I’ve noticed that throughout this forum and on isotropic, there are a lot of misinformed beliefs about Jack of All Trades. I’ve made a ton of posts on various different threads to try to set the record straight -- enough that I’ve decided to just make my own thread. For fun, I’ve decided to try out this true/false format (which I’d love to read your comments on). I’m basically going to make statements about Jack of All Trades, some of which are true, and some of which just
sound like the true ones, but are actually not true. Now, none of these things are provably true or false, so don’t take these as facts (that’s how we got in this mess to begin with). But hopefully if you read the explanations, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
So here goes...
1. Jack is a strong opening $4 card.TRUE.On early turns with Jack, you almost always trash an estate, gain a silver, and cycle at least one extra card. And you still have enough in your hand to buy a $4-5 card. This is pretty solid early game turn, by any standard.
2. Jack makes the game faster.TRUE.Double Jack can get 4 provinces in 14 turns pretty easy. And double Jack is a baseline for games with Jack. It's generally a lower-bound for Jack+X. Of course other stronger Jack+X strategies may be slightly slower with their strength coming from +Buy or something. But for the most part, Big Money strategies with Jack openings are pretty fast.
3. You can't play slower strategies when Jack is around.FALSE.Sure, someone playing Jack+money can get 4 provinces in 14 turns. But the game doesn’t end when 4 provinces are gone. It ends when
all the provinces are gone or 3 piles run out. A true statement might be that you can’t play slow strategies when Jack is around and there are no alternative sources of VPs, since the Jack player can grab half the available points pretty quickly. But with alternative sources of VPs, there are often ways for slower strategies to win.
4. "DoubleJack" (buying 2 Jacks and then just money) is one of the strongest single-card strategies.TRUE.If you go in the simulator and pit single-card strategies against each other, Jack is going to win a lot. As far as I can tell, it only loses to Young Witch, Witch, Mountebank, Wharf, Masquerade, and Courtyard.
5. Playing DoubleJack is often the best choice in a real game.FALSE.If you were restricted to only play single-card strategies, then sure you'd want to play Jack a lot, but you're not. If you could only play single-card strategies, Dominion would not be a best-selling game (and Young Witch would be the best card in the game)! Single-card strategies are fine to simulate to give simplified, baseline comparisons of cards, but you don't really want to do that in real games too often. Jack+almost anything beats pure jack.
You can try it out in the simulator. Take any of the following bots, and add a buy rule for 1-2 Jacks ahead of Silver, and you’ll get something that beats the Jack bot: Bank, Bazaar, Cartographer, Council Room, Duke, Embassy, Explorer, Festival, Goons, Harem, Inn, Laboratory, Library, Merchant Ship, Nobles, Rabble, Royal Seal, Stables, Stash, Torturer, Vault, Venture. Note that this is not a complete list of things that work better with Jack -- in fact, it’s nearly trivial to create several more, including Ill-Gotten Gains, Monument, Envoy, Smithy, Tournament, and Caravan, not to mention the cards that beat Jack in single-action decks listed in (4) -- it’s just meant to show that it’s not hard to find something that beats DoubleJack.
The important idea to understand is that Jack is a good
opener for money-heavy strategies. Pure Big Money is one such strategy, but it’s rarely the best one. You’re better off taking a stronger money-heavy strategy and adding a Jack opening (and potentially a second Jack if you have actions to spare).
Additionally, there are a bunch of other cheap support cards you can add, as discussed in
this thread, which includes bots for Lighthouse, Fishing Village, Oasis, Scheme, Warehouse, and Spice Merchant.
6. Jack is not a great opening for engines.TRUE.Not that it can't work, but generally for dense deck engines, you want to open with a trasher. While Jack is technically a trasher, it can't actually reduce your deck size, since it also gains a card, whether you trash or not. Usually if there’s an engine strategy quick enough to beat a money strategy with a Jack opening, it’s because there is a good quality non-Jack opening for the engine strategy.
7. Jack does not work with other cards.FALSE.See (5). You don’t need to be building a complex engine to have multiple kinds of action cards in your deck! Removing Estates and adding Silvers has a positive synergy with a lot of stuff.
I think this mistaken belief may stem from a comparison to Envoy that was done at some point. While both cards are strong in pure money decks, they function very differently. The way Enovy works is by drawing half your deck every time you play it so you can buy Golds early and Provinces late, and cycle the Envoy back around quickly. Naturally, this kind of strategy doesn’t like other cards, because there is a very high chance the card will be drawn on the Envoy turn and be completely useless. Jack money decks, on the other hand, work by trashing Estates and adding a lot of Silvers. This makes your deck primarily Coppers and Silvers, drastically reducing the variance of your cards and getting you close to that $1.6 per card point, allowing you to buy Golds and Provinces with typical 5-card hands. In this kind of deck, there is no real danger when adding other cards. The collision probability is not significantly higher than with any other card, particularly because the Jack adds extra treasures to the deck.
8. Jack is a good defense against attacks.TRUE.The card was designed to be an after-the fact Moat. Each of its 4 parts counters one kind of attack. The trash counters non-treasure junk-giving attacks. The draw counters hand-size attacks. The spy counters top deck attacks. And the Silver gain counters deck destruction attacks. So by design, it’s good against attacks.
9. You should ignore attacks when Jack is around.FALSE.Jack is extremely good against hand-size attacks, but its ability to trash Curses merely
mitigates the damage of cursing attacks. Cursing attacks are the strongest attacks because each play of the attack card can hurt multiple times. Even if you can trash the curse right away, you are still forced to draw the dead card at least once, and more times if you are unable to trash them immediately. And if you’re forced to wade through 10 Curses while your opponent doesn’t have to deal with them at all, you’re going to find yourself behind. So while Jack helps against cursing attacks, it can’t really take the place of cursing completely. Witch/Mountebank+Jack beats either the curser or Jack alone.
And even non-cursing attacks still can have an effect on the game. With Jack in hand, discard attacks are terrible, and weaker deck-top attacks aren't that great, but eventually your Jack density thins out, and attacks get stronger. If you get hit by a discard attack in a non-Jack hand, the Jack doesn't help a lot. And if Rabble puts 3 VP cards on top of your deck, filtering out 1 doesn't save you. If an Ambassador is feeding you multiple Coppers per turn, Jack is pretty helpless against that...