HT is a better X than Spice Merchant. Funny thing I found just messing with it now is that HT+FG+Smithy, Spice+FG+Smithy, and Smithy+FG form a nice little RPS situation. Totally unoptimized though...

[jomini]

Fg is a card that is nearly useless in a 2 card hand.

2 FG = Duchy. Few other cards can even get that much in a 2-card hand. Gold, and... that's all I can think of off-hand, unless you're drawing some more cards (esp. with Library and such, but of course Library can be mixed into a FG deck). Surely this makes FG one of the best cards if you're playing 2-card hands!

Edit: Of course this doesn't help you a ton if your opponent is reducing you to 2-cards every turn, but if there's discard+masq and a reliable engine on the board, why on earth are you not playing it?

Fg is only close to a reliable duchy when 40% of your deck is Fg. For a straight, uncontested Fg rush that is true only up until you have 5 cards besides Fg and starting cards. Even when the percentage is higher than 40%, because you can't use the high payout of 3 or more Fg in hand, you won't even average a duchy every turn.

So yes you can buy a useful 5 when you hit two Fg and you can buy a duchy, however when you hit just 1 Fg (which will happen quite quickly when you buy duchies and are forced to give away Fg) you can buy an estate.

Smithy gives you a 4 card (no action) hand and that beats Fg most of the time when your cash average is 1.25 coin/card (i.e. the minimum I would expect every BM-smithy deck to be hitting by the time discard/masq becomes reliable). University, menage, golem, etc. all do much better than Fg in 3 card hands. In some circumstances, things like Bishop and Monument even come out ahead (e.g. 3 player games where both of the other two players are playing discard attacks). I'd say just about anything that will, long term, bring in 2 VP per turn on average should beat Fg here.

There are several reasons not to play discard/masq yourself. The easiest one is if you are playing 3er and the opponents are not symmetrical. E.g. if the guy passing to you is going for gardens, you are going to wait forever to see any useful VP; likewise if the player to whom you pass is going Xroads & heavy VP, you really don't want to make him discard & pass to the other guy. Likewise, if you look to get the bum end of curse passing when one player (and not the other) has gone jester. It is quite possible & likely in 3er or higher that the player helped most by discard & masq won't be you.

Another reason to skip out on masq & discard is possession. This is a tricky one as discard & masq can often get to possession first, but the risk of 20 VP swings can make having masq in your deck too dangerous if he can just beeline possession before you can get there (e.g. golem/remodel).

There are a number of things where discard attacks are just too helpful - library, tunnel, watchtower, beggar/feodum, and even some countinghouse setups - and your return is just too low.

And of course there is the thing with faster attacks - like curse/ruins/copper givers that make it hard to build up to strong engines and get payout before the game end.

Yeah masq/discard is wickedly strong, but there are number of niche strats that can beat it and beat it handily (e.g. Possession, P-stone, Tunnel, Minion).

[blueblimp]

Re: Duchies diluting your deck, then don't buy Duchies yet if you don't want to dilute. The point is that you get $5 from two FG, which is hard to get from anything else except drawing cards, and drawing cards can be added to a FG deck.

I don't see how Smithy can be compared to FG, given that Smithy can be added to a FG deck. Same goes for Menagerie. OK, I wouldn't be surprised if Monument would do better here, but Monument+BM is crazy strong anyway. If you're buying University or Golem, then you're presumably playing an engine of some sort, meaning you're likely playing discard+masq yourself. Bishop does sound reasonable given that it's a good counter to trashers (including Masquerade).

3-player is irrelevant because it's a totally different game from 2-player, and most articles here are aimed at 2-player because that's the most common on isotropic.

Possession forces a re-evaluation of every strategy. Besides, unless picking out kingdoms by hand, it's staggeringly unlikely to ever see Possession, Masquerade, Fool's Gold, and a discard attack all in the same game.

OK, a counter-to-discard like Library/Watchtower is yeah a good reason to skip discard+masq. But either can be added to a FG deck without difficulty (especially Library). So I'm not seeing the relevance to the original point.

Edit: Like, in general I feel that if you're talking about kingdoms where there are two or more extremely strong strategies, it's just not something you will see in random kingdoms except very rarely. Sure weird stuff will happen in these cases, but it's not something you'll see on iso much.

[jomini]

Re: Duchies diluting your deck, then don't buy Duchies yet if you don't want to dilute. The point is that you get $5 from two FG, which is hard to get from anything else except drawing cards, and drawing cards can be added to a FG deck.

I don't see how Smithy can be compared to FG, given that Smithy can be added to a FG deck. Same goes for Menagerie. OK, I wouldn't be surprised if Monument would do better here, but Monument+BM is crazy strong anyway. If you're buying University or Golem, then you're presumably playing an engine of some sort, meaning you're likely playing discard+masq yourself. Bishop does sound reasonable given that it's a good counter to trashers (including Masquerade).

3-player is irrelevant because it's a totally different game from 2-player, and most articles here are aimed at 2-player because that's the most common on isotropic.

Possession forces a re-evaluation of every strategy. Besides, unless picking out kingdoms by hand, it's staggeringly unlikely to ever see Possession, Masquerade, Fool's Gold, and a discard attack all in the same game.

OK, a counter-to-discard like Library/Watchtower is yeah a good reason to skip discard+masq. But either can be added to a FG deck without difficulty (especially Library). So I'm not seeing the relevance to the original point.

Edit: Like, in general I feel that if you're talking about kingdoms where there are two or more extremely strong strategies, it's just not something you will see in random kingdoms except very rarely. Sure weird stuff will happen in these cases, but it's not something you'll see on iso much.

The thing with Fg is that anything you buy not only increases the size of your deck without increasing your cash total - it decreases it. Lower odds of pairing (or preferably tripling) Fg means that you stall out quicker. Engines respond better to discard masq (which almost always needs an engine to hit) and if discard/masq is out it can be stronger than Fg. Fg can win if it is fast enough, but is relatively weaker against discard/masq than a lot of things.

Smithy is comparable because there is an opportunity cost both in terms of when do you buy it and in terms of terminal collision. Let's say you take a Remodel/Fg opening. When exactly do you buy the smithy? Before the Fg are gone? After you've started going provinces? Instead of the opening remodel? At some point you forwent another card to get the smithy; typically this would mean a Fg or a gold in most games.

3er is relevant because, shockingly, there are a number of us who play it. Just because isotropic is the most popular doesn't mean we should ignore all other settings; after all there is a separate sub-forum for isotropic discussion. Likewise, non-random kingdoms are quite common - several of the threads in the general discussion section deal with non-random kingdoms and there are more ways to set up kingdoms than random dealing (e.g. I play a lot of sequential games with keep 5/discard 5/deal 5 to allow players to retry strategies and learn how boards evolve with different things in/out like trashing/+buy/+action).

And the original point was fairly simple: stealing Fg or VP bought by Fg with discard/masq is a viable strategy to beat Fg/not-too-fast-helper-card. Fg tends not to let you double province, green dilution really hurts Fg's ability to hit province, and only remodel/Fg really lets you burn out the provinces quickly (salvager might, but I've never managed to make that work with Fg); so something complicated like discard/masq can work even though Fg can get to 4 provinces (but not before things can get insurmountable. Fg is relatively more susceptible to discard/masq because losing a Fg is much worse than losing a silver.

You asked why I wouldn't go discard/masq all the time if I could set that up - and there are a number of setups that get to Rock-Paper-Scissors territory. Fg/helper beats menage/helper which beats discard/masq. Fg/helper beats possession which beats discard/masq. Fg/helper beats bishop/helper which beats discard masq. Fg/helper beats tunnel which beats discard/masq. Yeah odds of any particular one of them are low, but odds of one of several RPS potentials like this are enough to merit thought. Basically figure that Fg/helper and Discard/Masq (or rabble/masq) are on the board - call it ~3.5 card combo due to things being somewhat degenerate with helpers and discards. That leaves 6.5 cards and odds are non-trivial that possession, tunnel, or something else will also be out.

So, shockingly, in any real game I'd have to read the board and the opponent. Discard/masq is strong enough that I'd always have to consider if it can beat a decent to strong Fg opening. It also has enough counters that it isn't a brainless decision. Some of the counters can be shoehorned into a Fg strategy (e.g. Lib), some can't so well (e.g. Tunnel), and some are middling.