Since Farmland does something on-buy, there are really two big questions for it, and you probably want to have a good answer to both before buying it.
Question 1: What are you going to trash by buying Farmland?More to the point, why do you want to buy this lame green card instead of Gold or some other snazzy $6 card?
If you can gain a Gold by buying the Farmland and trashing something from your hand, either through Hoard or Market Square, then this is pretty great. But let's assume you're doing it for the on-trash ability itself:
a) You're trashing nothing.Surely you can do better than this with your $6.
b) You’re remodeling a Gold into a Province.You have, egad, too many Golds and aren’t going to have +buys to convert them into anything else later. Really, most times, if you’re able to get 3 Silvers and 1 Gold in hand to get both a Farmland and Province on a single turn, you’re probably ready to do just that.
c) You’re remodeling a Farmland into a Province.This will net you 4 VP for $6 while inching you closer to the end game. This is an easy choice over the Duchy if you have the $6 or $7 to buy it (barring considerations that make the Duchy better, a Duke-Duchy strategy being the most obvious).
But you might also ask yourself, if pushing toward the endgame and/or possibly break the PPR is to your advantage. It's a tough question with its own complications, but we won’t get into them now. It’s enough to note that the situation is essentially like buying a Fairgrounds (pumped up to 4 VP, of course) that also happens to reduce the Province pile by 1.
The other reason to do this, of course, is if you’re not planning to buy any more Provinces and just plan to remodel the rest of your deck into whatever you can get it to -- that is, you’ve given up on improving economy and are, most likely, in the home stretch trying to get as many points as possible.
Here’s how ecq put it: “Buying a Farmland and trashing a Farmland for a Province only nets 6 VP. Any time you do that, you could have just bought a Province if you had any other source of $2 instead of a Farmland. Further, other sources of $2 aren't nearly as bad to have in your hand as Farmland when you only have $5.”
d) You're remodeling Silver for a Duchy.Using Farmland to remodel Silver into a Duchy is unlikely to be a good play unless you’re really hitting the wall and trying to squeeze out every last possible point before the end of the game.
e) You're remodeling a <$5 card into something better.If Farmland is in the kingdom, decide early if you’re going to make use of it later, because a bunch of $5 cards in your deck are not going to be very useful with it.
Trashing Coppers, Estates, and Shelters into $2, $3, and $4 cards: Stop. Do not pass Go. Do not collect a $2 card. A general rule of thumb is that remodeling or expanding Coppers, Estates, and Shelters into cards to improve your economy is too slow in most kingdoms -- the differential between a Copper and Silver is just too little to justify the economy and time that goes into swapping the Copper for a Silver. So you especially won’t want to buy a Farmland for $6 just to remodel these little guys, unless you really love the idea of having that Farmland available later to turn into a Province. And for the record, you should not love that thought enough to blow $6 on an early Farmland.
“Trashing a Curse into a $2 card, especially a late-game Estate.” …as ecq put it. “Buying a Duchy gives you 3VP, +1 dead card. Trashing a Curse to, say, a Lighthouse is 3VP, +0 dead cards. Trashing a Curse to an Estate is 4VP, +1 dead card.”
Trashing $3 or $4 cards into better $5 or $6 cards. What Farmland can be good for in the midgame is to be useful when you hit that $6 or $7 one time too many. Notice a theme here? It’s a way to set yourself up for the endgame when you aren’t yet hitting $8 but have already developed infrastructure/economy and want to start cashing in.
There are any number of cards that work well in the early game but not so well later; these are your ripest targets for trashing.
- $4 cards that want Coppers or Estates in your hand/deck:
Baron, Moneylender, Remake, Spice Merchant, Rats. (This might include more Dark Ages cards when we figure out which ones are weakest in late game.)
- $3 cards that want Coppers or Estates in your hand/deck:
Masquerade, Lookout, Loan.
- Attacks that are less relevant mid to late game:
Sea Hag. Young Witch. Cutpurse. Ambassador.
- Low-grade gainers (better for building mid-game economy than buying Provinces):
Trader, Jack of All Trades. Bureaucrat. Ironworks. Workshop. Talisman.
- Miscellaneous cards that are better in early or mid-game:
Smugglers. Potion. Quarry. Tunnel.
- Cards you shouldn’t have bought in the first place:
Sometimes you have a dud card in your deck that’s not synergizing the way you thought it would, or maybe it’s just not doing much in this hand: dead Throne Room, dead Conspirator, dead Nobles.
Question 2: What are you going to do with that Farmland now that you’ve trashed something with it?Here’s the rub: Now you’ve got this lame green card that isn’t going to do much and is only worth 2 VP. If it’s not interesting to you now that you’ve gotten the trashing benefit out of it…then you probably shouldn’t have bought it. Like Border Village, you probably shouldn’t buy Farmland just because it gives you a fun on-buy effect. It really ought to be doing something for you coming and going, unless, of course, you’re at the very end of the game.
a) Use the Farmland for its greenness. An unlikely case. You might be using some combination of Crossroads and Scout, which sounds pretty bad to begin with, but Farmland would slow your deck down a little less this way. More plausibly, you’re doing silk road, in which case it really comes down to the math.
b) Just use it for the 2 VP.Weak. If this is what you plan to do with the Farmland, it better be last ditch.
c) Trash it for benefit.One of its best uses. Asklepios puts it this way: “When a card has some of its benefit on buy/gain (or just on buy in Farmland's case), then once it’s in your deck it’s less valuable to you than a card of its price ought to be. This makes it a good target for trash-for-benefit like Apprentice or Bishop.” Or Salvager, for that matter.
d) Remodel the Farmland itself into a ProvinceOf course, Farmland synergizes with itself to a limited degree by being a perfect target for future Farmlands to trash when you buy them. But this only gets better when you have actions that can do that for you without you wasting $6, like Remodel, Expand, Governor, or Rebuild. Otherwise, only if you’re desperate and squeezing the last few points out.
e) Remodel/expand it into a nice fat $7 or Platinum Look for this combo mid-game, especially with a Remake, Upgrade, or Develop. First, use the Farmland for one of the reasons described in Part I above to trash something janky, then turn this over into a good $7.
Sounds great, right? But you need to be able to draw that Farmland and your trasher together…so a thinned deck of 15 with some cantrips is a better bet than a thicker BM or engine deck.
Notes:
Thanks to ecq and Askpelios, but also to everybody who participated in these threads on Farmland, which I've taken a lot of these ideas from:
HYPERLINK "
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=2503.0"
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