Dominion Strategy Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Pages: [1]

Author Topic: Counter Vault-Ambassador  (Read 5226 times)

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Jfrisch

  • Conspirator
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 200
  • Respect: +166
    • View Profile
Counter Vault-Ambassador
« on: April 18, 2012, 12:23:22 pm »
+7

Ambassador has two uses. It effectively trashes your deck while simultaneously junking your opponents decks. The power of the card is in getting both of these uses to activate simultaneously. The trashing offered by ambassador is too slow to be effective, and the attack, in general is much weaker than cursers or hard discarders (torturer/militia/ghost ship), being bloated with extra copper's and estates is nowhere near as bad as being stuffed with curses. Thus in order to fight ambassador it suffices to counter one of the aspects. Vault does this very effectively by turning a deck filled with junk into one filled with provinces and duchies. A single gold (or 2 silvers) is all that is necessary for vault to get a province. This means that estates (and, if your opponent uses the ambassador/curse combo, late curses) instead of destroying your buying power, are merely a minor inconvenience. Vault's downside of allowing your opponent to cycle through there own junk with a 2 for 1 discard becomes much more insignifigant when your opponent has gotten rid of the mediocre cards in there deck of there own accord.

This combo, is, however, not sufficient reason in and of itself to ignore ambassador. If a strong counter to Vault (i.e., a discard attack) is present ambassador can lead to that's counter being played (almost) every turn, turning your vault deck dead. Similarly if a sufficiently strong engine is  present (+buy is a necessity) ambassador's pseudo-trashing effecting may be worthwhile despite the weakened strength of the attack. However if neither a strong engine nor discard attacks are available Vault is sufficient reason to ignore ambassador.

When playing this combo, green significantly earlier than you otherwise would. With your deck filled with junk from your opponents ambassador, as well as Vault to mitigate the damage of the junk, greening hard becomes far less detrimental.

Sample game: in this game against WanderingWinder, we both ignore sea-hag (do to the presence of ambassador) and I ignore ambassador because of the presence of Vault, despite using ambassador/curse to get me 9 curses, my early VP lead proves insurmountable.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/18/game-20120418-072033-c9d06f03.html
Logged

GendoIkari

  • Adventurer
  • ******
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 9701
  • Respect: +10741
    • View Profile
Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador
« Reply #1 on: April 18, 2012, 02:10:45 pm »
0

That's crazy! I never would have guessed that such a thing could work. Against double-Ambassador, no less.
Logged
Check out my F.DS extension for Chrome! Card links; Dominion icons, and maybe more! http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=13363.0

Thread for Firefox version:
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=16305.0

Axxle

  • Torturer
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1664
  • Most Valuable Serial Killer
  • Respect: +1965
    • View Profile
Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador
« Reply #2 on: April 18, 2012, 02:26:58 pm »
0

That's crazy! I never would have guessed that such a thing could work. Against double-Ambassador, no less.
If I remember correctly, double Ambassador is only very strong when doing Ambassador tennis.  If your opponent isn't filling your deck with anything, Ambassador/X works better.  Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though.
Logged
We might be from all over the world, but "we all talk this one language  : +1 card + 1 action +1 buy , gain , discard, trash... " - RTT

Jfrisch

  • Conspirator
  • ****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 200
  • Respect: +166
    • View Profile
Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador
« Reply #3 on: April 18, 2012, 02:32:23 pm »
0

In a 4/3 opening it's unclear whether you will buy an ambassador on your second hand after the first round.
Logged

Axxle

  • Torturer
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1664
  • Most Valuable Serial Killer
  • Respect: +1965
    • View Profile
Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador
« Reply #4 on: April 18, 2012, 04:58:15 pm »
0

In a 4/3 opening it's unclear whether you will buy an ambassador on your second hand after the first round.
True, I wasn't criticizing what WW did, but rather commenting that it isn't necessarily more surprising that it works against Double Ambassador more than Single Ambassador.
Logged
We might be from all over the world, but "we all talk this one language  : +1 card + 1 action +1 buy , gain , discard, trash... " - RTT

qmech

  • Torturer
  • *****
  • Offline Offline
  • Posts: 1918
  • Shuffle iT Username: qmech
  • What year is it?
  • Respect: +2320
    • View Profile
Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador
« Reply #5 on: April 20, 2012, 04:24:56 am »
0

In a 4/3 opening it's unclear whether you will buy an ambassador on your second hand after the first round.

Although you can buy Silver/X over X/Silver with a 4/3 start for any 3-cost X, it is particularly strong when you don't like Ambassador but suspect that your opponent will be tempted.
Logged
Pages: [1]
 

Page created in 0.081 seconds with 21 queries.