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Author Topic: Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well  (Read 3471 times)

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Dagenais

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Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well
« on: April 12, 2012, 09:01:07 pm »
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Here are my thoughts on Cartographer / Wishing Well. Any feedback would be welcome. I'm not really the best of players, I just played a good (3-player) game with it.

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When Intrigue came out, there was Scout / Wishing Well, but this turns out to be not so powerful. Sure, the Wishing Well turns into a Lab after playing a Scout, but Scout itself is weak outside of certain special cases. Its cycling ability is limited to green cards; if your deck contains few green cards, Scout usually replaces itself at best.

Enter Cartographer. It has two major advantages over Scout. One, it draws a card, so your handsize never decreases. Two, it allows you to discard any of your top 4 cards, not just the green cards. If you end up discarding green cards to Cartographer, then it gave you exactly what Scout gives, plus an additional card.

But what makes Cartographer even better when paired with WW is the ability to chain the combo in a way that Scout can't: you can use this combo to draw more of itself. The sifting ability of Cartographer paired up with the +2 Cards from WW all but ensures a decent hand every turn. It also becomes easier to play that powerful terminal action (Goons, Ghost Ship, Trading Post, etc.) lying somewhere in your deck. Both Cartographer and Lab are worthy $5 cards, but since WW costs $3 it is faster to set up this combo than to buy both Cartographers and Labs. The low cost of WW allows it to be easily bought with +Buy, gained with Workshop or Ironworks, or remodeled from Estates.

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That's all I have so far, any thoughts? I played a few solo games and it really depends on the board. With strong trashers like Chapel, there are usually better strategies. With Trading Post, I get 4 Provinces in 15-16 turns. It might work "better" with attacks, or it might just an illusion since Cartographer can weaken enemy attacks.
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jotheonah

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Re: Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well
« Reply #1 on: April 12, 2012, 11:32:49 pm »
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Quote
If you end up discarding green cards to Cartographer, then it gave you exactly what Scout gives, plus an additional card.

...unless you have a crossroads or hybrid VP cards, which are among the only times I'd have a Scout anyway.
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jonts26

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Re: Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well
« Reply #2 on: April 12, 2012, 11:51:03 pm »
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Cartographer/wishing well certainly have a great synergy here. But the big problem is that neither provide you any real economy, and the pieces are kind of expensive. This combo could work but I think it has to be more of a supplement to something else where you want lots of cantrips (maybe like conspirator and some source of +buy).
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mnavratil

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Re: Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well
« Reply #3 on: April 13, 2012, 04:59:00 pm »
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Cartographer/wishing well certainly have a great synergy here. But the big problem is that neither provide you any real economy, and the pieces are kind of expensive. This combo could work but I think it has to be more of a supplement to something else where you want lots of cantrips (maybe like conspirator and some source of +buy).

I think this is the biggest problem. These two work off of each other, but the cost of setting it up is going to have to pay off in some way, since you still don't have an economy after all is said and done. This is why the Apothecary/Wishing Well combo works so much better than the other look-ahead /Wishing Well combos, it also brings money into hand.
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jomini

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Re: Combo: Cartographer / Wishing Well
« Reply #4 on: April 14, 2012, 11:07:18 am »
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I'm not really sure how you expect WW to help here. Yes, you get to draw one more card than if you had a cantrip, however, what if you had a silver instead? Well without some card for payout to hunt for, cartographer/ww can ultimately result in 3 coin. Of course, if you  had bought a silver instead, you'd still have 3 coin AND have cycled exactly the same amount. So for any sort of big money deck, I'm expecting cartographer/money to work better than cartographer/WW.

What about searching through the deck for some strong payout cards? Well once you have a cantrip to go with the cartographer (even another cartographer), you still get to play the terminal and your WW has drawn one additional card (which will most likely be a copper) - to whit back to where we started. You run into a real problem with opportunity costs here, silver gives you the same payout much of the time when you have a cartographer in hand and a much higher one when  you don't.

This can payout, but only if you have a lot of cards you need to draw (e.g. cartographer/horn of plenty mega-turn decks), but I suspect they other stuff is more of the combo. I actually still prefer scout/WW to cartographer as scout is something I can get with most all card gainers while cartographer is not. As scout only costs 4, I don't have to sacrifice powerful 5 coin buys (like horns of plenty) to get engine components.
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