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[Raggedjoe]

Here is a game where I just completely demolished someone. Now, to be honest it was more a result of his lack of skill than my skill. But my question is: What is the moral of this game?

I feel it is obvious... Apprentice is simply broken.

This is something that I have come to believe to be a fundamental part of the game. Whoever plays Apprentice best wins. And to be honest, this is not that broken a board for Apprentice. Apprentice simply gives you completely insane card advantage in any game. You always have Duchies and Golds to power Apprentice, in any game. Apprentice simply has a critical mass after which you will just keep drawing your deck.

What do you guys think about Apprentice?

[rrenaud]

Apprentice is nice, but 19 turns for 5 provinces is pretty slow.  Try just playing straight up big money and you'll hit that.

If I was going to complain about a 5 cost, it would be montebank.

[guided]

What do you guys think about Apprentice?

I think you're severely overrating it

[DG]

Apprentice is a very strong card. It does however need strong partner cards or else it will be trashing coppers for little benefit. If a card is very strong in some card combinations and otherwise weak then it's probably good design.

[Fangz]

Apprentice is a strong card, but you had a deck there with 5 activated cities (plus golem to feed into it). That's quite something. If you want a real apprentice-based strategy, there's an annotated game on it:

http://dominionstrategy.com/2011/02/14/annotated-game-2/

[HiveMindEmulator]

Apprentice is one of the strongest cards in the game (conspicuously missing from theory's top 5 $5 non-attacks, where it should imo only be behind wharf, and now hunting party), but it is nowhere near "broken". It requires you to acquire enough expensive cards to be able to trash them and still have enough good cards left to buy provinces. So even if you both have to go for apprentice (which is not even always the case), there are still potentially multiple ways of getting to the point where you can just apprentice big cards every turn, which allows the game to still be interesting.

[guided]

It's extremely easy to buy and play Apprentice in ways that are not strong. It's a premier endgame accelerator, but only if you've established a big lead in deck value where you can afford to sac big cards to it. To effectively use it you must be ruthless in trashing high-cost cards (or at least Silvers) on it to draw big hands, and you must have some solid plan for how to use those big hands to win the game. Trashing a Copper on an Apprentice should be seen in most cases as a total failure.

[biopower]

I think it's interesting how well some of the new Hinterlands cards combo with Apprentice. Trader can get rid of your Estates for Silvers which can be trashed for more cards, Border Village gives you two expensive cards which can be trashed, and Ill-Gotten Gains can be trashed for 5 cards after it's bought for cursing. To a lesser extent, Fool's Gold works in that it turns into a Gold which can be trashed for a lot of cards and Nomad's Camp can both get you the Turn 2 Apprentice buy and be trashed later for cards.

[Davio]

Apprentice + Border Village =


Imagine that that annotated game had BVs, because I saw several Apprentice buys with $6+...

[Raggedjoe]

I'll agree that the game I linked to was a rather bad example (I wasn't even playing optimally), but I maintain my position about it being very powerful. At the worst, you stick it in Big Money and feed it Duchies and Golds. I just feel it is excessively strong when played.

[DStu]

I'll agree that the game I linked to was a rather bad example (I wasn't even playing optimally), but I maintain my position about it being very powerful. At the worst, you stick it in Big Money and feed it Duchies and Golds. I just feel it is excessively strong when played.

I really like Apprentice, and I also think it's very strong. But I often like to have some support. You want to trash good cards, but you don't want to trash (all of) your Provinces, because you bought them for some reason. You can trash some of them to accelerate the game, but when you trash one and gain one it's +-0, and this will not work unless you have plenty you had a huge lead. Duchies must also been bought. And you don't want to trash all of your Gold, because you need it to buy Provinces.
So at best you need a +Buy and can at least buy a $5card+Province each turn, better more. Without +Buy, you often run out of fuel in the end. And even with +Buy, it's difficult to get all these fuel while buying Provinces to play Apprentice more than once consistently. Unless there is some real good support like Ironworks or Quarry or Peddler or Hoard or Border Village or ... . In which case it really gets insane.
So not saying it is not a really strong card with huge potential. But without it, it is strong to get to the first $8 fastly, but might have not enough power to get you to the finishing line.

[guided]

At the worst, you stick it in Big Money and feed it Duchies and Golds. I just feel it is excessively strong when played.

I doubt this even beats Big Money without Apprentice. Methinks you have much to learn.

The only really strong, easy to spot combo with Apprentice I can think of at the moment is University (well, other than Border Village now). Even then, you definitely need some way to take advantage of really big hands to catch up from the time it takes to get a University-based engine running.

Yes, Apprentice is a good card in a lot of situations. But it's a good card that requires plenty of support and requires thoughtful/skillful play to beat an opponent who is thoughtful and skillful and not using the card. It's not even in the top 10 nearly-"must buy" power cards.

[Raggedjoe]

I don't really find problems fueling it... Festival, Market, Grand Market, Goons, Hoard, Peddler, Boarder Village, Mine, Mint... I could keep going. There are also plenty of ways to gain buys... I dunno. Maybe I just haven't played enough games to have a bad one

[guided]

Yeah. Keep playing, and play against experienced opponents. If you're on isotropic it's not hard to find them. The idea of playing Big Money/Apprentice and buying Duchies so you can trash them on Apprentice is fifty miles from any kind of credible strategy that will beat expert players. This will literally lose to somebody who is buying nothing but Silver, Gold, and basic victory cards, assuming they are familiar with basic principles of Duchy buy timing.

If you're admitting Apprentice needs support to be a great card (which it absolutely does), then that's the exact opposite of what the word "broken" actually means.

[Raggedjoe]

I appologise for saying only apprentice is good.

My point was that there are so many 'support' cards for apprentice that you will very likely see atleast one.

I equate "great with a huge number of cards" with broken. But obviously I'm disagreed with, and I'm certainly no expert

[guided]

I equate "great with a huge number of cards" with broken.

You should stop doing that, then, because that's not a reasonable definition. Worker's Village is great with a huge number of cards; is it broken? Gold is great all by itself; is it broken? You should also consider that good opponents do not go take a nap while you build your engine, and they can buy VP cards or build complex engines too.

Seriously, Apprentice is not even among the elite strong 5s. Look at Witch or Mountebank. Look at Torturer with any Village-type card on the board. Look at Minion in 2p games. Look at Wharf. Heck, Apprentice isn't even a particularly standout $5 non-terminal by the councilroom data.

[barsooma]

Broken is a term that's a lot stronger than "great with a lot of cards."

It should be reserved for something that is so powerful there is no strategy which can ignore it and win. Even then, it also carries an implication that something is so game-warping that it removes the strategy and fun from a game, which is not usually true even on a board with a clearly dominant strategy.

In my opinion, the only thing close to broken in Dominion is the KC-masquerade-militia pin.

[Karrow]

Sorry for the rant, but think before wild claims are made.

Everyone needs to remember, If you don't beat straight big money you're playing bad.  (don't feel bad about it, I play bad all the time)

Big Money baseline without attacks = 20 turn game average.  Now I haven't run the actual distribution, but a sampling of big money games show games regularly run 19-21 turns, rarely they run 17-25 turns.

Yes, a lucky big money can win in 17 turns.

Big money + 1 good card = 19turn average.



Now we have two cards costing 5+, trashing a card that took 5-6 to buy, to draw 5-6 cards.

Broken because it works with so many cards?  I'd like to introduce you to a card called Kings Court.  KC+Lab draws 6 giving three actions without trashing a $6 card!  KC+Smithy draws 9 without trashing.  KC+Envoy draws 15 without trashing,  opponent discards 3 of them, keep 12, don't worry too much about the first two your opponent discarded because they are probably shuffled back in to the last 5.  Ever felt a KC+Torturer?

5 province on 19 turns broken?  ROFL!  Please meet Workshop/Gardens.  Workshop/Gardens will 3-pile all by itself on turn 19 and beat a 7 Province opponent.  5-Prov on turn 19 won't stand a chance.  Two players going workshop/gardens will end the game on 10 turns flat, try picking up an apprentice in those 10 turns and see if it helps.

[Toskk]

Big Money baseline without attacks = 20 turn game average.  Now I haven't run the actual distribution, but a sampling of big money games show games regularly run 19-21 turns, rarely they run 17-25 turns.

As a slight aside, I'd really like to see actual distributions for number of turns to win for Big Money (as well as other common engines). Not that I'm disagreeing in any way with Karrow's estimates, but I think that data would be useful to have, sometimes even more useful than win/loss data or average number of turns to 4 Provinces (after all, BMU is buying more than Provinces). Do any of the sims have the ability to output that data?

[Raggedjoe]

I downloaded Geronimo's sim, and the results are:

BMU goldfishes in about 16-17 turns. But if you place it against itself, it takes 18-20 turns (these numbers come from running 100,000 games 5 times.

[Epoch]

I downloaded Geronimo's sim, and the results are:

BMU goldfishes in about 16-17 turns. But if you place it against itself, it takes 18-20 turns (these numbers come from running 100,000 games 5 times.

This is because when you play BMU against itself, it gets into a Duchy race that sidetracks it from buying Provinces.

[DG]

As a slight aside, I'd really like to see actual distributions for number of turns to win for Big Money (as well as other common engines).

If you look back far enough through the Dominion threads on BoardGameGeek you'll find one that shows how Treasure + single action strategies compare when buying 4 provinces, or some similar measure. It was however done so long ago that it was perhaps before alchemy was released. Nowadays you can download a simulator and run some tests of your own using your choice of kingdom cards.

[Anon79]

HiveMindEmulator: Apprentice is one of the strongest cards in the game (conspicuously missing from theory's top 5 $5 non-attacks, where it should imo only be behind wharf, and now hunting party), but it is nowhere near "broken".

guided: Seriously, Apprentice is not even among the elite strong 5s. Look at Witch or Mountebank. Look at Torturer with any Village-type card on the board. Look at Minion in 2p games. Look at Wharf. Heck, Apprentice isn't even a particularly standout $5 non-terminal by the councilroom data.

best of 9 on require:Apprentice gogogo

Separately, no-attacks benchmark is a little overused around here methinks, because if you're not playing in veto mode then a good proportion of your games will have attacks...

[guided]

I buy Apprentice in a huge proportion of games where it's available (around 80% of the time), because hey look, I have a spare $5 buy lying around, it's non-terminal, and it is hugely helpful in recovering from a bad hand that would otherwise doom me in the endgame. In that sense I would compare it to Laboratory: hey, why not buy it with $5 in the midgame?

What it is not is a card that I see and salivate about the game-breaking possibilities of building an engine around it on any and every board it appears. It's generally not very good in the early game: Trash an Estate and recover to your original hand size? Nice but not nearly as nice as most things other good $5 cards do when helping you build a deck. Draw it with nothing but Copper at turn 5? gg, just click "resign" now and be done with it. Trash a Silver to increase your hand size by 1? Decent-if-not-great in Colony games (where Silver is a less useful card), kinda crap otherwise. Trash a different useful card for a bigger hand size increase? Often the least-worst option, but early in the game you do this at the cost of sacrificing every future play of that useful card (and there would have been several).