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DG

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Procession
« on: October 12, 2012, 09:54:30 am »
+3

This is the devil's card. You will see someone play it wonderfully and empty the provinces in 10 turns. You'll try it out the next game for yourself and it'll make a complete mess of your deck. I'll try to explain how that happens.

The Plus Side

Procession is great because you can play it your wonderful action card twice and then trash it to get an even more wonderful action card to replace it. If you can draw through your deck you might be able to play the gained card the same turn as well. You get the benefits of a throne and the benefits of an upgrade put together. Your deck can power through with action cards and
accelerate through higher cost action cards. Wonderful indeed.

The Minus Side

So why is it so bad? How about an example hand of {pearl diver, copper, copper, grand market, procession} where you'll probably play procession on the pearl diver and trash it for something like a great hall. Firstly you're not getting the double play from the grand market and you're probably wasting time with the pearl diver and great hall. Secondly, you're going to get more bad draws with the procession even than you would with a throne room since there are some actions in your deck that you don't want to process. Let's remember at this point that thrones often do draw badly, so get worried about a card that is even more reliant on the draw.

That's not the end of the problems with procession. You need a sequence of action cards in the supply at different costs to give yourself card gains. Unfortunately, you actually need a good sequence of action cards in the supply at different costs since you always want to be getting better cards from the trashing rather than just expensive cards. If the actions cards are really good though you might also find that your opponents empty a key pile and leave you with nothing useful to gain for processing the action cards already in your deck. This is going to be more of a problems with more players.

Procession can also destroy the balance of your deck if you are repeatedly trashing one card from a combination without taking a similar replacement. A village/smithy deck might be working nicely until procession turns it into a smithy/smithy deck. You can buy more villages but wouldn't you rather be buying provinces? Some of the good partners for procession are likely to be cards that can replace themselves when processed. Bridge, border village, ironworks, and fortress can do this in different ways.

I should probably also mention the cards that rely on actions being in play, such as goons, highways, and peddlers. These cards all work well (indirectly) with throne rooms but have obvious problems with procession.

Specific Uses

If we get back to the positive, we can find plenty of good situations to trash action cards. Using procession to trash ruins and shelters might be worthwhile when you consider the small bonus from the playing the action twice. You might also be able to tidy up after a swindler or trash redundant cards like a chapel, but procession could easily be the wrong card for the job unless you have controlled/assisted drawing for your deck. You still need a deck that would be suitable for a throne room.

Some actions can remove themselves anyway (island, mining village, death card) so processing them gives the card gain without a trashing penalty. Many dark ages cards can give benefits when trashed. Some action cards can provide a lot of benefit from an instant double play but provide less benefit as the game progresses, so it isn't a disaster for them to be trashed even with no replacement. A wide variety of cards might fit into this category depending upon the game played, but we could be looking at chapel, ironworks, moneylender, sea hag, mine, swindler. If you're not going to shuffle your deck again you probably don't mind which action cards you trash in the search for vp.

In Summary


If you put together the plus points and stay clear of the minus points then we roughly have

- action heavy decks with good drawing to give choice of cards to process
- good sequences of cards through cost 4-5-6-7 to give power and acceleration
- actions cards that are flexible, genuinely useful, and disposable
- tricks in gaining/trashing cards to get extra benefit or limit losses.
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Schneau

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Re: Procession
« Reply #1 on: October 12, 2012, 10:26:49 am »
0

I think Procession works well with cards that you want early but want to get rid of later, as long as there is an Action card costing $1 more. Cursers come to mind, as you can give 2 Curses and then upgrade them, though most cost $5 and would require a $6 Action on the board. But, for Sea Hag and Young Witch, this could be a great mid-game move around the time the Curses are drained. Other early trashers are also good to hit with Procession - things like Moneylender, Remake, Chapel, and maybe even Steward and Bishop - as long as there are good mid-to-late game cards costing $1 more.
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jsh357

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Re: Procession
« Reply #2 on: October 12, 2012, 10:52:44 am »
+1

I think Procession works well with cards that you want early but want to get rid of later, as long as there is an Action card costing $1 more. Cursers come to mind, as you can give 2 Curses and then upgrade them, though most cost $5 and would require a $6 Action on the board. But, for Sea Hag and Young Witch, this could be a great mid-game move around the time the Curses are drained. Other early trashers are also good to hit with Procession - things like Moneylender, Remake, Chapel, and maybe even Steward and Bishop - as long as there are good mid-to-late game cards costing $1 more.

Honestly, I am often glad to get rid of a curser regardless of getting an upgrade if all Curses are out, especially Swindler/YW/Sea Hag.  Marauder might be another card worth dumping later, though I have not played with it much.  Gaining Spoils is only so good.
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jomini

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Re: Procession
« Reply #3 on: October 12, 2012, 03:24:18 pm »
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There are a few other things to consider with procession:
1. Procession works well with card gainers that can gain themselves. Prrsn -> Ironworks means that you can replace the trashed card, get a 5, and something else (e.g. a village), you can also use such cards to completely restock from heavy trashing (e.g. open Chap/Iw, gain a second Iw, gain two Prssn, then play Prssn -> Prssn -> Iw -> Iw to grab an Iw, another 4 and three 5's). One particularly strong example of this is with graverobber. Prssn -> Grvr allows you to either convert other Grvr to Provinces or to restock Grvr from the trash.

2. Procession works well with gaining out of the trash. As noted Grvr works well on itself, but it can also replenish other cards you'd really like to Prssn. E.g. Use prssn in an engine on itself, village, and smithy. End play of the engine you have tossed your components into the trash, now you can Grvr the trashed cards to form a new top deck for next turn. Rogue, likewise, can allow you to recover previously trashed cards.

3. Prssn can be a way to get higher value cards for use with scaling TfB. Using Prssn on something like chancellor will give you coin and will let you get a 4 coin card for your Bishop to trash. Prssn and forge can allow you to alter the value of cards in your deck so you can hit combos that total 8 or 11 when you otherwise couldn't (e.g. you have all 4 coin cards, a forge, and want to hit 11 for colonies).
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RD

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Re: Procession
« Reply #4 on: October 12, 2012, 06:19:43 pm »
+1

Quote
If we get back to the positive, we can find plenty of good situations to trash action cards. Using procession to trash ruins and shelters might be worthwhile when you consider the small bonus from the playing the action twice.

This might be too obvious to be worth dwelling on, but I think Shelters barely deserve to be mentioned here if at all. Necropolis is the only one that qualifies, and you're not really benefitting from playing it twice. At the most you'll have a use for the +2 Actions, not 3 or 4. And if you need even 2 Actions this turn, it's almost certainly because you have two other cards in your hand which make better Procession targets than Necropolis in the first place.

So in general, I think the most help you get from Shelters here is the small chance you'll draw something like Procession-Necropolis-CCC. Where at least your crappy shuffle luck isn't *quite* as crappy as it would have been in an Estate game.
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jotheonah

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Re: Procession
« Reply #5 on: October 16, 2012, 01:51:14 pm »
+1

Procession-Fortress gets a special mention, I think. Not only do you not lose the Fortress, you get it back in your hand, so it's actually better than TRing it or just playing two. And if there's a 5 like Market or Lab out there, you might never use your Processions on anything else. F/P is a University that draws two cards and puts a Village in your hand.
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HiveMindEmulator

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Re: Procession
« Reply #6 on: October 16, 2012, 02:28:25 pm »
+1

Great article. One point that could use a little more emphasis is that you want to have some idea of where the cards you're going to process are coming from. You need a +buy or gain to add in some $3 or $4 card to process up. You kind of mention this in the Smithy/Smithy example, but it probably should be in the summary too.
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