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Author Topic: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck  (Read 6104 times)

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scott_pilgrim

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Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« on: July 06, 2013, 05:23:59 pm »
+1

Trying to beat the Lucky Chancellor got me thinking about this.  What is the fastest you can empty the supply, assuming worst case shuffle luck?

You can choose the kingdom, and set the Black Market deck however you like.  (I would also be interested to see what people can do with a shuffled Black Market deck, but that probably just means it goes unused.)

In order to prevent a giant tree of possibilities (or at least, to minimize those possibilities), I would guess you want to trash down with Chapel and/or Doctor, then try to build up a megaturn starting from just a few cards.  I don't have a baseline solution.  I would expect good solutions to be around 11-13 turns.  If someone can do it in 10 or less I will be very impressed.  Actually, I would be impressed by any solutions at all, regardless of number of turns.
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liopoil

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #1 on: July 06, 2013, 06:00:09 pm »
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A megaturn will be harder because of the kingdom spots used up by the cards needed to trash. I mean, I can trash down to a deck of Pr-Pr-Fortress-Watchtower, but it'll be hard to explode as much as you can in CC's turn 4 solution.
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ftl

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #2 on: July 09, 2013, 10:16:33 pm »
0

 
Actually, I would be impressed by any solutions at all, regardless of number of turns.

It's definitely possible. If you trash all your non-actions, then a single scrying pool will draw your whole deck, and even worst-case shuffle luck can't prevent you from buying a scrying pool and trashing all your treasures eventually. And then you have plenty of ways to set up the rest of the kingdom so that you can use it to generate a huge turn.

You can even put "Chapel, Scrying Pool, Young Witch" as the only three cards in the Black Market deck, so that you have 10 kingdom piles worth of stuff to generate a game-ending turn, if you need that (though it would delay you far too much if you need speed).

Getting it *fast* is tricky though, and I have no idea how I'd go about that.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 10:18:59 pm by ftl »
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JacquesTheBard

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #3 on: July 09, 2013, 10:38:03 pm »
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I love these bad-luck puzzles. I love them so much! Thinking it through, trashing is naturally crucial. One of the more notable tricks for emptying the supply is Haggler abuse, specifically the Black Market-Haggler trick. Black Market is not a feasible investment on a minimal-luck board, however. The Black Market deck will naturally give you the least optimal cards for Haggler tricks: say, Pearl Diver, Duchess and Secret Chamber. Straight haggler use, in which you hard buy colonies or provinces, is certainly possible, but requires more effort.

Because more buildup is required to get 10 Hagglers in play with an astronomical amount of money, I wonder if a single gain-and-play megaturn CC style is viable at all. If not, Scheme and scrying pool are excellent kingdom additions, bypassing the danger of a bad draw.

I suspect that the opening here and the corresponding trashing will mirror the mint/chapel tricks from the Chancellor challenge. The sooner the deck is thinned, the sooner crazy combos become possible.

Edit: I see that scott pilgrim allowed a lucky Black Market deck, which changes this challenge considerably. With that in place, CC-esque solutions are more viable. As for the complexity of kingdom cards being too numerous, I doubt that hamlet and nomad camp will be as necessary once we no longer assume the perfect nomad camp/watchtower-hamlet opening.
« Last Edit: July 09, 2013, 10:40:54 pm by JacquesTheBard »
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Powerman

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #4 on: July 10, 2013, 11:57:23 am »
0

Trying to beat the Lucky Chancellor got me thinking about this.  What is the fastest you can empty the supply, assuming worst case shuffle luck?

You can choose the kingdom, and set the Black Market deck however you like.  (I would also be interested to see what people can do with a shuffled Black Market deck, but that probably just means it goes unused.)

In order to prevent a giant tree of possibilities (or at least, to minimize those possibilities), I would guess you want to trash down with Chapel and/or Doctor, then try to build up a megaturn starting from just a few cards.  I don't have a baseline solution.  I would expect good solutions to be around 11-13 turns.  If someone can do it in 10 or less I will be very impressed.  Actually, I would be impressed by any solutions at all, regardless of number of turns.

Do you want the opening split "worst possible" or can we do 5/2?
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JacquesTheBard

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #5 on: July 10, 2013, 03:08:09 pm »
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I think worst possible opening split is best.
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scott_pilgrim

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #6 on: July 10, 2013, 03:27:06 pm »
0

Trying to beat the Lucky Chancellor got me thinking about this.  What is the fastest you can empty the supply, assuming worst case shuffle luck?

You can choose the kingdom, and set the Black Market deck however you like.  (I would also be interested to see what people can do with a shuffled Black Market deck, but that probably just means it goes unused.)

In order to prevent a giant tree of possibilities (or at least, to minimize those possibilities), I would guess you want to trash down with Chapel and/or Doctor, then try to build up a megaturn starting from just a few cards.  I don't have a baseline solution.  I would expect good solutions to be around 11-13 turns.  If someone can do it in 10 or less I will be very impressed.  Actually, I would be impressed by any solutions at all, regardless of number of turns.

Do you want the opening split "worst possible" or can we do 5/2?
Worst would be more impressive, but if you can only do it with control over the opening split I would still like to see it.  This is a hard enough puzzle that I think it's best to be lenient with that sort of thing.
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heron

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #7 on: July 10, 2013, 03:50:59 pm »
0

Trying to beat the Lucky Chancellor got me thinking about this.  What is the fastest you can empty the supply, assuming worst case shuffle luck?

You can choose the kingdom, and set the Black Market deck however you like.  (I would also be interested to see what people can do with a shuffled Black Market deck, but that probably just means it goes unused.)

In order to prevent a giant tree of possibilities (or at least, to minimize those possibilities), I would guess you want to trash down with Chapel and/or Doctor, then try to build up a megaturn starting from just a few cards.  I don't have a baseline solution.  I would expect good solutions to be around 11-13 turns.  If someone can do it in 10 or less I will be very impressed.  Actually, I would be impressed by any solutions at all, regardless of number of turns.

Do you want the opening split "worst possible" or can we do 5/2?
Worst would be more impressive, but if you can only do it with control over the opening split I would still like to see it.  This is a hard enough puzzle that I think it's best to be lenient with that sort of thing.
Well, just toss a baker in the black market and there's your 5/3 opening.
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florrat

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #8 on: July 10, 2013, 04:24:45 pm »
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Well, just toss a baker in the black market and there's your 5/3 opening.
That might work for some openings, but maybe you want to guarantee yourself a 6/2 or 4/4 opening, or you want to open Inn+Chapel in the correct order, or you want to trash 5 coppers with mint, or you want to trash at least 1 estate with doctor (opening 6/?). So in general a coin token can't help you with your ideal opening.

If we can choose the opening, then I want to have 5C on T1, spend coin token, buy doctor and trash 3 estates. If this is not allowed, because I cannot assume that my 6th, 7th and 8th card are estates, then I think the line which is drawn between what is allowed (choosing opening split) and what isn't (choosing the order of my starting deck) a little arbitrary.

By the way: I'm not expecting any solutions of this puzzle, because with worst possible shuffle luck this puzzle is very hard to do efficiently, and probably the optimal solution is very tedious to write down. But I could be wrong.
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jomini

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #9 on: July 10, 2013, 05:37:36 pm »
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The big problem with worst possible is that some things you'd think would be the "worst possible" outcome, actually are not the worst possible. Take the simple case of Mint. Mint excels at reducing card count an increasing your ability to engineer shuffles. So say you open Mint/Chap (using Baker coin from Black market) with an eye towards rebuilding by either buying Peddlers & Pawns or using Squires and attacks (like Margrave or Goons). In the former case you likely are going to want to explode somewhere with a card that utilizes Peddler value - Stone mason, Develop, Salvager, etc. - this means worse luck is having to Chapel away the Mint and surrender its 5 coin value. However, if you are going for the Squire approach, then you want to chapel Mint asap as it is just as dead as an estate. Complicating things is if a 3 coin buy could have value greater than a 2 coin buy and ditching a copper. So is the worst possible T4 ChapCCCMint or ChapCCCE or ChapCCEMint or ChapCCEE? Depends.

Now you can make those somewhat degenerate by just never playing the Mint or buying 3 coin cards at this point, but proving worst case scenarios is pretty hard.
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scott_pilgrim

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #10 on: July 10, 2013, 06:23:03 pm »
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By the way: I'm not expecting any solutions of this puzzle, because with worst possible shuffle luck this puzzle is very hard to do efficiently, and probably the optimal solution is very tedious to write down. But I could be wrong.
Well, it depends on what qualifies as a solution.  I'm guessing that "good" solutions might not ever come up, but it's not too difficult to find just one solution.  For example, if you can just find a way to trash your deck down to Salvager and Province (and up to three other cards), you can buy one card at a time and finish in probably less than 300 turns.  If you can set up Village-Salvager-Salvager-Province-Province, that's probably less than 200 turns.  Other people might be able to come up with better solutions.  Whether a "good" solution exists is probably dependent on whether it's possible to make a supply-draining megaturn starting from just 5 cards, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it is.

Certainly with worst-case shuffle luck puzzles, you want to trash down as quickly as you can so that you don't have to deal with lots of cases.  I'm guessing that finding a good solution (15 turns or less or so) will require two main steps: 1. proving that some trashing method can reach the desired deck in a given number of turns, and 2. setting up a megaturn starting from 5 cards.
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Powerman

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #11 on: July 10, 2013, 08:04:21 pm »
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I'd bet 11 turns is possible.  I bet I could do 12.  Just use my solution to Lucky Chancellor, but switch out Moat, Chancellor, and Fortress for Watchtower, Squire, and Scrying Pool.  Eh... maybee you need Haggler, so put BM (with Baker and YW) and make one of them the bane.  Then buy a bunch of actions turn 10-11, but with a Watchtower in hand to trash a squire and topdeck a SP.
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florrat

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #12 on: July 10, 2013, 09:45:14 pm »
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I'd bet 11 turns is possible.  I bet I could do 12.  Just use my solution to Lucky Chancellor, but switch out Moat, Chancellor, and Fortress for Watchtower, Squire, and Scrying Pool.  Eh... maybee you need Haggler, so put BM (with Baker and YW) and make one of them the bane.  Then buy a bunch of actions turn 10-11, but with a Watchtower in hand to trash a squire and topdeck a SP.
Hmm... It might actually work with so few turns (but you're assuming having a 5/2-split, right?), but I still see some problems.

If I can count, at the start of the game the supply contains 303 cards (assuming 1-player game, colonies and YW in supply) (Treasures: 53C+40S+30G+12Plat+16Pot, Victory Cards: 8*4, 10 Curses, 110 Kingdom cards). We don't want to play to much bridges, otherwise our hagglers don't gain cards, but we want to play some, to make things payable. I think 7 bridges is the ideal amount, then you can gain a card with haggler for every Province, Colony and Platinum buy. If we end our mega-turn with 10 hagglers in play, have 7 cost reduction, we can probably manage with 38 buys and 52 coins (maybe we need a few buys and coins more).

That way you can buy all victory cards and 6 platinum, gaining all other cards with haggler (except Scrying Pool, which should be gained by trashing all gained Squires immediately with a Watchtower). Then you buy 38 cards, gain 220 cards with haggler, and ~9 cards with Watchtower+Squire, totalling 267 gained cards in our megaturn. So in this scenario we will need to gain the other 36 cards in earlier turns.

Coins won't be the problem, but getting enough buys will be a problem. We can't use Squire for +buys, because they all need to be trashed to gain the Scrying Pools, and we just get 7 buys from bridges. So I think we should add a cheap source of +buy in the kingdom, like Candlestick Maker. If you king court all 10 of them, and play 7 bridges, you get 38 buys.

So if we follow this idea we will need to start our mega turn with the following cards (or gain them during our megaturn):
-7 King Court (giving 13 positions, 10 for CM, 2 for bridge, also giving enough actions to play hagglers)
-3 Bridge
-10 Candlestick Makers
-10 Hagglers
-Scrying Pool (in starting hand)
- Watchtower
- Some other action cards (no non-action cards must be in deck)
Note that this deck also fulfills the requirement that we gain 36 cards on turns before our mega-turn (we have also gained Ch, Fg*2, Mint, Squire, totalling 3)

Probably we want to make a mini-megaturn before our real megaturn to get all needed components. For example with the following deck we can gain all components:
- 2 KC
- 2 CM
- 2 Bridge
- 2 Hag
- SP (in starting hand)
- WT
Then you can play SP -- KC-KC-Br-Br-CM -- Hag -- Hag, buy 8 KC, Bridge and Squire (trash for SP and topdeck), and gain 8 Hagglers and 8 CM.

This seems to point in the good direction for a solution... :D

By the way: I'm not expecting any solutions of this puzzle, because with worst possible shuffle luck this puzzle is very hard to do efficiently, and probably the optimal solution is very tedious to write down. But I could be wrong.
Well, it depends on what qualifies as a solution.  I'm guessing that "good" solutions might not ever come up, but it's not too difficult to find just one solution.  For example, if you can just find a way to trash your deck down to Salvager and Province (and up to three other cards), you can buy one card at a time and finish in probably less than 300 turns.  If you can set up Village-Salvager-Salvager-Province-Province, that's probably less than 200 turns.  Other people might be able to come up with better solutions.  Whether a "good" solution exists is probably dependent on whether it's possible to make a supply-draining megaturn starting from just 5 cards, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it is.

Certainly with worst-case shuffle luck puzzles, you want to trash down as quickly as you can so that you don't have to deal with lots of cases.  I'm guessing that finding a good solution (15 turns or less or so) will require two main steps: 1. proving that some trashing method can reach the desired deck in a given number of turns, and 2. setting up a megaturn starting from 5 cards.
I was talking about good solutions indeed. Note that your suggestions do not quite work, because you will three pile before you empty the supply. In the last turn at the very least 15 cards must be gained.
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Warfreak2

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #13 on: July 11, 2013, 04:10:07 am »
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You could start a five-card megaturn with KC/KC/KC/Bridge/Ironworks, gaining Ironworks, Nobles, Nobles, in that order to guarantee drawing Ironworks and Nobles. It's not actually necessary to gain the whole supply in this turn - KC/Scheme perpetually putting 10 KCs, 10 Schemes, one Bridge and 9 Ironworks on your deck (in an appropriate order) will not take many additional turns. This requires five supply slots (KC, Bridge, Ironworks, Scheme, Nobles), leaving plenty of room for a bunch of cards that let you trash quickly.
« Last Edit: July 11, 2013, 04:12:49 am by Warfreak2 »
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florrat

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #14 on: July 11, 2013, 05:14:40 am »
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You could start a five-card megaturn with KC/KC/KC/Bridge/Ironworks, gaining Ironworks, Nobles, Nobles, in that order to guarantee drawing Ironworks and Nobles. It's not actually necessary to gain the whole supply in this turn - KC/Scheme perpetually putting 10 KCs, 10 Schemes, one Bridge and 9 Ironworks on your deck (in an appropriate order) will not take many additional turns. This requires five supply slots (KC, Bridge, Ironworks, Scheme, Nobles), leaving plenty of room for a bunch of cards that let you trash quickly.
I doubt such a thing will be very fast. You need to gain about 257 cards during the whole game (2 less for each victory kingdom pile), so if you gain 31 cards during your megaturns (27 from ironworks and 4 from buys), then the megaturn part will still take 7 or 8 turns...
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Warfreak2

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #15 on: July 11, 2013, 08:11:29 am »
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On second thought, if you're doing it over multiple turns KC/Scheme, you don't need to trash down to a five-card deck first, so you can potentially save time there. Scheme lines itself up with KC without assistance.
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florrat

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #16 on: July 11, 2013, 09:45:33 pm »
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True, but to guarantee gaining a KC, you will probably need to trash down quite a bit anyway (probably to a deck with 5 or fewer cards). Maybe you can try something with Death Card, but probably that will end up in a big mess (more junk in your deck).
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Warfreak2

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #17 on: July 12, 2013, 04:41:05 am »
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Watchtower with $4 and three buys can buy and topdeck Death Cart (and its two Ruins), plus two Coppers.
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florrat

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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #18 on: July 12, 2013, 08:10:16 am »
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Watchtower with $4 and three buys
That sounds equally hard - or maybe even harder - than getting $7...
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Re: Empty the Supply with Bad Shuffle Luck
« Reply #19 on: July 12, 2013, 10:27:05 am »
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I think CSM as a very cheap source of money smoothing and +Buy could be very important to setting up megaturns.
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