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Deck Control

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shark_bait:
Deck Control
One very important aspect of dominion is deck control.  This involves knowing what cards you have in your deck, how many of them are left in your deck and where they located in your deck.  I know exactly what some people are going to be saying right now, so I’ll adress it immediately.  The deck is shuffled, how do I know where they are.  I’ll answer by stating the contrapositive.  You know where cards are located in your deck by knowing where they aren’t  (i.e. your discard pile).  So following this logic, as you get closer and closer to the reshuffle, you gain more and more control over your deck.  That is, assuming you have been keeping track of your deck.  This leads to my first big bullet point regarding deck control.

Know What Cards are Left in Your Deck

It is important that you always know what cards are in your deck at all times.  One thing that helps me keep track of my deck is by playing meticulously.  When  I play my cards, I make sure that I recognize which cards have been added to the discard pile and which are left in my deck.  If you can’t keep track of them all, then start by taking baby steps.  Have you seen your 5-cost action yet?  Out of your 3 golds, how many have you played?  Keeping track of your big-ticket cards is the first step to controlling your deck. 

Knowing your draw deck composition is important when playing cards that draw other cards.  If there are 5 cards left in your draw pile and you haven’t seen your montebank yet, please don’t play your smithy.  There are two things that are fundamentally wrong by playing that smithy.  First, you could draw your montebank this turn and be unable to play it due having no actions remaining.  The second fundamental flaw leads me to my second big (and very much related) bullet point.

Know When You Reshuffle

The reshuffle is a fundamental (albeit rather annoying when playing with the physical cards) aspect of dominion.  This aspect is displayed most prominantly through the chanceller by giving the option for triggering a reshuffle immediately.  This card provides one of the easiest ways to control your deck and it is important to use it correctly.  To use it correctly you must…. Know What Cards are Left in Your Deck (I told you these two points were related).  This allows you to have the best possible deck control.

There is one other way to trigger a reshuffle and this is what I will focus on.  You trigger a reshuffle by emptying your draw pile.  Manipulating when you reshuffle can be a game changing event if used correctly.  Consider the following two hypothetical hands in which 2 cards are left in the draw pile.

Hand 1 – Smithy, 3X Estate, Copper
Hand 2 – Smithy, 2X Gold, 2X Silver

I know this is a little exagerated, but it’s to prove a point.  In hand 1, you most certainly don’t want those estates and coppers back in your draw deck so you play the smithy to trigger the reshuffle before those cards are returned to the discard pile.  In hand 2, you want those cards back in your deck, so you don’t play the smithy. 

Let’s look back at the smithy/montebank example.  Let’s assume that you don’t draw your montebank with the smithy.  At the end of your clean up phase, you will draw the montebank, your montebank will miss the reshuffle because you need to reshuffle in order to draw the final 3 cards of your hand.

In either situation described above, you will play your montebank only once as opposed to twice if you chose not to play smithy.  With a card as powerful as montebank, playing it one more time could determine the outcome of the game.  In this case, you must think “one turn” ahead of the reshuffle in order to manipulate it to your advantage.  But to think “one turn” ahead, you must Know What Cards are Left in Your Deck in order to take advantage of this.

Sample Game

Consider the following isotropic example on a game I recently played.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110608-161945-80a3dff8.html#shark_bait-show-turn-3

On my 3rd turn, I opt not to play my warehouse because my deck would reshuffle before I could purchase my familiar.  Additionally, my potion is also in my draw deck again, which gives me another chance to purchase a familiar.

Conclusions

I hope this helped you think about dominion in a new way and I hope that the connection between knowing what cards are left in your deck and reshuffling was made clear.  Here are a few final bullet points to highlight the key points.

•Always keep track of the cards left in both draw and discard pile
•Any card that has a card drawing aspect can be used to manipulate a reshuffle.
       oThese include cards that don’t necessarily put them in your hand (Navigator, Scout, etc.)
•When possible, manipulate the reshuffle to play your “good” cards as much as possible and your “bad” cards as little as possible

rod-:
I've long been wanting an opportunity to convince people to look into the win/loss rates based on which cards miss shuffles.  If your 2nd shuffle misses 2 estates, and your opponent's misses their 4-cost opener, you're well on your way to winning.  Similarly, if your potion or montebanc misses your second shuffle, more often than not you might as well resign. 

joel88s:
This is really interesting stuff. It might be worth stating clearly what is evidently the underlying point of your whole reshuffling discussion, which is: Cards that are in your hand or in play when you trigger a reshuffle mid-turn are omitted from that reshuffle, and will be lost for the next trip through the deck. I say this because while it's self-evident to you it took me a while to realize it, and comments like rod-'s suggest that it's more important even than I yet realize! I'd love to read more about this concept and see further examples of how it plays out or can be controlled.

DStu:
I think the (not!) triggering of the reshuffling is especially important when playing Actionchains with some discard-for-value (Minion, Warehouse, Cellar, Vault, Hamlet). When your chain really works and you get through your whole remaining Drawpile, but don't have a chance to also get through your discard pile, you better don't trigger the reshuffle. You would spend the next 1-2 turns with hands of all the crap you just discarded, mostly Estates, Coppers, maybe Curses, and without all the actions you just played.

For joel88s:
I first realized in the BSW.days playing some Minion+Lab+Festival engine that got very swingy. A very good draw followed by one or two veery bad draws. Guessed that it is exactly as described. Starting with a fresh deck, you play Minion(Discard 4xCrap) + some more actions + Minion (Discard NxCrap) + ... + Lab (reshuffle and draw 2 Cards (crap). That leaves you with 1-2 hands of crap on the draw pile and everything good in the discard.
Because of the small number of Cards on the BSW this combination is quite common there and taking care of the reshuffling really helped.

I think control in this case is really easy and does not even need for counting onces cards. You just have to take care that, when a big draw engine tends to get to its end one does not trigger reshuffling of a "large" discard pile but just don't play this actions. Large discard piles are often due to Discard-for-benefit, but of course can also be some bad draws at the beginning.

theory:

--- Quote from: DStu on June 14, 2011, 12:14:11 pm ---I think the (not!) triggering of the reshuffling is especially important when playing Actionchains with some discard-for-value (Minion, Warehouse, Cellar, Vault, Hamlet). When your chain really works and you get through your whole remaining Drawpile, but don't have a chance to also get through your discard pile, you better don't trigger the reshuffle. You would spend the next 1-2 turns with hands of all the crap you just discarded, mostly Estates, Coppers, maybe Curses, and without all the actions you just played.

--- End quote ---
My favorite Possession trick ever!

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