This post is intended as an extension to Theory's original
tactician article on the blog.
Theory's article does an amazing job at explaining what tactician does and in describing
in depth the mechanisms of
double-tactician decks. I feel however that it is lacking when it comes to single-tactician
decks. This is somewhat unfortunate, as I really meet a lot of players who cannot distinguish between good and bad single tactician boards. I believe this is because the article does not really address the question of full
single tactician decks, rather than just cards that benefit from a single tact.
To explain what I mean, I'll introduce the notion of a scaling card. In its most strict definition, its not just a card that benefits from increased handsize, but actively
creates payload in at least a linear fashion from hand size. Vault benefits greatly from the tactician hand-increase, but essentially does not increase the payload when compared to just playing out all the treasures you discard: there is a combo, but its of qualitative nature, not a scaling one. Baron matching an estate is an example of a quantitative benefit, but it does not truly scale with hand size and merely benefits from it. The cards that fit the most strict version of
scaling are:
- Bank, which increases dollar output either linearly or quadratically, depending on how greedy and bank-heavy you go
- Coppersmith, which behaves in exactly the same manner
- HoP, which will hit 8 and snowball very quickly.
- Bridge, Highway and King's Court, which all scale in more than n when you have n copies of them in hand.
Crossroad deserves an honorable mention. It's drawing ability scales linearly in hand size, but that does not translate into scaling payload unless you have an effective way of gaining a lot of treasure or virtual coin. Hoard and Haggler fit the bill, amongst many other.
Why does this scaling matter? First and foremost, because the three first scaling cards are treasures and do not fit in the double tactician framework unless black market is in the kingdom. On a more down to earth note, you are skipping a whole turn to play your tactician in a single tactician deck. As theory points out, this means the tactician turn better pay off. Cards like Baron, forge or treasure map do greatly benefit from tactician, but they don't expect to
only work through it. Think of it more as a preliminary phase to building your
real deck. This is more obvious for forge, which really gets a huge boost from the first tactician, but then usually proceeds to make the tactician
irrelevant by trashing your deck to the point where you can draw it every single turn anyway. In the case of treasure map, you will keep on playing tactician whenever your hand does not hit 8, but that is really secondary and you are essentially playing a BM variant. In particular, you don't stage with any form of consistency a
multi-province turn. All the card matchers (Tournament, Explorer and Baron) again greatly benefit from a single tactician, but its usually a boostrapping mechanism to engineer a deck that mostly does not
need tactician. Scaling cards are the only ones that
truly form single tactician
decks, rather than just some acceleration mechanism for some other deck.
What makes up a legitimate single tactician deck? How do you recognize one? What's a good metric to evaluate it by? Well, basically you have to compare it to double tact. Double tact usually makes a province a turn in steady state. Single tact decks need to make
n provinces a turn every n turns to be competitive. This means that if you have a 15 card deck and one tact, you need to scale your tacticians so that they produce triple province turns. Unfortunately, the 'instability' of the deck makes it hard to reach the steady state, and you can often end up either with a lucky lead, or an unfortunate trail off despite your best intentions. This makes the matter a bit more complicated in practice as
border conditions do matter. Steady state analysis is weakened a fair bit when you start buying a third of the green in one turn.
How do I build a single tactician deck? First, you need a scaling card. Second, you need to figure out how frequently you will have tactician turns. The aim is to scale your deck according to that frequency. It is therefore very important to get the appropriate number of scalers. This number depends on a few parameters. In the absence of
scheme, you essentially have two possibilities: green early, or go for a mega-turn. If you green early, you are trying to grab an early lead in green using a few lucky turns and then hope to close down the game very quickly. Cards that can trash provinces into provinces (salvager being the top one) greatly boost this game plan. The other possibility is to build up to a one or two-turn super frenzy. This usually means a triple and a double province turn. In this case, you scale a lot more and green a little later.
Scheme? Yes scheme. Scheme changes everything. Scheme makes this deck
much closer to double tactician than to super-turn decks. Scheme turns this from a good to an amazing deck, even with very little support. I am surprised at the number of games where people don't realize this and waste time thinning their deck towards double tact, when scheme+tact+scaler is just plain faster. When scheme is in the kingdom, you have one very simple objective:
make two provinces every second turn. You can do that extremely efficiently: scheme+tact+scaler. In the case of coppersmith/bank, you usually attain that goal either by hitting that initial silver you bought to boostrap yourself to tactician, or by playing two scalers. The typical deck therefore looks around the lines scheme, silver, tact, 2 Coppersmith/bank, 7 coppers, green. In the case of HoP, you need to grab HoP right after your first tact
and start gaining stuff. There is usually enough of an engine present to both grab enough diversity to hit 8 and keep drawing everything every second turn.
Finally, strong trashers (chapel, ambassador, remake, steward and forge) tend to favor double tact over single tact-scheme. Single-tact without scheme is usually weaker than a solid double tact deck regardless of the trashing but can be played when the other alternative is to play a non-tact strategy.
Works with- Scalers
- Scheme!
- Cards that enhance your scaler (apothecary for Coppersmith/Bank, mint for HoP)
Conflicts with- Double tact if no scheme
- Lack of +buy if no scheme/HoP
- Strong trashers (makes double tact and engines more valuable)
- Cursers
edit: random additional comments.
Haggler technically is also a card that scales with hand size. If you produce n dollars, it will grant you a card costing n-1. But because this card cannot be a green, it is not well-suited for single tact decks, and much better for double tact as it also provides virtual coin.
Alchemist can replace Tactician as the card that enables scalers. It doesn't set itself up nearly as fast (it takes time to grab the 5 alchemists necessary to start with a 10 card hand) but doesn't require you to skip a turn once it is set up.
