Print

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

[timchen]

I encountered this situation today and I found it's nontrivial to me:

suppose you have apothecary, scrying pool, hunting party and coppersmith in play and you opt for a copper strategy. (There are +buy, +2 actions and light trashing available.) What would be the correct order to play the scrying pool, the apothecary, and the hunting party, if you have them all in hand? Suppose your deck contains coppers, potion, some VPs and some other actions.

[WanderingWinder]

I need to know how many of the other cards are in your deck, and what those +buy and light trashing cards are. If your deck is action-thick, scrying pool lead is the better option. If not, probably apothecary followed by either scrying pool or HP, depending on what your apothecary sees. Almost always coppersmith last of course, as you need to make sure you can prop up the extra actions and buys before you'll even consider the second coppersmith. Apothecary almost always wants to be played before HP here, so your HP can get more apothecaries, which are really key to this strategy. In fact, I'm not sure I'd have gotten any scrying pools at all.

[ackack]

I'd agree Apothecary goes first. It seems like what goes next then depends on what the Apothecary finds. If it's action heavy, I'd order it so that Scrying Pool pulls well and play that. If it's VP heavy, and I already have some in hand, I play the Hunting Party to discard those. HP before Scrying Pool to focus on pulling Apothecaries as WW suggests seems like a good tiebreaker when it's not obvious which of these to go with.

added: even if I'm really action heavy I'd still use the Apothecary first. The only argument I could see for not doing so is if I have a big Apothecary shortage and think I'm not going to scare up enough Coppers. But that seems unlikely if I'm action heavy, since Apothecary is one of the central cards of this concept.

[timchen]

It seems I was thinking about the problem on the wrong track. Indeed the most important aspect of the strategy is to use HP to pull up apothecaries (scrying pools as well) so it goes last. Somehow I was trying to think about the opposite.

[Thisisnotasmile]

Why would you spend $2P on a Scrying Pool when Apothecaries are available and you have a deck full of Potions and Coppers? Seems a waste of a buy to me.

[DG]

Why would you spend $2P on a Scrying Pool when Apothecaries are available and you have a deck full of Potions and Coppers? Seems a waste of a buy to me.

Apothecary and scrying pool are a better pair of cards in hand than two apothecaries, especially since most decks will mature and fill with something other than copper.

[Thisisnotasmile]

Well normally, yeah, but we've been told that there is Coppersmith and we are opting for a Copper strategy.

[Davio]

Why are you playing Hunting Party with a Copper strategy?
Playing HP with a Copper in your hand just skips them.

I generally play draw manipulators before blind drawing cards.

Cards I generally play first:
Spy, Pearl Diver, Scout, etc.

Not that Scrying Pool is an entirely blind card, but if you play Apothecary first, you can manipulate the remaining Action Cards for SP.

If you do it the other way around and reveal a Copper with your SP, you are conflicting with your Apo.

[chwhite]

Why would you spend $2P on a Scrying Pool when Apothecaries are available and you have a deck full of Potions and Coppers? Seems a waste of a buy to me.

This.  If you're going Apothecary/Coppersmith (and it's surprisingly effective on many boards), you should *always* be buying Apothecaries when you have potion and you don't have Province power.  Just because Scrying Pool is usually the better card doesn't mean it fits all strategies.

Hunting Party, OTOH, does kinda make sense as a way to fish for your one Coppersmith.

[WanderingWinder]

Hunting party will also get you more apothecaries, or your buy card, whatever it is. I'd probably prefer apothecary to it, but there you go.