I was unable to check out the forum this week. So I just was able to look over the village discussion. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the Walled Village vs. Farming Village question.
However, this discussion did bring up another question for me. When did we start calling villages "splitters" and why? They give you an extra turn, but what exactly are they splitting?
I and some others (but not most people) started calling splitters splitters in 2012* when onigame posted his Dominion Set Generator which used terminology that he, as a Dominion playtester, had been using, including the word "splitter". The reasons why I call them splitters are that there's no question about the definition of a splitter — it's simply anything that lets you split an action — and that one definition is also the most strategically relevant thing to discuss. "Village", however, could mean any of the following:
- The card whose name is just Village
- Any card with the word "village" in its title (sometimes including Ruined Village)
- Any card that always does everything that vanilla Village does
- Any card that always has an effect roughly comparable to Village (e.g. Lost City might not qualify because it's too powerful and Squire might not qualify because it's too weak)
- Any card that always or through a choice effect explicitly gives +2 actions
- Any card that is capable of giving +2 actions
- Any splitter
- Any combination of these (for example, to include Ruined Village as well as cards such as Squire)
This doesn't necessarily cause too much confusion because usually you can tell from the context what people mean, but it has the potential to be confusing. Most importantly though, the most popular definition is probably "Any card that always or through a choice effect explicitly gives +2 actions", and that categorization is something that everyone has to unlearn during their process of climbing up the leaderboard from the intermediate ranks to the high level ranks. Like, people used to joke about Marin and Throne Room but these days it's not good enough to joke about it, you actually need to be able to pull it off yourself. I'd rather use the kind of terminology that already pushes people to think in ways which will help them improve as players.
*: I couldn't figure out a way to convey the relevant information nicely and accurately, so relevant but inaccurate information conveyed nicely will have to do. To be accurate,
I probably didn't start calling them splitters until later when I stumbled upon that thread.
TL;DR: Splitters are splitters because it would be weird to call Summon "a village" and it would also be weird to not group Summon together with Village.