Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Game Reports => Topic started by: ehunt on January 22, 2012, 03:56:17 pm
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As second player, I lose the scrying pool split, but it's not too brutal thanks to scheme. I have plenty of extra actions and I'm drawing my deck anyway, so I prefer duchess to silver, and even to navigator (just for the cheapness - the friendly spy is a mild drawback in the scrying pool game, although not really, as my opponent's drawing his whole deck as well.)
Then to top it off, the duchess lets me three-pile the game while still buying enough victory points to overcome my opponent's defensive province buy, something it's typically very hard to do as second player.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120116-154340-4a9b58fa.html
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Strategy question for you... You talk about losing the Scrying Pool split; in my experience with Scrying Pool decks, I tend to stop buying them after I have 4 or 5... this has done quite well for me. Do you really want as many as you can get, or at least 6?
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Good point - I'm not sure, actually.
If I'm not fighting for the scrying pools, 4 is probably enough, although with +buy and a potion doing nothing for me, I'm likely to pick up more even after they stop being my main focus (without +buy, the SP is much weaker and I probably shouldn't be going for them in the first place.) If I'm fighting, I'd rather have more than fewer, but I'm not too sad with a 4-6 split, and in this game, I wasn't sad at all thanks to scheme.
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I think that in a game without Scheme, if you lose a Scrying Pool split 4-6, you have a higher chance of drawing a bunch of Throne Rooms with no other drawing Actions. But since you have Scheme, you can guarantee topdecking a Throne Room and a Scrying Pool every turn, so it doesn't really matter if you only got 4 of the Scrying Pools.
Upon reading the log, I thought that ehunt committing himself to the Throne Room chains was kind of a dangerous move, though, since one mistake and he could end up trashing a Province for his Trade Route.
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My play here is a good example of what NOT to do with Scrying Pool, and how it can very easily be a trap card. I spend so much time gunning for them and utterly fail to put together a strong enough deck around them to rack up points in the end game. I don't even buy a Trade Route until turn 12! On separate turns I waste $5, $6, and $7 buys on Pools - I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's probably not optimal play.