Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Markov Chain]

The Councilroom list of popular buys shows Potion as one of the worst cards in win rate; it's bought half the time and has a win rate of 0.94 with the card and 1.06 without it. 

I believe this is an artifact of the way the game is played on isotropic, which takes a random selection of kingdom cards; there would be much less of a split if you played with a minimum of three Alchemy cards (and thus usually have 2-4 Potion-cost cards rather than just one).  This also explains why Potion is bought only half the time.

Potion is good in some sets, bad in others, depending on which Potion-cost cards are available.  If there are several Potion-cost cards, then Potion is likely to be a good card, and everyone will buy it.  If there is just one Potion-cost card, the weaker player is more likely to overvalue the card and buy a Potion.  Note that even Possession is break-even on win rate; if Apothecary and Alchemist are there to make Potions useful, then the player who uses them on the way to Possession will do very well, but if Possession is the only good Potion-cost card, then buying a Potion will slow down your deck and you will be too far behind when you get your Possession.

The only very good Potion-cost card is Familiar, and even it scores much worse than Witch and Mountebank.  This is probably because of the delay in getting Familiar into the game; if only one player has Witch, he may have bought it on a 5/2 opening, and that made it hard for his opponent to get to 5 until a lot of Curses were already out.  In contrast, Familiar cannot be gained until the second time through the deck.

The other two Potion-cost cards which are better than average are Vineyard and Apprentice.  Apprentice is interesting; it's better than the similar Salvager, probably because Alchemy decks can make good use of the actions from Apprentice in a big hand.  Vineyard has cause and effect reversed; if you are buying Vineyards, that is because you have a deck which benefits from the VP from Vineyard, and usually that means a strong deck. 

[ackack]

Apprentice is an Alchemy card, but it doesn't have a Potion cost.

Beyond that, it seems like this is largely based on fishing through Council Room data without any real analysis. I'd disagree with the claim that "the only very good Potion cost card is Familiar;" almost all of the Alchemy cards are strong.

added: I'll expand a bit on the weirdness of some of the analysis. Your state that isotropic data is skewed and that there aren't generally heavy Alchemy games - which I'd agree with - but your argument that Apprentice is strong is that "Alchemy decks can make good use of the actions from Apprentice." There can't be that many of those decks out there, so it's unlikely that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And while there are weird causality effects with some cards -  using the standard example, Curses might look like strong buys because people will often be buying them to pile out - Vineyards is not a convincing example at all. Vineyards are, like Gardens, quite often the dominant path to victory. That makes them strong to begin with. And with Gardens, a non-Gardens opponent can still find it easy to deny you a couple. The Potion cost of Vineyards mean there will be more games where somebody totally ignores Vineyards, so it would be unsurprising if there's a bigger "delta win" with Vineyards than Gardens.

[HiveMindEmulator]

I do agree that the reason the potion stats are bad on isotropic is that weaker players buy potion simply because the alchemy cards look good. They are all good to *have*, but it takes a little more knowledge to know when it's worth buying a potion to get them.

I completely disagree, however, that familiar is the only very good potion-cost card. It is the one that is most *often* good (in that most of the time it shows up, you want to go for it), but in appropriate situations, the other ones are all very strong, and not just when multiple potion-cost cards are present.

[DG]

I suspect the university is largely to blame. According to the stats it is bought almost as often as familiars and alchemists and has a worse record than the potion. The university can look very tempting when there are good 5 cost cards in the kingdom but the slow speed of the university often still kills the deck making it worse even than pure money.

The potion cost cards are generally very strong but expensive/slow. They also tend to bring cards into play such as the outpost, chancellor, or even woodcutter that many players might ignore. As a result the power of the alchemy cards is generally not harnessed well by beginners.

[Davio]

Well, it's a 1-2-3.

Potions are only as good as the cards bought by them.
The cards bought by them are only as good as their effects/other cards that interact with them.

If you buy a Scrying Pool ang play a Big Money strategy, then you'd probably have been better off with 2 Silvers.
If you buy University and grab just 1 Tactician with it, it's just a waste.

Often, there is just 1 card with a Potion cost and you really have to judge it well, do you absolutely need that Golem if you have a bunch of Haven's? Probably not. If you have 2 Mountebanks and it's a multiplayer game, then it's probably very good.

[WanderingWinder]

Often, there is just 1 card with a Potion cost and you really have to judge it well, do you absolutely need that Golem if you have a bunch of Haven's? Probably not. If you have 2 Mountebanks and it's a multiplayer game, then it's probably very good.

Actually, though I don't have tons of experience in multiplayer, I doubt that getting a golem is worth it here even.
The main point is that the opportunity cost of getting the stuff is quite high, but the cards are flashy, so generally in the games where only one player buys a potion, it's because the other player has realized that it's not worth it to go for a potion strategy, 'cause it takes too long. And in the games where both players buy one, it draws the win rate towards 50%. This is a bit of an overgeneralization, but I think it's the right principle.

[Fangz]

Another thing is to realise that potion generally should be bought early, if at all. Look at

http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=Silver%2C%20potion

Potion has a positive value as an opener, but it then falls off a cliff. I suspect a lot of potion's weakness is due to players realising belatedly the strength of a potion card, throwing their entire strategy (if they had one to begin with) into disarray in a frantic grab for potions, when it's already too late, thereby losing the game.

Looking at the openings page, potion/ambassador has a better win rate than any silver opening, and is up there with freaking hamlet/witch - and that's despite all the problems people mentioned.

EDIT: I think the basic lesson is this: don't go potions unless you know what you are doing, and do it early, if ever.

[DG]

Another thing is to realise that potion generally should be bought early, if at all.

I'm not sure that this is true. Vineyards, golems and possessions use mid game potions.

[Empathy]

It would be interesting to see what people buy as their first potion card for ambassador/potion.

I would suspect apothecary or university to work extremely well. Apothecary because you can at the beginning focus on ambassading estates at first and eventually receiving coppers from your opponent. University also works well with ambassador, which otherwise lacks buying power.

[Fangz]

That's why I said generally. I think possession or golem games are rare (and volatile) enough that doesn't swing the councilroom statistics. (And frequently the possession/golem is a poor play. And I dunno, I've opened potion with a view to getting golem before...) In *most* cases, a draw of $5+ and potion is absolutely disastrous.

[popsofctown]

I'm biased towards potion strategies because they're fun to use.  That's a large part of the reason I have several -'s on alchemy cards.

[Davio]

I think there's also often an error in judgement on how to spend the available Treasure + Potion.

If a player has $6+P, should he get a Gold or another Alchemist? And then there's $5+P and it just so happens to be that $5 is the sweet spot where most of the good cards are.
Because you often have just one Potion in your deck, not spending the hand with a Potion on a Potion costing buy may seem like a big waste.

Potion is just a really difficult card to judge and buy and use correctly, especially for beginners, and even for experienced players.

[Markov Chain]

Apprentice is an Alchemy card, but it doesn't have a Potion cost.

Thanks for the correction.  That explains why Apprentice scores well on councilroom.com; it's a good card to buy in many situations in which you don't have Potions.

Beyond that, it seems like this is largely based on fishing through Council Room data without any real analysis. I'd disagree with the claim that "the only very good Potion cost card is Familiar;" almost all of the Alchemy cards are strong.

And that was my point as well.  Familiar is the only Potion-cost card which has a much higher win rate with than without.  Alchemist is a very strong card, but if the weaker players buy a Potion in order to build an Alchemist deck with cards that do not support Potion strategies well, there will be a lot of games in which one player goes for Potions and Alchemists but loses to another player who went for ordinary money.

[mDuo13]

I tend to avoid buying potions in many games because in my experience they don't lead to victory points.

There are only two $P cards that make a direct, material difference in your victory points and the VP of your opponent(s): Vineyard, and Familiar. Both are situationally excellent cards, but not always good.

The problem is, Potion doesn't help you buy the cards that let you win. $6+P frustrates me, because I know I could've just bought a silver instead of that potion and have $8 instead. Potion also doesn't let you buy cards like Gold and Platinum that are crucial for getting those high-point VP cards. That's why getting Potions late is really bad: excepting Vineyard, potions just don't buy green cards when you really need them.

So if you're going to sacrifice some of your ability to buy the REALLY important cards, you better have a good reason. Getting a few $P cards early can make your deck stronger in the midgame, but it also makes your deck weaker when you need every bit of money you can get to buy those game-winning Provinces. It's not a bad idea to trash your Potions (especially to, say, Apprentice) after you've gotten enough engine cards off of them.

That said, Vineyard is one of my favorite Alchemy cards. I love the feeling of people walking into my trap when I spend my first few turns buying a bunch of actions that don't seem to build up buying power... and then all of a sudden, I start my death-run towards buying out the Vineyards.

[Fangz]

The power of a familiar is far from the effect it has on VP. The familiar could give your opponent estates, and it'd be almost as bad.

I've been recently been experimenting with apothecaries, and wow, that is a powerful card, so long as you have a +buy. I've laughed off an assault by ambassadors. Yes, send me more coppers please, I'm happen to have them.

[ftl]

Yeah. I'd completely underestimated the value of apothecaries because I misunderstood them a little... but recently I had a game where I made a comeback with them. I was behind early in familiars and ambassadoring, but just kept buying apothecaries - at first just because I couldn't get above 2+p, later because I realized just how awesome they were. (And my opponent probably made a mistake in trying to end the game by running out the ambassadors, which took long enough that I had time to make the comeback while those cards just gummed up my opponent's deck.)