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[JacquesTheBard]

Doctor is in your top 10???

If it's not courtyard, I can't think of what else it would be. I suspect that talking about that part of the list will be very entertaining.

Honestly, I'm surprised that the classic BM enablers like Courtyard and Vault were this far down.

Edit: Wow. Every other card in that post has been seen already. It actually is Doctor.

[SCSN]

Lol, I'm not even sure I'd place Doctor above Lookout; the card really is much worse than it looks.

[gman314]

Yeah, it looked good in the previews, but I only really buy it if I can get to a point where I can muster at least 7, and really want some trashing.

[jaybeez]

63.   Bazaar
I believe that this is the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have (trusty steed, powered-up cities, madman being potentially better overall). But it does cost 5.

I am kinda surprised by this.  Don't get me wrong, I think Bazaar is an outstanding card and generally underrated.  But is it really better than Fishing Village or Wandering Minstrel for engines?

[ycz6]

I think by the weird wording "the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have" he means independent of cost. Which I think is relatively uncontroversial.

[WanderingWinder]

I think by the weird wording "the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have" he means independent of cost. Which I think is relatively uncontroversial.

This is what I mean, yes. Obviously I think WM is a better card - it hasn't shown up yet....


As for top 10 Doctor: You have to remember I made this list very shortly after Guilds came out, and there will be a revision as soon as I get through everything.....

[Witherweaver]

I think by the weird wording "the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have" he means independent of cost. Which I think is relatively uncontroversial.

This is what I mean, yes. Obviously I think WM is a better card - it hasn't shown up yet....


As for top 10 Doctor: You have to remember I made this list very shortly after Guilds came out, and there will be a revision as soon as I get through everything.....

[markusin]

My first guess was Doctor. I'll have to stick with that guess until the end.

I totally called it.

[thirtyseven]

Lighthouse stands out as way too low. Can't wait to see the rest of the list!

[Piemaster]

I think by the weird wording "the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have" he means independent of cost. Which I think is relatively uncontroversial.

This is what I mean, yes. Obviously I think WM is a better card - it hasn't shown up yet....

What about Border Village?  Or do you mean strictly what the village does once it's in your deck?

[Warfreak2]

Multi-Goons gets way more than 30 VP tokens.

It can, if your opponent doesn't know what you're doing, or the game is so close that you don't have time to three-pile. Multi-Goons in general gives ridiculously many VP tokens. 15 isn't unreasonable over the whole game, but you shouldn't have 15 coin tokens in your pile at any time. I did in fact give a baseline for how many I think is sensible.

Sometimes multi-Goons is possible; sometimes multi-Merchant Guild is. Sometimes a Golden Deck is fast enough, sometimes Scrying Pool/Candlestick Maker is. Of course there are some games where you can win on VP chips alone, and then there are games where it is sensible to build your entire economy out of coin tokens. But you see Baker and Chapel and think, I'm going to Chapel down and just play a lot of Bakers every turn and buy all the Provinces in one go - but then once you have all those coin tokens you can't buy Provinces because your opponent already has four and you'd end the game with a loss. Normally it's a bad plan, even if it's an exciting one - it's about equivalent to "hey, Bishop is on the board, that means I don't have to buy Victory cards!"

If the phrase "ridiculously many" conjures up for you images of Scrooge McDuck swimming amongst the gold coins in his vault, or you're allergic to hyperbole/flowery language, read "ridiculously many" as "too many", or "more than you should have". It's just a tautology, coin tokens are better than VP chips unless you have more coin tokens than you can sustainably spend at >=1VP per token. But it's not a vacuous truth, as in the next section I demonstrated that the quantities of VP chips produced in a typical game are also sensible quantities of coin tokens in a typical game.

Regarding how many tokens you get per shuffle, that's not really a fair comparison, unless comparing the strength of the official cards rather than just the tokens.  All of the VP token cards are terminal, most of the coin token cards are not.

It's a much better comparison than how many you have at a particular time, or how many you collect throughout the game; it directly tells you how many coin token producers you want in your deck. It is also much easier to estimate how many you would need, because on average, you're going to see each of your cards once per shuffle.

Just because something is non-terminal doesn't mean playing five of them is five times as good as playing one. You can spam Market Squares too, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Yes, it's easier to get coin tokens en masse than VP tokens, because there are non-terminal coin token producers - but that isn't a reason to do it, you have to decide how many coin tokens you will want before more stop being useful to you, and add the appropriate number of coin token producers to your deck, not just blindly buy as many of them as possible.

[WanderingWinder]

I think by the weird wording "the best village for engines which you can buy, at least to have" he means independent of cost. Which I think is relatively uncontroversial.

This is what I mean, yes. Obviously I think WM is a better card - it hasn't shown up yet....

What about Border Village?  Or do you mean strictly what the village does once it's in your deck?

Same with BV.

[eHalcyon]

Multi-Goons gets way more than 30 VP tokens.

It can, if your opponent doesn't know what you're doing, or the game is so close that you don't have time to three-pile. Multi-Goons in general gives ridiculously many VP tokens. 15 isn't unreasonable over the whole game, but you shouldn't have 15 coin tokens in your pile at any time. I did in fact give a baseline for how many I think is sensible.

Sometimes multi-Goons is possible; sometimes multi-Merchant Guild is. Sometimes a Golden Deck is fast enough, sometimes Scrying Pool/Candlestick Maker is. Of course there are some games where you can win on VP chips alone, and then there are games where it is sensible to build your entire economy out of coin tokens. But you see Baker and Chapel and think, I'm going to Chapel down and just play a lot of Bakers every turn and buy all the Provinces in one go - but then once you have all those coin tokens you can't buy Provinces because your opponent already has four and you'd end the game with a loss. Normally it's a bad plan, even if it's an exciting one - it's about equivalent to "hey, Bishop is on the board, that means I don't have to buy Victory cards!"

If the phrase "ridiculously many" conjures up for you images of Scrooge McDuck swimming amongst the gold coins in his vault, or you're allergic to hyperbole/flowery language, read "ridiculously many" as "too many", or "more than you should have". It's just a tautology, coin tokens are better than VP chips unless you have more coin tokens than you can sustainably spend at >=1VP per token. But it's not a vacuous truth, as in the next section I demonstrated that the quantities of VP chips produced in a typical game are also sensible quantities of coin tokens in a typical game.

Regarding how many tokens you get per shuffle, that's not really a fair comparison, unless comparing the strength of the official cards rather than just the tokens.  All of the VP token cards are terminal, most of the coin token cards are not.

It's a much better comparison than how many you have at a particular time, or how many you collect throughout the game; it directly tells you how many coin token producers you want in your deck. It is also much easier to estimate how many you would need, because on average, you're going to see each of your cards once per shuffle.

Just because something is non-terminal doesn't mean playing five of them is five times as good as playing one. You can spam Market Squares too, but that doesn't make it a good idea. Yes, it's easier to get coin tokens en masse than VP tokens, because there are non-terminal coin token producers - but that isn't a reason to do it, you have to decide how many coin tokens you will want before more stop being useful to you, and add the appropriate number of coin token producers to your deck, not just blindly buy as many of them as possible.

I think how many you get over the course of the whole game is a fair comparison.  With VP tokens, they just stick around.  With coin tokens, you spend them as you go -- I'm not making any assumptions about hoarding them!

I'm not convinced that the tokens/shuffle metric is better for the purpose of comparison.  That doesn't tell you how many shuffles you expect to have, so it can't tell you how many VP you would get if those had been VP tokens instead.  It also doesn't account for how soon you can get that going.  For your early shuffles you won't be generating as many tokens, but your later shuffles may also take more turns (or not, depending on the engine).  You say that tokens/shuffle is good because it "directly tells you have many coin token producers you want in your deck".  OK, sure, but that's a point for strategy and not for comparing how good the tokens are.

If the point is to compare VP tokens with coin tokens, you have to consider how many you get over the course of the whole game.  Say you generated 20 coin tokens over the course of the game and spent 15 of them, who knows.  Those extra 5 coin tokens are wasted.  If you had just generated VP tokens intead, those extras count!  But maybe you couldn't have bought a certain key card.

Finally, I was not saying that it's good to play lots of cards just because they are non-terminal.  My point was that, if you consider the official cards, it is actually far easier to generate coin tokens than VP tokens.  Since most of them are non-terminal, you can safely load up on more of the producers and you can play more of them as well.  Since two are cantrips, they also help you shuffle more often.  Generally speaking, you can expect to generate more coin tokens per shuffle and you can expect to shuffle more often.  But that's because (as someone put it above) coin tokens have diminishing returns.  If cards let you produce VP tokens as easily, they would be broken.

[eHalcyon]

If the phrase "ridiculously many" conjures up for you images of Scrooge McDuck swimming amongst the gold coins in his vault, or you're allergic to hyperbole/flowery language, read "ridiculously many" as "too many", or "more than you should have". It's just a tautology, coin tokens are better than VP chips unless you have more coin tokens than you can sustainably spend at >=1VP per token. But it's not a vacuous truth, as in the next section I demonstrated that the quantities of VP chips produced in a typical game are also sensible quantities of coin tokens in a typical game.

I should respond to this specifically.  You can't really suggest that there is a "too many" here.  It's disingenuous to say "coin tokens are definitely better than VP tokens unless you have too many of them", where "too many" is the point at which VP tokens have a greater impact.  Like you said, that's just tautology. 



Hmm, if we do consider tokens/shuffle, consider this:

If you get 3-6 coin tokens per shuffle, how big of an impact is that making in terms of points?  How often does that boost you up from Duchy to Province?   How does that compare to just getting 3-6 VP tokens per shuffle?  Keep in mind that the coin token doesn't matter if you hit $8 without it.

I think that at 3-6 per shuffle, coin tokens and VP tokens are pretty close with coin tokens edging out slightly.  But as you produce more per shuffle, VP tokens are better.  And yeah, you usually wouldn't try to do that with coin tokens because you don't need to, but it is not ridiculous to do that with VP tokens.

[Warfreak2]

You can't really suggest that there is a "too many" here.  It's disingenuous to say "coin tokens are definitely better than VP tokens unless you have too many of them", where "too many" is the point at which VP tokens have a greater impact.  Like you said, that's just tautology. 

What do you mean I can't? I did. Obviously there is such a thing as "too many": it's when you have more coin tokens than are worth getting. That's not disingenuous, it's genuine strategy advice: collect coin tokens in quantities at which you can sustainably spend them at >=1VP per token. If you have a bunch left at the end of the game that you didn't spend, then you weren't good enough at predicting the end of the game - you can spend your last few below parity, while still averaging >=1VP per token over the whole game.

I think that at 3-6 per shuffle, coin tokens and VP tokens are pretty close with coin tokens edging out slightly.  But as you produce more per shuffle, VP tokens are better.  And yeah, you usually wouldn't try to do that with coin tokens because you don't need to, but it is not ridiculous to do that with VP tokens.

It's not always ridiculous to do that with VP tokens, but neither for coin tokens, there's an exact correlation between multi-Goons and multi-Merchant Guild, and when either is possible, it's a strong strategy. Goons is better obviously, because Merchant Guild needs to spend those tokens on later turns, but Goons costs more and your opponents will attack you with it. Sometimes you can do Bishop/Market Square, sometimes you can play 7 Candlestick Makers per turn, but most boards don't support strategies like that. Anyway, if you produce the first $2 by other means, even these decks are buying Provinces at parity.

It's hard for me to read these objections as other than "I failed to use coin tokens effectively, and wouldn't it be nice if they were VP chips instead". Yeah, I've made those decks too, and I lost, but I didn't blame the coin tokens.

[eHalcyon]

I think you are misunderstanding me.  I am not talking about strategy for how to use the tokens effectively.  Either coin or VP tokens can be more effective depending on the board.

If you are examining how good coin tokens are compared to VP tokens, then it is wrong to arbitrarily define "too much" in favour of coin tokens.  Look at the flip side -- I can also argue that VP tokens are always better than coin tokens, except when you don't have enough.

When you cannot get an abundance of tokens, coin tokens will usually be more useful.  When you can, VP tokens will often be better.  Do you disagree with this?  This was my point.  Coin tokens are not always better.  Suggesting that VP tokens are only better in "ridiculous" quantities is wrong because you ARE able to achieve those values a fair amount of the time.

Again, the takeaway is that it is not uncommon for VP tokens to be better.

[Mic Qsenoch]

You can't really suggest that there is a "too many" here.  It's disingenuous to say "coin tokens are definitely better than VP tokens unless you have too many of them", where "too many" is the point at which VP tokens have a greater impact.  Like you said, that's just tautology. 

What do you mean I can't? I did. Obviously there is such a thing as "too many": it's when you have more coin tokens than are worth getting. That's not disingenuous, it's genuine strategy advice: collect coin tokens in quantities at which you can sustainably spend them at >=1VP per token. If you have a bunch left at the end of the game that you didn't spend, then you weren't good enough at predicting the end of the game - you can spend your last few below parity, while still averaging >=1VP per token over the whole game.

It's genuinely useless strategy advice. Slightly above "try to score more points than your opponent."

Also, just because you have excess coin tokens at the end of the game does not mean your strategy or token use was bad. Dominion is a game of chance (breaking news!), sometimes unlikely things happen that harm your strategy (or help it), that doesn't mean your decisions were bad. Maybe I had crazy good draws and I didn't need that pile of tokens after all. If you're building for a token mega-turn, or even a mere double Province turn, you might get caught with extra tokens, but hey sometimes my opponent beats me to KC-Bridge, does that mean I shouldn't have gone for KC-Bridge?

I think that at 3-6 per shuffle, coin tokens and VP tokens are pretty close with coin tokens edging out slightly.  But as you produce more per shuffle, VP tokens are better.  And yeah, you usually wouldn't try to do that with coin tokens because you don't need to, but it is not ridiculous to do that with VP tokens.

It's not always ridiculous to do that with VP tokens, but neither for coin tokens, there's an exact correlation between multi-Goons and multi-Merchant Guild, and when either is possible, it's a strong strategy. Goons is better obviously, because Merchant Guild needs to spend those tokens on later turns, but Goons costs more and your opponents will attack you with it. Sometimes you can do Bishop/Market Square, sometimes you can play 7 Candlestick Makers per turn, but most boards don't support strategies like that. Anyway, if you produce the first $2 by other means, even these decks are buying Provinces at parity.

It's hard for me to read these objections as other than "I failed to use coin tokens effectively, and wouldn't it be nice if they were VP chips instead". Yeah, I've made those decks too, and I lost, but I didn't blame the coin tokens.

[Davio]

I appreciate you taking the time to fill in your rankings, WW, but don't you think a numbered list from 1 - 200+ is a bit silly?
I mean, how do we compare #154 to #166? If I were to do a ranking like this - and I might at some point if I'm really bored - I think I would just create 5 groups maximum and maybe do a top 10 of the first group only.

Top Tier: Cards that absolutely dominate most of the kingdoms they're in (King's Court, Goons, Mountebank, etc...)
Second Tier: Cards that are very useful on a high number of kingdoms (probably some good Villages, trashers, etc)
Third Tier: Cards that you could take or leave most of the time (think Great Hall or something)
Fourth Tier: Cards that are generally bad and need a rare and specific kingdom to shine (Counting House)
Fifth Tier: Scout

[Robz888]

I appreciate you taking the time to fill in your rankings, WW, but don't you think a numbered list from 1 - 200+ is a bit silly?
I mean, how do we compare #154 to #166? If I were to do a ranking like this - and I might at some point if I'm really bored - I think I would just create 5 groups maximum and maybe do a top 10 of the first group only.

Top Tier: Cards that absolutely dominate most of the kingdoms they're in (King's Court, Goons, Mountebank, etc...)
Second Tier: Cards that are very useful on a high number of kingdoms (probably some good Villages, trashers, etc)
Third Tier: Cards that you could take or leave most of the time (think Great Hall or something)
Fourth Tier: Cards that are generally bad and need a rare and specific kingdom to shine (Counting House)
Fifth Tier: Scout

Disagree. Each card is better or worse than every other card! Let's rank them accordingly.

[Tables]

I appreciate you taking the time to fill in your rankings, WW, but don't you think a numbered list from 1 - 200+ is a bit silly?
I mean, how do we compare #154 to #166? If I were to do a ranking like this - and I might at some point if I'm really bored - I think I would just create 5 groups maximum and maybe do a top 10 of the first group only.

Top Tier: Cards that absolutely dominate most of the kingdoms they're in (King's Court, Goons, Mountebank, etc...)
Second Tier: Cards that are very useful on a high number of kingdoms (probably some good Villages, trashers, etc)
Third Tier: Cards that you could take or leave most of the time (think Great Hall or something)
Fourth Tier: Cards that are generally bad and need a rare and specific kingdom to shine (Counting House)
Fifth Tier: Scout

Disagree. Each card is better or worse than every other card! Let's rank them accordingly.

Well, better or worse or the same. And it's extremely hard to exactly rate lots of cards which are very close together. And while there might theoretically exist an exact order, in practice it comes down a lot to how one ranks the cards. Which is better: A card that dominates 5% of the time, is a useful buy 10% of the time and is worthless 85% of the time, or a card which is dominates 1% of the time, is a useful buy 39% of the time and is worthless 60% of the time? It's not really possible to say objectively.

[Warfreak2]

If you are examining how good coin tokens are compared to VP tokens, then it is wrong to arbitrarily define "too much" in favour of coin tokens.

Disingenuous, huh? I said it would be too many coin tokens, when did I refer to 'too many tokens which could either be coin tokens or VP chips'? Obviously it's not wrong to define "too many coin tokens" as being more coin tokens than it is strategically sound to collect. Please, how can you even have too many VP chips. That is some real garbage argumentation there.

When you cannot get an abundance of tokens, coin tokens will usually be more useful.  When you can, VP tokens will often be better.  Do you disagree with this?  This was my point.  Coin tokens are not always better.  Suggesting that VP tokens are only better in "ridiculous" quantities is wrong because you ARE able to achieve those values a fair amount of the time.

Yes, I said that. If you are doing multi-Goons or a Golden Deck then in those quantities you'd rather have VP chips. I said that. But that's a small proportion of games, normally it's not sensible to have more than 6 Monuments in your deck, normally you don't have a free source of fuel for Bishop, so in every other game you're going to get VP chips in quantities at which coin tokens are better. If all you want to do is argue about how many games that is, have that argument with a brick wall, I don't care about it.

It's genuinely useless strategy advice. Slightly above "try to score more points than your opponent."

In the Baker preview thread, the consensus was that you want to spend coin tokens very soon after you get them, so that you have more of the game left during which you can benefit from your improved deck. On the other hand, I'm advocating spending tokens primarily on improving VP purchases in the later game. Even then, it is easier to get coin tokens than VP tokens, so it would make sense if you chose some other cutoff, say, 0.8VP each. So, I'm advocating a particular use for coin tokens, and then a particular parameter for that use, and then saying build a deck that produces that many coin tokens and not more. It's not even definitely good advice - we could argue about that instead of some garbage like how often you can Bishop a Gold every turn - so I struggle to see why you'd compare it to advice like "try to win".

[RTT]

Hey WW how about playing a game with your top 10 and your worst 10 and putting them on your Youtube channel? would be interesting to watch

greetings RTT

[SCSN]

Your argument just makes zero sense. Stipulating that you only spend coin tokens when you can get >1 VP in return doesn't make them better than VP tokens, it makes them much, much worse due to the opportunity cost of not spending them in other productive ways and in getting them in the first place. In fact, if you're only planning to use them in such a restrictive fashion, it's better not to get them at all.

In particular:

I mean, you can just play an otherwise-identical strategy, only using coin tokens to improve the VP you are already buying, on the condition that you get more than 1 VP per token

No, you can't just play an "otherwise-identical strategy", because where you spend some economy in setting up coin tokens, your opponent is doing something else (which is almost certainly better), or if you both have coin tokens, him spending them more liberally deviates from "otherwise-identical" and will also lead to better results than just using them for >1 VP/token.

[Warfreak2]

Of course you can use them for other things too; if it's better to use them for other things, do that, "better" means you're getting more than 1VP of value out of them in the long-run, and it's another reason to prefer them as coin tokens rather than VP chips. More flexibility doesn't make them worse...

I don't know what you mean by the "opportunity cost", here. Obviously producing VP chips are also at the opportunity cost of whatever else you could be doing; spending coin tokens suboptimally is only an opportunity cost compared to using them better, not compared to having VP chips instead. If you can use them better, great, but my proposed strategy makes coin tokens worth, on average over the course of the game, more than VP chips - I didn't say it was the best way to use them, but it's a possible way to use them, in which they are better than VP chips, in the same quantities that you normally have VP chips. If there's a better way to use them then they are that much better than VP chips. What's the problem?

[SCSN]

"better" means you're getting more than 1VP of value out of them in the long-run

No, it does not.