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platykurtic

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Highway
« on: February 20, 2013, 01:10:09 am »
+6

There didn't seem to be an article just about Highway, so I thought I'd take a stab at it.

It's hard to talk about Highway without talking about its more popular older brother, Bridge. Both provide cost reduction, but they do so very differently.  As a general rule to take advantage of cost reduction, you also need +buy and money (unless you reduce all costs to zero). Bridge provides all three, but since it's terminal, you need a serious village/draw engine to take full advantage of it. Highway provides only cost reduction, meaning you need to get money and buys elsewhere, but as a non-terminal it can fit into a much wider variety of decks.

Without any +buy, Highway is for the most part just a Peddler, with the cost reduction equivalent to +1$. There are times when you'd buy a 5$ Peddler, if you really need virtual money, but for the most part it's overpriced and, moreover, there are better 5$ cards to be had. It's important to note that the Highway card text is worded such that Throne Room and King's Court don't multiply the cost reduction, so in that sense it's worse than Peddler, and some of the crazy combos you get with Bridge get short circuited.

Where the cost reduction does come in handy, however, is with cards that care about cost. This isn't really specific to Highway, but as non-terminals it's significantly easier to chain them and then a payload card, whereas with Bridge you'd need an engine up and running to even have a chance. There are a few categories here, and it's worth going into the subtle tricks and pitfalls in their interaction with cost reduction.

Gain a card costing up to X$:
Workshop, Feast, Ironworks, Smugglers, Talisman, University, Horn of Plenty, Hermit, Altar
Highway expands the range of cards that can be gained by reducing their costs.  For example, play a Highway, then Workshop, and you can gain a card costing up to 5$. Of course, you could have just bought that card instead of the Highway, so you really need an engine to enable these happy collisions multiple times, ideally every turn. After enough highways, any gainer can start on the Provinces, or even Colonies. Horn of Plenty works especially well here since it doesn't require actions. Highway makes your HoPs useful even when your engine doesn't have many unique cards. Soon your HoPs can gain Highways and other HoPs, and so long as you don't stall you get your megaturn.

Gain a card costing up to X$ more:
Remodel, Mine, Swindler, Expand, Forge, Rebuild
Remodel type cards can also benefit from a few well placed Highways. Since costs only go down to zero, after 4 Highways you can Remodel a copper into a Gold, for example, since the Gold only costs 2. If you plan to depend on this doing this to gain Provinces, you need to make sure to leave enough junk in your hand to Remodel. Swindler is a special case since you're choosing the card for your opponent. This only matters if you've reduce the cost of the card you're Swindling to 0$, in which case you can downgrade it to a Curse. Forge gets weaker as cards you might want to forge together start costing 0$, but once the card you want costs 0$ you can Forge any combinations of things into it.

Gain a card costing exactly X$ more:
Upgrade, Remake, Develop, Procession, Farmland, Governor
Much like the above category, you can reduce costs towards zero until you can Upgrade Coppers into Golds or Provinces. However, because Upgrade specifies "exactly 1$ more", if you reduce the cost of the card you want to 0, you can't Upgrade to it anymore. 

Do something with a card costing exactly X$ less:
Develop, Border Village, Haggler, Band of Misfits
These cards don't get any benefit at all from cost reduction, and in fact become useless when the card costs 0$, and there's nothing costing less. 

Do something with a card costing between $X and $X
Knights, Rouge, Graverobber
These are a mixed bag as you'd expect. By lowering costs you can attack or graverob more expensive cards, like Provinces, but you may also push cards down out of the range.

Do something with a card costing $X or More
Saboteur, Sage
Highway can focus these cards on higher priced cards, for better or worse. Both seek out cards costing $3 or more, but as you reduce costs that starts to include only the more expensive ones. In the extreme case, after 4 or 5 highways the only card worth $3 is Province (or Peddler of course, and add 3 Highways if you're dealing with Colony). This make sage virtually useless and Saboteur deadly, though I've never seen that one pulled off.

Trash for benefit proportional to cost
Salvager, Apprentice, Bishop, Forge, Trader
These cards become weaker each time you actually play a Highway, since the cards you're going to trash cost less. This doesn't make them entirely useless though, especially if they help you get your Highway deck up and running (Trader's not too relevant for that). If you can manage to play your TfB before your Highways, you can "buy low, trash high" to get extra benefits. You can hope for this to happen luckily a few times, but if you have an engine where you can keep drawing and avoid playing your Highways until you've used your TfB card, you're golden.

There are a few good combos in there, but for the most part these are supplemental tricks you'll use to grab an extra province or some engine parts. At the end of the day you still need to get your points by more conventional means, and with the right support highway can be excellent at this as well. It's definitely an engine card though; if you're not playing tons of actions, your Highways won't collide with your other cards and they'll just be overpriced Peddlers.

One key insight with cost reduction is that it's often possible to win with a megaturn, which means getting all your points and ending the game in one turn. This may mean buying all the Provinces, but often if your opponent is buying the same cards as you, it becomes possible to end the game on piles with a small VP advantage earlier. Don't forget to look for that every turn, it may be a bit of an anti-climax, but winning by one point is the same as winning by fifty, and your opponent can probably do it next turn. You also have to remember the extended Penultimate Province Rule, which is "don't leave the board in a state where your opponent can win next turn, even if it means passing up cards you want, unless you're behind and banking on a lucky break". Megaturns let you build flimsy decks with no hope of surviving greening, since you'll never have to actually play with the green cards you buy at the end. Highway allows for especially flimsy decks as a non-terminal itself; a little cycling or light trashing like Loan can sometimes be sufficient. The player who does the absolute minimum buildup before firing off their megaturn is likely to win.

Here's an example of a game that should scream megaturn
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201302/26/game-20130226-193803-bac46a33.html
There's Remodel to clear up the deck a bit and gain Highways (benefiting from the Remodel trick explained above), Festival for money and buys, and Lab + Margrave for the draw to get past the Festivals and junk you haven't trashed yet.

The obvious pairing for Highway is Market or Grand Market, since they provide money and buys in a convenient, non-terminal package. This combo is good enough that it's got a wiki article devoted to it already. The short version is that via good trashing, cycling, or a little draw you get your deck to a state where you're drawing through all your Highways and Markets each turn. This screams megaturn, and the chances are high that the game will end with the Highway, Market, and some other pile gone.

Powered up Cities are similar, but they bring endgame brinkmanship to a new level. The actions let you mix in some terminals early on to help with buy, and after a pile runs you've got draw. With two piles gone, Cities providing draw, money, and buys, and Highway reducing costs, the game isn't going to last another turn. You don't want to give your opponent that chance, so case is if you can drain the second pile during your turn with a gainer, so that you're the one that gets the Unstoppable City Stack.

Market Square, Workers Village are the other non-terminal +buy cards, and they can work for a strategy like this too. It will be slower though and you'll need to have some other virtual money, or have a lot of faith that you can reduce costs to 0. Festival similarly is missing one piece of the puzzle: draw. Too many will stall you unless you have some draw.

Forager and Counterfeit deserve special mention, since they thin your deck without requiring extra actions and provide +Buy with at least a little money. Neither one replaces itself though, so you'll need some draw to keep playing your highways.

Tactician provides a bit of +Buy and a large hand from which to play more Highways. More so than usual, sacrificing a turn for a big next turn is well worth it with Highway, and if you gets some Highways in before playing the Tactician you may even be able to buy something then. As virtual money, Highway helps to enable double Tactician, which is always powerful. The big Tactician turn can also be the platform for your megaturn, even if you couldn't have managed it from a five card hand.

Goons is another great pairing, since it provides money, +buy, and an alternate path to victory. Even without villages and just one Goons at the end of a Highway chain it's powerful: you get 2 chips and can buy 2 cards for cheap each turn. With some villages and draw you can play multiple Goons, which can enable a victory chip strategy. The goal is to be playing multiple goons a turn and getting tons of points off of each buy. Normally with Goons you're stuck buying mostly copper to make use of extra buys, but with Highway you should be able to get the prices low enough that you can buy zero-cost non-terminals instead and not clog your deck. With two or three Goons in play you can gain more chips per turn than your opponent can counter with victory cards and drain piles at your leisure. King's Court brings this to the level of insanity, in spite of scaling up neither the cost reduction nor the chip gaining.

Highway also doesn't conflict with the other cost reducers, Bridge and Princess. You'll need an engine to take advantage of them, but Highway can supplement it without requiring any more draw, helping you get down to that all important 0$ where costs cease to matter and you're only limited by your +Buy.

Highway will never pack quite the same power as Bridge; at 5$ you usually can't open with it, and by itself it just doesn't do enough. But with the right pairings it can be part of some awesome decks indeed. It's a fun little card and worth an extra look on any board.

Works with:
Markets
Goons engines
Forager
Counterfeit
Tactician
+Buy
Gainers, especially Horn of Plenty
Remodelers
Other cost reducers.

Conflicts with
Trash for benefit
Lack of +Buy
Upgraders and other cards that care about cost if you're not careful
King's Court and Throne room (unless they're part of an engine)
Big Money
Slogs and Rushes
« Last Edit: March 01, 2013, 03:25:29 pm by platykurtic »
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thirtyseven

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Re: Highway
« Reply #1 on: February 20, 2013, 01:28:05 am »
0

"After 5 highways your Saboteur will seek out your opponent's provinces, though I've never seen that one pulled off."

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here. GREAT article though!
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eHalcyon

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Re: Highway
« Reply #2 on: February 20, 2013, 01:56:21 am »
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"After 5 highways your Saboteur will seek out your opponent's provinces, though I've never seen that one pulled off."

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here. GREAT article though!

5 highways reduce Province to $3.  All other cards are less than $3 (Colonies and Platinum notwithstanding) so Sab will only hit Provinces.  Of course, if there are no $7 cards, 4 highways will suffice.
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platykurtic

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Re: Highway
« Reply #3 on: February 20, 2013, 01:57:09 am »
0

"After 5 highways your Saboteur will seek out your opponent's provinces, though I've never seen that one pulled off."

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here. GREAT article though!

Thanks. After 5 highways, nothing but Provinces costs more than $3 in a normal game, so it ought to skip right through to the Provinces and trash them, unless I'm mistaken.
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Jimmmmm

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Re: Highway
« Reply #4 on: February 20, 2013, 02:00:00 am »
0

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here.

After 5 Highways Provinces will be the only cards costing $3 or more (absent Plat/Col and Peddler), and therefore the only cards Sab will find.

Edit: ninja'd
« Last Edit: February 20, 2013, 02:01:23 am by Jimmmmm »
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timchen

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Re: Highway
« Reply #5 on: February 20, 2013, 02:54:52 am »
+2

Quote
Swindler is a special case since you're choosing the card for your opponent. There you can use highway to actually downgrade the your opponents card. If you've brought its cost down to zero you can even turn it into a curse. 

Some nitpick here: usually only when you have reduced its cost to zero can you downgrade it. So when you downgrade a card you almost always turn it into a curse.
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thirtyseven

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Re: Highway
« Reply #6 on: February 20, 2013, 03:14:38 am »
0

Okay, so then the OP was unclear (to me at least), not mistaken. Thanks, I get it now. Could a sentence of explanation be added after the Saboteur sentence, then?
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platykurtic

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Re: Highway
« Reply #7 on: February 20, 2013, 03:35:42 am »
+1

Both clarifications have been made
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Ozle

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Re: Highway
« Reply #8 on: February 20, 2013, 06:49:50 am »
0

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here.

After 5 Highways Provinces will be the only cards costing $3 or more (absent Plat/Col and Peddler), and therefore the only cards Sab will find.

Edit: ninja'd

Peddler would cost less than $3 because of all the highways played?

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Jimmmmm

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Re: Highway
« Reply #9 on: February 20, 2013, 07:01:24 am »
0

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here.

After 5 Highways Provinces will be the only cards costing $3 or more (absent Plat/Col and Peddler), and therefore the only cards Sab will find.

Edit: ninja'd

Peddler would cost less than $3 because of all the highways played?

Right, of course.
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lespeutere

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Re: Highway
« Reply #10 on: February 20, 2013, 07:02:21 am »
+2

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here.

After 5 Highways Provinces will be the only cards costing $3 or more (absent Plat/Col and Peddler), and therefore the only cards Sab will find.

Edit: ninja'd

Peddler would cost less than $3 because of all the highways played?

Right, of course.
No, peddler's costs are reduced only during the buy phase which you're clearly not it when playing sab. Think of swindler at peddler -> province.
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Jimmmmm

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Re: Highway
« Reply #11 on: February 20, 2013, 07:04:15 am »
+2

Sab seeks out all cards costing $3 or more, so I think you're either mistaken or unclear here.

After 5 Highways Provinces will be the only cards costing $3 or more (absent Plat/Col and Peddler), and therefore the only cards Sab will find.

Edit: ninja'd

Peddler would cost less than $3 because of all the highways played?

Right, of course.
No, peddler's costs are reduced only during the buy phase which you're clearly not it when playing sab. Think of swindler at peddler -> province.

Right, of course.
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DG

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Re: Highway
« Reply #12 on: February 20, 2013, 07:28:34 am »
+1

Quote
Highway will never pack quite the same power as Bridge

Well actually it does. It's a not a terminal card so you can put it into any crazy engine, weird things start happening, and you can find the most unlikely mega turns to clear piles and win the game.

One problem with a good highways kingdom is that your opponents generally don't let you get all of them. You need a plan B for when the supply is empty and you can't yet pull off the big finish.
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soulnet

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Re: Highway
« Reply #13 on: February 20, 2013, 08:19:35 am »
+1

Nice article.

I would add that it works great with Tactician, because is better to play more Highways in the same turn and buy two things, than playing half that number and have a single buy in two turns. Also, since Highway is "kind of" virtual money, is also nice to play before your Tact, to buy something in the "missed" turn. Highway is a really nice enabler for Double Tactician decks, especially if you have Market.

In this game there are Highways, Markets, Grand Markets and Tactician, and I pulled off the big finish right on time:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20130219-050244-ff50383c.html

About the Goons part, even without villages, if you can manage playing several Highways and a single Goons per turn, you can still get 2 VP out of Goons while buying two good pieces (probably more Highways or any other cantrip) and attacking your opponent. If there are more cantrip +Buys, then all the better, more VPs and more nice cards for you. I think Goons is a good pairing for Highway even without a Goons engine (of course, having the engine is always preferable).
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jomini

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Re: Highway
« Reply #14 on: February 20, 2013, 09:47:30 am »
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The big things for making Highways powerful are:
1. Additional +buy/gains. You did an excellent job of spelling out this requirement here.
2. Trashing, live-draw, or sifting. For big Hwy turns to work, you really want to increase your odds pairing up your Hwy's &  +buys/gainers and not getting stopped dead by greens & coppers. Light trashing is perfectly acceptable - you don't need an ultra-lean deck or solid engine. A few (two - three) Warehouses can be great for enabling big Hwy turns, light trashing (particularly non-terminal like Loan) is more than enough to enable big Hwy chains, and as noted draw makes it even easier to line all this up.
3. In line with the need for draw, City is strong combo card for Hwy. You can mix in a few terminals (Smithy, Oracle, Horse Traders), they tend to start at +2 actions/+2 cards, and with the right setup you can quickly get them fully stocked where they provide plenty of money & the +buys to pile the Duchies.
4. Scaling TfB's are weakened, but I wouldn't say neutered. Take something like Apprentice. If you play apprentice before you play the Hwy's, it actually leverages the cost reduction quite nicely. Say you have a Royal Seal (bought after the Hwy's ran out), say you spend 1 buy on an Apprentice and 1 buy on a Gold ($3 total say), well next turn you can Apprentice for six cards (net +4). This greatly increases the odds that you will manage to draw your whole deck, even if you just snagged a few Provinces/duchies. Less easily, you can manage the same sorts of tricks with Bishop and Salvager. Buy a Prov for $2, next turn Salvage it for $8, and then play Hwy's so you can convert that into $4. Tricks like these are much easier if you can top deck so cards like Watchtower, Royal Seal, Develop, Scheme, Count, etc. are very helpful if using these Tfb's might be viable. So doing something like: buy a Prov for $4, a Village for $0, a Bishop for $0, and a Menage for $0 reveal a Wt and top deck them all should ensure that the Menage hits, you can Bishop the Prov at full value, and then continue on to your normal Hwy turn, is a pretty strong move in some circumstances. Buy low, sell high works in Dominion sometimes.
5.  You have Forge in the wrong slot, it plays a lot more like a gain a card costing up to X than exactly one more. When you play Hwy, Forge only becomes useful at trashing junk for whatever costs zero now. Because each card going into the Forge lose 1 value, you get a lot less than if you hadn't played Hwy first. For instance 1 Hwy in play and Forging 3 Estates nets you a Silver instead of a Gold. Conversely, five Hwy's in play can let you Forge four Curses into a Hwy.
6. One of the big things if you plan to use Remake, Upgrade, Remodel, etc. as your gainers is that you need to be careful about how low you let your junk card count go. 7 Hwy & Remake really wants to have 3 treasure cards left over - so you can Remake 2 of them & buy a Province on your big turn; ideally you'd have bought a Province the turn before and from here on out can play for Duchies as needed. If you trash all your starting junk & have no +buys or pure gainers (e.g. Workshop), then you end up having to cannibalize, this is either pretty harsh or a sign that you overbuilt and maybe should have gone for the provinces sooner.
7. You need to make this say without "Forager and Counterfeit deserve special mention, since they thin your deck with requirng extra actions and provide +Buy with at least a little money. Neither one replaces itself though, so you'll need some draw to keep playing your highways."
8. Hwy can be really good against slogs. Take a preferred slog card - Silk Road. If you are doing any type of Remodel or Upgrade setup, you can poach several Silk Roads to later turn into Hwy's or Provs. Yeah, you make 3 pile easier, but if the other guy is trying to slog through to big point Silk Roads you can knee cap him by crapping his big VP & turning them into components or provs.
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ehunt

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Re: Highway
« Reply #15 on: February 20, 2013, 12:15:33 pm »
0

highway and cartographer are bff
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Taco Lobster

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Re: Highway
« Reply #16 on: February 20, 2013, 12:25:13 pm »
0

I like that you point out the TR and KC don't combo with Highway like they do with Bridge, but you might also want to point out one other major non-combo partner: Gang of Misfits.  I played a game the other day with both cards, and had it in my head that GoM would let me copy $5 cost cards after playing a single Highway.  Of course, given that GoM can only copy cards that cost less than it, my cunning plan did not work out in the way I expected...
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dondon151

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Re: Highway
« Reply #17 on: February 20, 2013, 12:27:22 pm »
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It's already been pointed out that cards who care about costs less than their own cost don't combo (and sometimes nombo) with Highway.
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cluckyb

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Re: Highway
« Reply #18 on: February 20, 2013, 03:42:52 pm »
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I like that you point out the TR and KC don't combo with Highway like they do with Bridge, but you might also want to point out one other major non-combo partner: Gang of Misfits.  I played a game the other day with both cards, and had it in my head that GoM would let me copy $5 cost cards after playing a single Highway.  Of course, given that GoM can only copy cards that cost less than it, my cunning plan did not work out in the way I expected...

Also while Procession can be good to play after your highway, its a terrible card to play your highway with.
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platykurtic

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Re: Highway
« Reply #19 on: February 20, 2013, 03:58:59 pm »
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I've incorporated all feedback so far, thanks everyone. Band of Misfits is called out in the "Do something with a card costing exactly X$ less" section.

jomini: I'm not sure how your suggestion 8 really benefits from Highway especially
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dondon151

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Re: Highway
« Reply #20 on: February 20, 2013, 05:26:28 pm »
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4. Scaling TfB's are weakened, but I wouldn't say neutered. Take something like Apprentice. If you play apprentice before you play the Hwy's, it actually leverages the cost reduction quite nicely. Say you have a Royal Seal (bought after the Hwy's ran out), say you spend 1 buy on an Apprentice and 1 buy on a Gold ($3 total say), well next turn you can Apprentice for six cards (net +4). This greatly increases the odds that you will manage to draw your whole deck, even if you just snagged a few Provinces/duchies. Less easily, you can manage the same sorts of tricks with Bishop and Salvager. Buy a Prov for $2, next turn Salvage it for $8, and then play Hwy's so you can convert that into $4. Tricks like these are much easier if you can top deck so cards like Watchtower, Royal Seal, Develop, Scheme, Count, etc. are very helpful if using these Tfb's might be viable. So doing something like: buy a Prov for $4, a Village for $0, a Bishop for $0, and a Menage for $0 reveal a Wt and top deck them all should ensure that the Menage hits, you can Bishop the Prov at full value, and then continue on to your normal Hwy turn, is a pretty strong move in some circumstances. Buy low, sell high works in Dominion sometimes.

This is much, much less likely to work out in your favor with Highways than it is with Bridges. In most cases you don't have options to not play Highways in your hand since it means that you're not drawing as many other cards in your deck if you hold off on playing the Highways. Though it is true that you could just treat Highway like Bridge and not play the Highways (since you don't play Bridges until the end of your action phase unless you're playing draw-to-X or Menagerie), my observation is that most engines incorporating Highway don't tend to be as strong at deck-drawing with other cards in the engine than those that incorporate Bridge. The likely reason for this is probably because Highway engines have auxiliary components that give +buy, which are less likely to draw cards and/or give +action, whereas Bridge engines have auxiliary components that give +actions and +cards.

(Also, Bridge costs less.)
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ConMan

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Re: Highway
« Reply #21 on: February 20, 2013, 05:54:31 pm »
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The "affects on less cost" category may normally be nombos, but sometimes you may want to avoid the effect and Highway can help with that - say you want to use Develop on a $3 to top-deck a $4, but don't want to have an Estate on there too. Play 3 Highways, you're now Developing a $0 into a $1 and a $-1, which of course gives you just the card you want.
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SirPeebles

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Re: Highway
« Reply #22 on: February 20, 2013, 10:23:19 pm »
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You seem to be using "non-terminal" where one usually says "cantrip".  Roughly, non-terminal is something which gives at least +1 action, while something giving at least +1 action and +1 card is called a cantrip.  There's are some edge case squabbles that I don't wish to start debates over, but I think the consensus is that Highway is considered a cantrip.  This is usually better than merely being "non-terminal".  Non-cantrip non-terminals are cards like Lookout, Bag of Gold, or Minion (for money).
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jomini

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Re: Highway
« Reply #23 on: February 21, 2013, 12:24:25 am »
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I've incorporated all feedback so far, thanks everyone. Band of Misfits is called out in the "Do something with a card costing exactly X$ less" section.

jomini: I'm not sure how your suggestion 8 really benefits from Highway especially

Highways enable cards that trash & gain a card costing X more; e.g. Remake, Remodel, Upgrade, Develop, etc. on many boards (a board with Highway will have such a card in play ~50% of the time) are quite useful for turning Coppers & Estates into Hwy's. Against a slog, you can poach lots of Alt-VP - hey they cost like $1 and $1 buy, so you dramatically lesson the potential payout for slog. Then, because the other player went slog, you can take a few extra turns turning those nearly useless alt-VP into Hwy's or other useful cards (e.g. Wharves).

How does this differ from a traditional engine?
1. Opportunity cost, in a traditional engine that Garden often comes at the price of buying a 5, with Hwy, you often have a spare coin or two and a spare buy that can be used to steal Gardens.
2. Ability to get value out of them. Because you are so much more likely to find Remodel, etc. useful, that dead Garden can quickly be turned into a card you want (like say Hwy). Yeah, this slows you down, but fighting a slog is also slow and hey, if he loses 1/4th of his total possible points, that's worth a turn or three.
3. Ability to heavily deny. A traditional engine rarely can gain more than 2 green cards a turn, a Hwy engine may well be able to punch out 5 Silk Roads in a go, leaving a Silk Roads/Island player with a pretty weak VP matrix. This is especially good if the other guy is going for a very high point, low buying power slog. The danger is, of course, if they convert to a rush, but that is not always viable.
4. Reliability. Hwy engines never buy fewer than 2 Prov's unless things go wrong. Often, you can pile all the provinces in a single go. You just need the engine to hit fewer times and don't run into as many "where are my villages" moments.

A couple of other minor details:

Swindler also allows you to swindle any currently zero cost card into another currently zero cost card. This means you can upgrade curses to estates, if that let's you win a 3 pile. Likewise using Swindler to turn a copper into a Hwy for your opponent can let you more easily 3-pile out.

The more I look Forge, the more it just doesn't fit in any of the categories. You can buy low/trash high so it works like Bishop, Apprentice, and Salvager ... but you also can Forge 0 cost cards into each other (e.g. Curse -> Hwy) so it is trash a card and gains a card costing up to the number of Hwy in play.

Dondon:
I wholeheartedly concur. The big cases are where you can top deck. Those aren't exactly rare, though also not that common. Hence, why I like weakened, but not neutered. I need a good reason to go for a scaling TfB, but such reasons do exist.
« Last Edit: February 21, 2013, 12:41:17 am by jomini »
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GendoIkari

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Re: Highway
« Reply #24 on: February 21, 2013, 03:49:31 pm »
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I like that you point out the TR and KC don't combo with Highway like they do with Bridge, but you might also want to point out one other major non-combo partner: Gang of Misfits.  I played a game the other day with both cards, and had it in my head that GoM would let me copy $5 cost cards after playing a single Highway.  Of course, given that GoM can only copy cards that cost less than it, my cunning plan did not work out in the way I expected...

Is "Gang of Misfits" something that comes from translation from another language? It's called "Band of Misfits" in English.
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