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WanderingWinder

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Oracle
« on: June 15, 2012, 11:29:59 am »
+7

Oracle is one of my irrationally favourite cards. A fun, clever little novelty. It's not super strong, but it's not amazingly weak either. A nice card, a nice power level - hey, I like it. Now for analysis.

The big thing with oracle, well, is the filtering. Without the filtering, it's a moat. Let me tell you, moat for engines isn't that great (though not totally unusable). And moat for big money is also weak as all get out. (This assumes that moat's defensive function is negligible, of course). But the filtering gives a lot to this card, both in how it effects you and in how it effects your opponent. The thing is, the card is very deceptive.
It looks like the benefits to you and the attack on your opponent is totally even, totally mirrored. But in reality, they play very, very differently. This is one of the biggest reasons that the simulators play the card rather poorly. The attack part is largely "Are these better-than-average cards for them?" with a little bit of cycling concern. The sims play this okay now, thought it could definitely be improved - you definitely want to know what your opponent is doing, and what's in their deck (how else are you supposed to know what average is?). I suppose also, it depends on the number of oracles you play in a turn. Totally average (sans cycling issues) is the benchmark for one oracle, but if you're playing more, you really want to stick them with something bad - if you have more cracks at it, roll the dice. But you should play the filtering portion on yourself very, very differently. Basically, what you want to do here is ask yourself, do these cards give me a meaningful advantage right now, given what I know about my hand? The knowledge of what's in your hand is huge, and it makes a big difference on how you play things. For example, I'm playing mostly a money deck, and it's toward the endgame. My hand is silver copper copper oracle province. I play and find silver copper for me. Now, this is quite possibly better-than-average here for you. But what will you do with it? Buy a duchy. So usually, in these situations, you want to roll the dice - it's very unlikely you won't get at least $1 back to buy your duchy anyway, and there's a chance you get to your province. Similarly, if in the same situation, my hand is Gold silver copper copper oracle, and I turn up province copper, I'm keeping those buddy - yeah,, it's a sucky draw of two cards, but you know, I don't need a good draw; it's good enough, it ensures me a province, so keep and laugh your way to the bank. No, not the card.

The thing is, Oracle looks like a draw card, and it is a draw card, but it does not play very much at all like other draw cards. It's a drawer+filterer. Whereas most draw cards let you draw lots of cards, the only way to get oracle to really work for you is to have it draw the right cards. Whereas with something like a smithy-based engine, you can draw your whole deck (or close to it) relatively easily, this is going to be a tall order with oracle.
To illustrate what I mean by this, I want to look at an oracle-festival engine. Yes, oracle-festival. I played this against a strong opponent once, and I distinctly remember him saying something like 'What? But that's no net cards!' (Actually he phrased it differently, but he was shocked at how such a terrible strategy could be doing anything good). The point is, playing festival then oracle leaves you, at the end of things, with the same number of cards you started with. You are just spinning your wheels. But every time you spin those wheels, you pick up some money, you pick up a buy, and most importantly, you get the filtering, which gives you a pretty good chance of having those wheels keep spinning, so you ARE making progress. And you get a little attack on your opponent in the process.

Oracle is at its most powerful when it turns your opponents good cards over (you can make them miss a power card for a whole reshuffle, a strong attack) and when it turns your weak cards over (skip them - a strong filter). When you always use it to put cards back, it's not really better than moat. Having said that, this means it's good with cards that will have opponents' good cards on the top of their deck (maybe big scheme/alchemist/treasury chains? -it's pretty rare), or cards that bring the top of your deck to be pretty junky. This means it works rather poorly with something like scout (as if this card needed negative synergy!) and cartographer, but possibly good synergy with something like apothecary, which often leaves you with a couple green cards on top. It's also good against, say, your opponents' ghost ships - just ship your worst cards to the top of your deck, and skip them.


I find that oracle is a bit better in engines than it is in money, simply because you get more out of the filtering effect. Yes, the filtering can help you in money, but it tends to help more with engines, where you need a certain type of card and can hunt for it. Also note that you should basically never skip past a pair of your own cantrips (unless you're out of actions), as the benefit of doing this is just getting to the next two cards, which... you get to anyway with the cantrips! There may be some weird reshuffle exceptions....

Speaking of the reshuffle, the last point to talk about here is cycling. Now, I don't think cycling is a HUGE factor on how you should play oracle, with the following caveat: if going fishing for a better set of two cards will trigger a reshuffle, you really need to consider this as part of your decision-making process when you're trying to figure out whether to hold what you have or roll the dice with two new cards. If you've got lots of good cards in hand or play, you should really consider holding two even less-than-average cards. For instance, if you've got gold silver copper estate oracle, and flip up copper estate, early in the game, you really want to consider keeping this if you'd otherwise trigger a reshuffle. The reason is, of course, that if you go fishing, you might get your province, but you for sure lose your gold silver and oracle for another reshuffle, which is something you don't want. And how much better is province for you than gold at this point anyway? Conversely, if you've got a hand of junk, you might want to throw back a couple of above-average cards, just to make the junk not be in your next reshuffle at all.


Works with:
Engines
Opponents' ghost ships
Opponents' alchemist stacks
Apothecary
Stash

Doesn't work with:
Monotonous decks (i.e. jack and trader do it very few favours)
Opponents' farming villages, loans, and ventures (that they can re-order the cards they put back helps them way more than you)

Robz888

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #1 on: June 15, 2012, 12:04:02 pm »
+1

This means it works rather poorly with something like scout (as if this card needed negative synergy!)

Laughed at that! I sure love picking on Scout.

As for Oracle, I like the card, but I liked it more a couple months ago when nobody seemed to be buying it. It sort of has that Swindler effect where if they hit you with it and cause you to flip one of your opening buys, you are just so furious, and way behind.
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clb

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #2 on: June 15, 2012, 12:24:25 pm »
0

It seems like Oracle would be pretty useful on a Sea Hag board. Maybe it's an obvious consideration, but being able to toss aside the top-decked curse can be handy. Unless, of course, you have some other way of taking care of business.
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WheresMyElephant

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #3 on: June 15, 2012, 12:30:34 pm »
0

Can you elaborate more on how to play Oracle as a Ghost Ship counter? Straightforward play looks pretty clearly losing. If the timing is right you get to discard two junk cards and draw two cards for a four-card hand, but by playing Ghost Ship he gets to draw two cards and keep his junk (which might be a couple of Coppers for instance) still giving him the upper hand.

Do you think the Oracle attack alone makes up the difference? I guess it's possible but seems a little unintuitive to me. Or is there something else you have to be doing to make it work?
« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 12:33:42 pm by WheresMyElephant »
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Robz888

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #4 on: June 15, 2012, 12:36:13 pm »
0

It seems like Oracle would be pretty useful on a Sea Hag board. Maybe it's an obvious consideration, but being able to toss aside the top-decked curse can be handy. Unless, of course, you have some other way of taking care of business.

This would only be true though with good village help. Because you almost certainly want a Sea Hag of your own... and Oracle, like Envoy, totally drops the ball in a Big Money affair where you mix in other terminals with your terminal draw cards. Like Envoy, Oracle is looking at 4 cards, and your terminal is dead if it's anywhere in there.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #5 on: June 15, 2012, 12:42:49 pm »
0

It seems like Oracle would be pretty useful on a Sea Hag board. Maybe it's an obvious consideration, but being able to toss aside the top-decked curse can be handy. Unless, of course, you have some other way of taking care of business.

This would only be true though with good village help. Because you almost certainly want a Sea Hag of your own... and Oracle, like Envoy, totally drops the ball in a Big Money affair where you mix in other terminals with your terminal draw cards. Like Envoy, Oracle is looking at 4 cards, and your terminal is dead if it's anywhere in there.
You do realize that unless the village is fishing or festival, you totally lose the advantage he's talking about getting?

WanderingWinder

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #6 on: June 15, 2012, 12:43:56 pm »
0

Can you elaborate more on how to play Oracle as a Ghost Ship counter? Straightforward play looks pretty clearly losing. If the timing is right you get to discard two junk cards and draw two cards for a four-card hand, but by playing Ghost Ship he gets to draw two cards and keep his junk (which might be a couple of Coppers for instance) still giving him the upper hand.

Do you think the Oracle attack alone makes up the difference? I guess it's possible but seems a little unintuitive to me. Or is there something else you have to be doing to make it work?
Your analysis is pretty good. But Oracle costs 3; ghost ship costs 5.

methods of rationality

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #7 on: June 15, 2012, 01:15:08 pm »
0

It seems like Oracle would be pretty useful on a Sea Hag board. Maybe it's an obvious consideration, but being able to toss aside the top-decked curse can be handy. Unless, of course, you have some other way of taking care of business.

This would only be true though with good village help. Because you almost certainly want a Sea Hag of your own... and Oracle, like Envoy, totally drops the ball in a Big Money affair where you mix in other terminals with your terminal draw cards. Like Envoy, Oracle is looking at 4 cards, and your terminal is dead if it's anywhere in there.

But sea hag games are not exactly "big money affairs". If you have a fat deck filled with curses, your terminals are a little less likely to collide.
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DG

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #8 on: June 15, 2012, 01:17:39 pm »
0

Quote
But sea hag games are not exactly "big money affairs"

They are often small money affairs.
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Robz888

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #9 on: June 15, 2012, 01:19:55 pm »
0

Okay, but would you want an Oracle to counteracting the Cursing? Seems to me you are just going to flip your own Sea Hag all the time if you get it early, and later it's good to filter with, but doesn't specifically deal with Hag top decking.
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qmech

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #10 on: June 15, 2012, 02:14:13 pm »
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Early game I would not want Oracles with Sea Hags, for the reasons Robz mentions.  Late game I'd often be rather keen on them.

Envoy sees 5 cards, not 2 or 4, so is quite a bit worse than Oracle when it comes to dead draws.  That brings up another point about dead-drawing with Oracle: you still skip playing a card this shuffle, but the discard allows you to replace some potential dead draws with another more useful card instead.
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HiveMindEmulator

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #11 on: June 15, 2012, 02:29:13 pm »
+1

Can you elaborate more on how to play Oracle as a Ghost Ship counter? Straightforward play looks pretty clearly losing. If the timing is right you get to discard two junk cards and draw two cards for a four-card hand, but by playing Ghost Ship he gets to draw two cards and keep his junk (which might be a couple of Coppers for instance) still giving him the upper hand.

Do you think the Oracle attack alone makes up the difference? I guess it's possible but seems a little unintuitive to me. Or is there something else you have to be doing to make it work?
You're omitting the effect of the Oracle attack. He gets 2 extra cards, but they're below average, so his hand situation is not strictly better than yours. And a particularly interesting thing that isn't mentioned in the article is how Oracle deals with terminal density. If the Ghost Ship player gets a lot of Ghost Ships so he can play them every turn, then with the Oracle attack, you can leave Ghost Ships on top of his deck while only skipping money. This makes his terminal density effectively too high, and causes a lot of collisions on dead-drawn Ghost Ships. If he keeps his Ghost Ship count low, on the other hand, you can skip them, so he has an even lower density and doesn't get off the perpetual attacks.

This is an interesting idea in general, and makes me feel like Oracle's best role is in engines against Big Money strategies because the self-ability is more useful in engines and the attack ability is better against Big Money, where you can mess with effective terminal density.
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pingpongsam

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #12 on: June 15, 2012, 02:37:55 pm »
0

I often find myself picking up an Oracle mistaking it in my mind for an Oasis. When I desperately need a cantrip and no more terminals it can be death sentence. If I need a way to add another dollar or 2 to the bottom line when I have a deck full of VP, curses or other terminals it actually tends to work as well or better than Oasis. I have no technical insight into the mechanism other than to say I have been pleasantly surprised at what Oracle is doing for me when I wanted an Oasis.
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Davio

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #13 on: June 15, 2012, 02:56:45 pm »
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Another aspect of Oracle is that it can mess with your opponent's shuffle timing.
While it's hard to say whether it's good or bad to force your opponent to reshuffle as you don't always know what cards he has in his hand (maybe 3 Estates and 2 Coppers), it is a feature of the card.

Thief, Noble Brigand, Tribute and Pirate Ship also dig two cards deep into your opponent's deck.
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FishingVillage

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #14 on: June 15, 2012, 03:04:57 pm »
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I recently played a nice game with Oracle and Hoard, and I think the two would work very well as a money focused deck. Playing with Hoard makes one more likely to buy Duchies and Estates, and while filling up on VP too early could potentially stall your deck, Oracle can help filter out cards you don't want (like extra greens) while also messing around with your opponent's deck. Especially in games with cursers, running down the Duchies and Estates piles becomes a better proposition, and Oracle is cheap draw that lets you filter while also messing with your opponent.

In general though, as HiveMindEmulator mentioned, picking up an extra Oracle is less of a problem than with other terminals. If you don't want the other card that shows up with Oracle when you play one, you can just dump those and get the next 2. If those next 2 are bad as well, you just powered through 4 cards so hopefully your next draw won't be so terrible!
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Julle

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #15 on: June 15, 2012, 04:01:59 pm »
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This isn't about strategy but is there any reason why does ISO let you rearrange cards before you draw them, if you chose not to discard?
« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 04:05:27 pm by Julle »
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jonts26

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #16 on: June 15, 2012, 04:08:41 pm »
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Because your opponent might get some benefit from ordering the cards, and it's hard to keep people honest about what order they actually were in, it makes sense to let your opponent order them. And because of the phrasing of the card, if your opponent gets to order, well so do you. And iso is a stickler for the exact rules. Likely this is done to consolidate the number of words on the card, which is already kind of a lot.
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eHalcyon

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #17 on: June 15, 2012, 04:12:10 pm »
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This isn't about strategy but is there any reason why does ISO let you rearrange cards before you draw them, if you chose not to discard?

iso follows the text on the card as closely as possible, even if it makes for less intuitive play.  The text on Oracle says that each player (including you) either discards the card or puts them back on the deck in any order, your choice.  It's worded this way for simplicity.  The rearranging doesn't really matter for you since you'll draw those cards anyway, but it does for the other players.

Although I wonder if there are any cards that might stop you from drawing them.  I don't think there are any right now, but I can imagine a reaction card that says something like, "when you would draw a card during your turn, you may reveal and discard this for +$3 instead".  That would be kind of interesting.

PPE: ninja'd but I'm posting this anyway.
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shMerker

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #18 on: June 15, 2012, 04:21:41 pm »
0

The Secret History of the Seaside Cards

Quote
Navigator: Originally this didn't let you reorder the cards, but I thought that would be something the developers would want changed, since they'd behaved similarly on similar stuff. You know, so you don't have to carefully keep the order the same. Anyway they didn't actually complain about this one but I changed it to let you reorder the cards anyway. It makes the card marginally more powerful.

I think the rationale is somewhat similar with Oracle. Also the ordering does matter for your opponents, since they might have a single cantrip in hand or a caravan that's still durating from last turn or something. And specifying different behavior for the player playing the card would make the card text longer while not really improving anything so it's probably just better to leave the behavior the same for everyone. Meanwhile Iso is just implementing the card the way it's written, which says you get to rearrange the cards.

And who knows maybe in the future there will be some reaction card that you reveal when you put cards back on your deck (would potentially be useful against Ghost Ship, Bureaucrat, and Rabble; and would maybe have some cute interactions with Mandarin and Courtyard and I'm probably forgetting some other cards) and then maybe it actually does matter.

Also ninja'd but I'm not wasting this post.
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ednever

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #19 on: June 15, 2012, 05:16:13 pm »
0

What does ninja'd mean?

Ed
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Taco Lobster

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #20 on: June 15, 2012, 05:16:19 pm »
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I had a painfully long Ghost Ship/Oracle game the other day.  I tended to drop a village, ghost ship my opponent, and then Oracle away (or not) his top few cards (he was working on an Alchemist chain).  As dumb as it sounds, I hadn't considered using the Oracle to clean out the Ghost Shipped top cards first, but the village was Working Village, so the best case scenario was getting rid of one bad card.  Plus, I wanted to be able to Oracle cards out of my opponent's hand after Ghost Shipping.
« Last Edit: June 15, 2012, 06:11:30 pm by Taco Lobster »
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Taco Lobster

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #21 on: June 15, 2012, 05:16:34 pm »
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What does ninja'd mean?

Ed

Someone answered the question while you were typing your response.
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verikt

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #22 on: June 15, 2012, 05:54:24 pm »
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In cases where the first few buys are crucial, it sometimes pays to buy an oracle first turn even if it will be practically useless all game. I'm thinking scrying pool, familiar or talisman 4 cards. If you can draw yours and knock out theirs it was worth it. Although for some reason, my experience has been that if both players buy it first buy second player will draw it first more often than not.
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Davio

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #23 on: June 15, 2012, 06:01:40 pm »
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This isn't about strategy but is there any reason why does ISO let you rearrange cards before you draw them, if you chose not to discard?
Yeah, you can easily forget which card was first and which was second.

The ordering can be done for strategic reasons for any drawing card or Caravan.
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jomini

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Re: Oracle
« Reply #24 on: June 16, 2012, 10:25:30 am »
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Ordering your cards matters whenever you have more actions and any draw coming. For some conditional draw, like farming village or spy, it becomes important to have things in the correct order. Likewise, loan and venture can keep drawing through green even with no more actions.

For your opponent card order matters if they have any draw coming or in hand. Further, if you have the potential to play any top deck attacks, then it becomes important to correctly order to defend against the attacks (e.g. curse on deck top if swindler is out, curse on bottom if jester is out).

I'm sure a large portion of this is to make mechanics easier - it is easy to flip around the order of the cards (e.g. someone drops them or the left hand/right hand ordering when setting them out for viewing) so it just makes things easier and more interesting to let folks reorder. The only real down shot is that it takes more clicks online, but I don't value that too much.
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