Note – I just saw that Mean Mr. Mustard put up a post about Apothecary as well, particularly in its interaction with Vault, so my apologies if anything in here is redundant, though from my brief reading of his post, I don’t think there is a ton of overlap. Hopefully this looks at some different interactions that the card has, as I have seen very little discussion of it. What are the chances of 2 posts in the same day? Anyway…..
Apothecary is a card that I often see overlooked in kingdoms despite its unique capabilities. While Scrying Pool is something that people can easily see building around, Apothecary never gets this type of treatment, though it has some excellent pairings that can enable some power engines. Like other cards with some nuance, it must be used correctly, and takes some more planning than most cards.
Apothecary essentially has 2 abilities – drawing out treasures that clog, and reorganizing your deck in order to play your next card or next hand the way you want. The first ability is obvious, though copper based strategies are often tough to make work against straight big money/big money+. Apothecary really can work quite well with coppersmith, and if you don’t buy many other cards to clog, you can pretty assuredly purchase a province every time you have an apothecary + coppersmith (and of course, because of the reorganization of your deck, will get this combo more often than other 2 card combos. I don’t have the ability to run it on a simulator or know how to do that (and this seems to be a hard card to program?), but I’d be curious how it would perform. I’ve played the combo with real cards (not on isotropic) so I don’t have a log for it. This, of course, works much better on a board with poor, or no trashing.
Apothecary’s reorganizing of decks is really a much more powerful thing. The simplest form of this is that, it can put the card you want on top for your +1/+1 card to draw. First, it can be a tremendous combination with Hunting Party. Draw a card, then reorganize your deck so you will draw it the way you want and discard the things you want to discard (i.e. draw the gold instead of discarding it because you already have one in your hand). One of the most frustrating things about HP is that it can discard great cards because you already have one – Apothecary can solve this problem by putting it first, and then stuff your coppers and estates behind them so they get skipped over.
Torturer chains can be the most frustrating part of dominion, seem to give a huge edge to the first player to get theirs going first, and have such a high variance due to the luck of drawing things in proper order. Apothecary cut this variance. I recently played a game where Apothecary was the reason that I won because I was able to set up a torturer chain much quicker and more importantly, much more reliably by setting up the order of the following cards, and won’t end up with 3 villages, no torturers (and then 2-3 torturers with no village). This obviously works with any drawing card combination, but it is most important with torturer. You’ll have to weigh the opportunity cost of buying the potion instead of just another village, but if you get a couple apothecaries in your deck, you will be in a much better position to draw your cards in the correct order and do the same on subsequent turns.
edit: as per Rod's comment.Apothecary can also mitigate against swindler attacks/jester attacks and anything else that look at the top of your deck and mess with it. If you’re not going to be drawing anything else after you play your apothecary, leave the estate on the top, and let your opponent swindle it into another estate. Is your opponent jestering? Leave a silver on top and give him the most annoying of all choices when playing a Jester – who should gain the silver??
