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Author Topic: Updating the Top 5 lists  (Read 87976 times)

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rinkworks

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #50 on: November 02, 2011, 11:14:08 pm »
+1

What is this "Traders" card people keep talking about?  There is no such card.
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chwhite

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #51 on: November 02, 2011, 11:44:51 pm »
+1

What is this "Traders" card people keep talking about?  There is no such card.

It's part of the new expansion, along with Stable and Developer and Haggle.
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dondon151

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #52 on: November 02, 2011, 11:52:57 pm »
0

I think what rinkworks is trying to say is that the card does not naturally have the plural form of the noun in its name.
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chwhite

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #53 on: November 02, 2011, 11:58:49 pm »
+1

I think what rinkworks is trying to say is that the card does not naturally have the plural form of the noun in its name.

Read my post a little more carefully. :P
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guided

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #54 on: November 03, 2011, 12:03:37 am »
0

The 20%-25% case is where Outpost begins to approach giving you twice as many endgame turns as your opponents (assuming they think Outpost is the worst $5 card and fail to get in on the action). The 10-15% case is where it straight up gives you full double turns, and you will certainly win if you're the only one playing Outpost. I doubt Counting House's value exceeds that of Duchy at any opportunity to acquire a $5 even once in anything like 10% of games, and it's essentially never as good as the good cases for Outpost. Saboteur is almost as situational (and underwhelming when useful) as Counting House except that it has some bigger upside in a KC deck. Anyone who thinks Outpost is the worst $5 card simply doesn't know how to play Outpost.

Simple examples: Most Outpost/Wharf boards containing a Village variant will overwhelmingly favor playing Outpost. Any board that allows for a halfway decent, nearly full-cycling double-Tactician engine (which is a pretty high percentage of Tactician boards) too. This is by no means an exhaustive list.
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chwhite

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #55 on: November 03, 2011, 12:12:53 am »
0

The 20%-25% case is where Outpost begins to approach giving you twice as many endgame turns as your opponents (assuming they think Outpost is the worst $5 card and fail to get in on the action). The 10-15% case is where it straight up gives you full double turns, and you will certainly win if you're the only one playing Outpost. I doubt Counting House's value exceeds that of Duchy at any opportunity to acquire a $5 even once in anything like 10% of games, and it's essentially never as good as the good cases for Outpost. Saboteur is almost as situational (and underwhelming when useful) as Counting House except that it has some bigger upside in a KC deck. Anyone who thinks Outpost is the worst $5 card simply doesn't know how to play Outpost.

Simple examples: Most Outpost/Wharf boards containing a Village variant will overwhelmingly favor playing Outpost. Any board that allows for a halfway decent, nearly full-cycling double-Tactician engine (which is a pretty high percentage of Tactician boards) too. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Saboteur's upside is also decent in Minion matches, and there is one case where Counting House has as much utility as a best-case Outpost buy: notrash Mountebank games.  I do agree that Outpost is better than these two cards, certainly.
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papaHav

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #56 on: November 03, 2011, 01:40:55 am »
0

Just to clean up the debate a little

Ultra powerful cards when used well:
Outpost, Mint, Bank, Forge, Venture, all the ?VP (vineyard...), all the +VP (bishop...)

Weak cards even when used well:
Mine, Mandarin, Harvest, Cache, Governor, Explorer, Transmute, Adventurer etc.

"best" and "worst" looks at other factors.
Not just powerful, but broadly useful (caravan), "luckbox factor" (treasure map), takes a long time to play (pawn, forge), people play it badly (village), whether there is unfair impact to 2nd player (cutpurse)... etc.

Raw crushing$$$power is just one factor that clearly belongs to enabled bank/outpost.
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dondon151

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #57 on: November 03, 2011, 04:20:27 am »
0

Read my post a little more carefully. :P

Ah, yes. I totally autocompleted those words in my head.
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guided

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #58 on: November 03, 2011, 08:10:03 am »
0

Saboteur's upside is also decent in Minion matches, and there is one case where Counting House has as much utility as a best-case Outpost buy: notrash Mountebank games.
Fair points, though I've never personally used or seen the Counting House counter to Mountebank.
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ackack

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #59 on: November 03, 2011, 08:44:42 am »
0

I agree that it's ridiculous to claim Outpost is the worst $5. What I'm guessing is that, as WW often says, he specializes in Big Moneyish games. And there I can see Outpost being genuinely bad most of the time, giving you 4 and 3 card hands that may be good for Duchies but bad for straight Province running. But there are plenty of engines that love Outpost (decks that can get multiple plays of Wharf, multi-Tactician decks, Minion decks, City decks, other sorts of draw decks with Scheme), and when it's good it's really good. Explorer, Counting House and Stash are all clearly worse in my opinion, and there are several cards (Cache, Mandarin, Saboteur, Contraband) that you can make good arguments for being worse. Basically I doubt Outpost should be on the list at all.
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Davio

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #60 on: November 03, 2011, 09:47:44 am »
+1

I don't think a discussion like this is useful at all for two reasons:

1. All cards are situational. You can't just say that X is horrible per se, because there will be always be that niche setup in which it shines. On the other hand there are probably plenty of games in which you don't need any of the so called "top 5 cards". And what if you play a game with all of those top 5 cards, will the #1 still be the best card for that setup or will the #5 be the best?

2. It promotes tunnel vision. It leads new players to think these cards are good just because they are in the top 5, not making them look further about their actual effects. Dominion is such a complex game, because there are 10+, not just 5, cards in the supply and the dominant strategy may be anything from BMU to the grand daddy Fairgrounds deck with a few copies of everything and the entire Black Market deck.

Of course there are cards which are usually better than others. A Colony is (usually) better than an Estate and a Grand Market is almost always better than a plain Market. Splitting the cards into groups of same cost doesn't help much either; that's because everything from $2-$4 is basically in the same group and everything $5+ makes up the other group.

Assembling a top 5 is also way too static, because of the situational nature of the cards. You can't just blindly buy these cards and expect to win every game.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #61 on: November 03, 2011, 10:03:46 am »
+1

I don't think a discussion like this is useful at all for two reasons:
Great! Ignore it then.

Quote
1. All cards are situational. You can't just say that X is horrible per se, because there will be always be that niche setup in which it shines. On the other hand there are probably plenty of games in which you don't need any of the so called "top 5 cards". And what if you play a game with all of those top 5 cards, will the #1 still be the best card for that setup or will the #5 be the best?

2. It promotes tunnel vision. It leads new players to think these cards are good just because they are in the top 5, not making them look further about their actual effects. Dominion is such a complex game, because there are 10+, not just 5, cards in the supply and the dominant strategy may be anything from BMU to the grand daddy Fairgrounds deck with a few copies of everything and the entire Black Market deck.

Of course there are cards which are usually better than others. A Colony is (usually) better than an Estate and a Grand Market is almost always better than a plain Market. Splitting the cards into groups of same cost doesn't help much either; that's because everything from $2-$4 is basically in the same group and everything $5+ makes up the other group.

Assembling a top 5 is also way too static, because of the situational nature of the cards. You can't just blindly buy these cards and expect to win every game.

Agree with basically everything you're saying (well, except that everything 2-4 is the same and everything 5+ is the same, which isn't right, though even there, you've got a lot of logic behind you, you're just going too far). But these aren't supposed to be be-all and end-all lists! These are supposed to be "This card is USUALLY better than this other card" lists.

greatexpectations

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #62 on: November 03, 2011, 10:08:40 am »
+5

a friendly reminder to all of the disclaimer theory put on the blog posts that started this discussion:

---
Disclaimer: Dominion does a really great job of balancing its Kingdom cards. Pretty much every card has some situations where it shines, and some situations where it doesn’t. Nevertheless, some cards just end up being flat-out better than others, either because they are more useful more often, or just ridiculously good when they are useful. Don’t expect this list to be very scientific.
---
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Empathy

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #63 on: November 03, 2011, 10:24:03 am »
0

Saboteur's upside is also decent in Minion matches, and there is one case where Counting House has as much utility as a best-case Outpost buy: notrash Mountebank games.
Fair points, though I've never personally used or seen the Counting House counter to Mountebank.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20111010-040301-7f6bdd3f.html

Near identical mirror match. The only difference is that I jumped into the counting house craze 3-4 turns earlier rather than go for (Top5) Jester. Granted, apothecary was a mitigating factor.

On a somewhat unrelated topic, warehouse (somewhat trivially) makes for a very good counting house enabler: http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20111007-064649-39b8e0f5.html
In this game, he had the counting houses but not enough warehouses to fuel and control his deck reshuffle. Though cellar is in some ways better: it enables to control exactly when to trigger the reshuffle and can be opened on T1.
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DG

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #64 on: November 03, 2011, 10:29:23 am »
0

Quote
Fair points, though I've never personally used or seen the Counting House counter to Mountebank.
I've actually used counting house to counter sea hags. Yes think on that for a moment. I remodelled curses into coppers and used them to feed apothecaries and counting houses.
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guided

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #65 on: November 03, 2011, 11:18:28 am »
+1

To be clear, I'm not doubting that Counting House can help with Mountebank games, I've just never seen it myself ;)

My personal favorite Counting House synergy is actually with Goons in the absence of Villages.
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AJD

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #66 on: November 03, 2011, 01:32:13 pm »
0

My personal favorite Counting House synergy is actually with Goons in the absence of Villages.

I agree with this! Counting House has also served me well as a partner to Cache (with Haven to finesse timing a bit).
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mDuo13

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #67 on: November 03, 2011, 08:58:07 pm »
0

I'm inclined to say that Cache is underrated, although I haven't played all that many games where I wanted to buy it, the few times I did, I felt like it helped substantially. I'm pretty sure it's better than Counting House. It's definitely not better than IGG.

One thing I feel like hasn't been discussed is when to buy a card that costs less than you have. There are definitely times when, given $5, I'd rather take a $4 card. One of the nice things about Cache is that it's not a terrible buy at any given time. It helps your buying power pretty well, and it fuels things like Stables and Spice Merchant quite nicely. And yes, it's pretty slick in a Gardens deck.

I haven't yet figured out how to use Jack of All Trades properly, I guess. I've been able to do just fine without it in most boards. It's certainly pretty OK most of the time, but I feel like (as its name implies) it's not especially good at any of the things it does. Not being able to trash Coppers is a pretty big drawback.

I agree with most of the OP's sentiments, though. Tunnel is pretty nuts a lot of the time. (Incidentally, Oracle goes pretty well with Tunnel). Develop is awful almost every time. Tournament needs to be on the best list because it dominates games far too often -- even Colony games. Trader is AWESOME. The mere fear of Trader can stop Curse-givers in their tracks ("what if my Mountebank gives him double-Silver instead? Maybe I shouldn't play it at all!"), and that's not to talk about

Another thing that would be interesting to discuss would be cards' early-game / mid-game / late-game potential. Obviously Menagerie is terrible early game and amazing late-game. Less obviously, Swindler gets a lot less good late-game when it's as likely to swap your opponent's Province for another Province than it is to turn their Copper into a Curse. Saboteur is an obnoxious card because it's worse than zero-sum for the game as a whole and it's also very luck-based... but that's exactly why it gives you chance of staging a comeback when the relatively-similar Swindler is as likely to accelerate your demise.
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HiveMindEmulator

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #68 on: November 17, 2011, 02:33:26 am »
0

I realize I'm a couple weeks late to the party, but I wanted to chip in my 2 cents. I didn't make "worst" lists since the criteria are a bit too nebulous, but here are my "best" lists:

Top $6+ cards:
1. Grand Market
2. Goons
3. KC - it can be totally insane, but is a trap much more often than the 2 higher cards
4. Hoard
5. Peddler
6. Nobles - it’s not good if you don’t have villages, but if you do, you definitely want to race these down. It’s okay that you’ll get later provinces when you have extra points and a deck that is less likely to stall

Top $5 attacks:
1. Witch - Less disruptive than MB when there is trashing, better without
2. Mountebank
3. Torturer - alone, weaker than below attacks, but oh so strong with any kind of village
4. Minion - great in 2-player, but needs a lot of support in more players
5. Ghost ship - less dependent on support than other attacks, as it's good in big money decks, but unless you can play them practically every turn, you run a big risk of actually helping your opponents
6. Margrave - not a great attack, but very good benefits to yourself

1&2 are interchangeable, as are 3-5.

Top $5 non-attacks:
1. Ill-gotten gains - it's really a cursing attack, of course it's the best “non-attack”!
2. hunting party - stupid strong with a wide array of cards
3. wharf
4. venture - gets the edge over most other options since it's not an action so it always works, plus it’s totally green-immune
5. tactician - not so sure about this one. when i first read it, i thought it was the best card ever, but unless you’re doing some perpetual tactician strat, it has some trouble with end game, when you can’t afford to take zero for a turn
6. stables - better than lab in untrashed decks, which makes it simply easier to get a stables deck going

There is a huge drop between 1-3 and the rest, which are somewhat interchangeable, along with probably apprentice, lab, vault, embassy, and upgrade (which although not strategy-defining is just so generally good all the time).

While $5 cards can be valued based on how useful they are as a cornerstone of your strategy, $4 cards will rarely be cornerstones. Thus the $4 cards get ranked based on how important it is for you to be aware of their presence.

Top $4 cards:
1. Jack of all trades - puts a real timer on the game, and makes attacks much less worthwhile
2. Sea Hag
3. Young Witch - also a cursing attack. yes there is a bane, but most of the time the bane won’t be good enough to want it over just getting your own young witch
4. Tournament - not always the best card, but one that can definitely change the game a lot
5. Remake - great opener for almost any strategy
6. Salvager - even if you don't agree it's a great opening (which it is), you have to agree that it can have a major effect on accelerating the end-game

Top $3 cards:
1. Masquerade - one of the best openings, good for BM as well as transitions into draw strategies, overall more versatile than ambassador
2. Ambassador
3. Fishing village
4. Warehouse - combos with absolutely everything: cards you need to play often (attacks), cards you need to draw together (treasure map), cards for which you need to play a lot of actions (conspirator), large handsizes (apothecary), you name it
5. Steward - really strong opening when you are going for a slim deck
6. Lookout - non-terminal trashing from outside your hand is really underrated.

The top 4 are well above the rest, but can be re-ordered. I'm pretty set on masquerade being #1, but the other 3 could be shuffled a bit. The 5-6 spots could really be anything out of the listed ones and swindler, menagerie (which is more situational, but gets super-strong), and loan (again non-terminal trashing from outside your hand = good).

Top $2 cards:
1. Chapel
2. Hamlet
3. Courtyard
4. Lighthouse
5. Fool's gold - needs +buy and trashing or drawing, but like minion or warehouse, you simply can't let your opponent get too many, or it gets out of control
6. Crossroads - not always better than cellar, but with a greater chance of being absolutely nuts

The top 4 hardly need any explanation. It's hard to know how high to put fool's gold and crossroads because they are new, but it sure seems like they are really good. If not, the spots can go to pawn and haven, maybe cellar or native village or even embargo (just because it has the ability to change the direction of the game).
« Last Edit: November 17, 2011, 02:35:30 am by HiveMindEmulator »
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ehunt

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #69 on: November 17, 2011, 12:40:02 pm »
0

For the record, I do not think the governor is in the bottom five 5s.
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Jorbles

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #70 on: November 17, 2011, 05:13:38 pm »
0

For the record, I do not think the governor is in the bottom five 5s.

I'd agree with that. And to back that up I'd offer these stats from Council Room's Popular Buys:
Win Rate with 1.01 ± 0.01
Win Rate without 0.98 ± 0.02

It's a little tricky to use Governor properly, but the benefits to you still greatly outweigh the benefits to your opponents. The gain Gold ability and the trash for Remodel are greatly better for you than they are for your opponents.
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WanderingWinder

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #71 on: November 17, 2011, 05:24:04 pm »
0

For the record, I do not think the governor is in the bottom five 5s.

I'd agree with that. And to back that up I'd offer these stats from Council Room's Popular Buys:
Win Rate with 1.01 ± 0.01
Win Rate without 0.98 ± 0.02

It's a little tricky to use Governor properly, but the benefits to you still greatly outweigh the benefits to your opponents. The gain Gold ability and the trash for Remodel are greatly better for you than they are for your opponents.
Each of the abilities is better for you than your opponents, with the possible exception of... the trashing one, where often you'd want to use it to turn estate into silver or copper/curse into nothing. It's not that it's really all that terrible, it's more just... not that great. It's gotta be worse than say jester, which while being a quite decent card, isn't really anything spectacular.
And so if it's not in your bottom 5... what is?

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #72 on: November 17, 2011, 05:29:17 pm »
0

Maybe I am too much of an engine whore, but if you are going for a more combo/chainy deck than your opponent, +2 cards for you and +1 cards for them helps you a lot more than it helps them.
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Rabid

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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #73 on: November 17, 2011, 05:59:21 pm »
0

I think a useful thing about governor is using several of them on the last turn of the game for +3 cards, then your opponent doesn't get to use their benefit at all.
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Re: Updating the Top 5 lists
« Reply #74 on: November 17, 2011, 06:04:28 pm »
0

Is there a place for Noble Brigand and Nomad Camp on the worst card lists? Nomad Camp's singular purpose seems to advance your 3$ draw on turn 2 into a 5$ draw. After that's you just paid four bucks for a Woodcutter. Noble Brigand just seems really weak to me.

And is there a place for Tunnel on the best card list? Man, I love that card! It might be my favorite 3$ card.

I am asking, because I am in no position to judge, just seems to me these cards might deserve mention.
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