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Dominion 101: The Village

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WanderingWinder:
Most people know that 'being the Village Idiot" is something to avoid. You don't want to open with a village because no matter how many actions you need, there's little point in picking up a village on turn one when you don't even have two terminals to play it with. Pretty simple, right?

Well, the story goes a bit deeper. Consider how a lot of players look at smithy early on. Good card. I can draw a lot with it. But man, I draw stuff dead with it. Especially other smithies. I wish there were some way around that. Hey, village! And so they then proceed to build big smithy/village decks. Lots of villages, lots of smithies, drawing like your whole deck every turn. And then they lose! The tragedy is, for a good while, players will often then chalk these losses up to bad luck. But actually, in a kingdom where smithy, village, and 'the basics' are the only cards, you know what the optimum number of villages is? 0! (and that's not the mathematical zero factorial, which would be one, but just plain zero). Huh?

The thing is, village isn't a bad card. Like basically all other at-least-a-cantrips, in the vast majority of decks, if you gave me the choice of having a village or not, I'd have it. I almost always give the village to myself. So why then, is it better to not buy the villages here? The answer is opportunity cost. Basically every time you buy a village, you've wasted at least $3 and a buy; you could have bought, if nothing else, silver. And most decks need silver early on to ramp up to buying 5s and 6s and eventually provinces.
Let's take a closer look at the village/smithy deck. Of course one of the other biggest problems here is that you can draw the villages dead. To reliably be able to chain stuff up, you need to make sure you have a village in your original 5 card hand, so you need more villages than smithies. So to draw most all your deck, you'll need something like 5 villages and 3 smithies. Let's say you've thrown a couple silver in 'cause you realize you need them. Well shoot, now you need a couple more smithies, which means a couple more villages. So that's 7 villages, 4 smithies, 2 silvers... that took 13 turns to set up, and you can still start without the right combination sometimes. Big money baselines to 4 provinces in 17 turns. With smithies, cut that to 14. Our strategy, it seems, is just too slow then.

So the next logical progression is to ask about if you have good reasons to draw a big hand every turn with actions to spare. Good question! There are definitely some good terminals out there to help your village/smithy engine. How about Merchant ship? That's good. It speeds your deck up - maybe you can skip some of the money (it's pretty risky). But it doesn't really get you into the speed you need. Plus, why not just buy money and then ramp up to merchant ship? Do you really need to play it every turn? No. So what cards do you want to be able to play every turn? Most of them are attacks. The problem is, basically every attack does more damage to an engine like village/smithy than it does to money. Curse-givers especially fill your deck with muck and you'll only be able to get the key cards in the right order very rarely.

The same story goes for most other cards - you should just buy those cards without village support. Yes, they can have terminal collision. But you would need both those cards WITH the village to avoid that, and that's pretty unlikely. And if you correctly gauge how many of the terminal you buy, you won't get that collision too often anyway.

Okay, so village isn't the uber-card we all thought it was back when we got actions with every buy. But does it really suck so bad you should almost never get it? No, it can be good in a decent number of situations, like most other cards. What are those? First of, there are basically two cards, I think, that warrant heavy village strategies almost by themselves, if there's no other amazing thing in the kingdom: Torturer and Goons. Both of these cards share the property that they're really, really good if you can play multiple copies in a single turn, especially if you can do that reliably. Torturer chains can shut the opponent down cold. Goons stacks build up VP chips really quickly. There are two other cards that have this property, bridge and conspirator, and village works well with them too, but you really need to play a lot of bridges for htat to be super good, and with village as the only support for conspirator, it's going to be tough to hit the critical action mass to get them going very quickly and you won't be able to do all that much with it once you do. But with a little other support, village with these can be good too.
But the most common reason you want village is in the midgame. You already have a handful of silvers, and you've bought three or four good terminals and would like to buy more, but you're worried about terminal collision. Well, since village IS a cantrip plus, and since you've already got a pretty good amount of money, and these terminals are good enough that you'd really like to be able to play multiples sometimes (especially if they aren't card-draw), then village can be a very good fit in this deck.

Basically all of the above applies to many of the 'village plus' cards. I'm specifically thinking of worker's village and walled village. Shanty town is usually even worse if you want to use it as a village. But there are some caveats for some of the variants:

Bazaar is much better, as that $1 helps actually quite a lot. Of course, it also costs $5.
Mining village is much better since you can (and pretty aggressively should) trash it for a one-time silver
Native village shouldn't really be thought of in this class at all, as it doesn't draw the card in your hand directly. Thus it's much worse at being a prototypical village, but better for a lot of combo decks. But again, plays differently.

Finally, there's fishing village. Fishing Village is really another beast entirely, generally a much better card, and deserves its own article, which will come at some point.

Admin edit: added whitespace between paragraphs for readability

Mean Mr Mustard:
Very good article, WW.

I would like to add some other board-dependent scenarios where Village type cards shine:

The Scrying Pool deck.  Many times the non-terminal actions alone cannot provide the needed punch or economy to make a Pool deck viable.  The proper number of $2 attacks or other strong terminals with village support can make this deck an absolute monster.

The heavy Remake deck.  A mix of basic Village, $4 Villages and $5 Villages can grease a Remake deck, allowing it to cycle through the cards already upgraded, playing multiple Remakes every turn.  When the deck can cycle completely all the the cards in the deck can be remade into Golds or, even better, Grand Markets;   using this method a deck could alternatively be made up of a super tight mix of strong $5 and $6 terminals and economy cards.

The Minion deck.  This deck can be turbo-charged with a light mix of Villages and strong terminals.

The Menagerie deck.  While seemingly weak during the mid-game, this deck can get very strong very fast once your starting ten cards are weeded out.  Having villages mixed in helps play a multitude of unique terminals.  Different types of Villages on the board helps this deck reach a critical mass of unique cards faster, but it can also do okay using a few of the same Villages as they can be played out freely in order to make a hand of unique cards.

Deadlock39:
Good article.

I would add a bit more space to your post as it is a bit hard to read.  (At least a full blank line between your sections instead of just a return.)

Also, I have seen Mining Village described as a one-shot Grand Market before (I think in one of Theory's articles), and that seems more accurate to me than Silver.  You don't get the buy, but the extra card can make a big difference.

WanderingWinder:
A couple notes:
1. I did not intend this to be a fully exhaustive list of every way it's possible to use silver.
2. I did think about putting in scrying pool decks, but I think they tend to fall under the categories I already have and/or you really want the village because you want any action. Probably there's a little more to it than that.
3. I haven't really played a successful heavy remake deck, though I know they exist, so I really couldn't say.
4. That actually hasn't been my experience with most minion decks.
5. All of these decks are rather specialized strategies that require a board of several different cards to make them work (don't want villages in a minion deck if minions are the only action or if the right terminals aren't out, scrying pool decks obviously only work fairly rarely, menagerie decks need a lot of different, good, cheap terminals and a little trashing for this to be viable, etc.). I didn't really want to post specific decks beyond 2-card combos.
6. I've seen mining village described that way by theory too, but don't like the description it gives. Grand Market is one of the three most powerful cards in the game, and psychologically, putting the tag on is really powerful, at least for me. I like 'one-shot conspirator' better, but in any case I was using 'silver' not so much to literally mean the card Silver, but more 'any card that produces $2).

Love the comments though.

Superdad:
Also, you mention mining villiage and bridge rather closely together, and say that villiaging bridges together can be hard. Specifically Mining Villiage is a complete monster paired with bridge and some decent trashing.

The mining villiages help play multiple bridges in the midgame, and the bridges help buy multiple mining villiages (midgame). Then all of a sudden, you do your best kings-court impression, play 5-6 bridges, trash every single mining villiage you play (save it up for 1 big turn) and buy 5+ provinces/colonies in one turn. It is the only villiage (IMO) that makes this work, because the deck actually focuses like a super crazy combo deck for that one big turn.

Run a board like Chapel/Mining Villiage/Bridge. Open Bridge/Chapel, then maybe a silver or two once you've chapeled everyting else away. Then just load up on tons of MV/Bridges. The deck will usually explode for 5-8 provinces sometime around turn 13-14.

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