Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Articles => Topic started by: dominator 123 on June 24, 2014, 10:00:34 am
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Just what do you do in a Hermit/MS mirror? In normal circumstances, each person gets 1 Hermit, 4 Madmen and 5 Market Squares. That's not enough to piledrive Estates and if you do, the other player can grab the remaining Estates plus some Duchies for the win. Of course, the Hermits and MSes are not going to always split evenly, so sometimes you get 6 Hermits and 4 Market Squares, or vice versa.
So what do you do in each case? In a Hermit/MS mirror, I am always clueless as of how to end the game.
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If you go off first and you can't end it yourself, just don't do anything that would enable your opponent to end it with a win when he goes off. I.e. just go for Provinces and let him play catch up.
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It depends on the shuffle luck. Most games will not end in an even split of engine components due to some combination of shuffle luck and player turn advantage. Mirrors like this give a huge edge to player one. Honestly, I don't have a formula for playing mirrors like this.
Here is my one example of the mirror against awculus. I win on turns in a very close game. In our game, Hermits go first followed by Market Squares. Some observations from my game are below.
1.) I was able to get my Hermits into Mad Men a bit quicker than my opponent.
2.) I had Estates left in my deck to trigger the Market Square reaction
I guess the single best piece of advice would be as follows. Track both your deck and the deck of your opponent and ask yourself each turn. Who has more VP, myself or my opponent. If you have more VP => can I end the game on a 3-pile? If opponent has more VP, can they end next turn with a 3-pile if I don't get VP? You need to have an awareness of exactly how much your deck is capable of. You will most likely need to trigger early and get some points like I did with Provinces and then transition into a blitz for Estates. I hope this helps. Others may have different opinions. But this is my general advice for engine mirrors like this where piles are highly contested.
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Other trashers end up playing a big role in how the game plays out. If you don't have to use Hermit as a trasher to trigger your Market Squares, it means you can make them all into Madmen and have a bigger payload. This usually only comes up in the mirror though, or at least whenever components are conested -- almost all of the time that I play H/MS against someone who doesn't know what's going on, they end up contesting Hermits at the very least for some weird reason. I ask them why and they just say that when they saw me rushing them, they followed me just for the sake of following me.
Chapel and Forager come to mind, since they can be gained by Hermits; along with Develop, Trade Route, Steward, Stonemason, Masquerade, and even Embargo!
Lookout and Doctor aren't so good, though.
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I recently lost a mirror against Watno (http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140612/log.505c626fa2e6c78ad2ed5aa6.1402593401502.txt), who started using his Madmen and gaining some Golds before his deck was ready for the combo that's suggested in the article. He bought a Province and emptied the Estates in 10 turns while I was left stuck with 3 Hermits and 2 Madmen, being unable to do anything. I made a mistake on t7 when I emptied the Market Squares instead of turning one of my Hermits into a Madman, because I didn't expect that he was going to go for it already, and arguably doing the same thing (not emptying the MS pile though) on t6 was a mistake, too. There's a lot of plays that Watno did that I still don't like (such as not winning the Hermit split even though he could have done it), but this game shows how important it is to turn your Hermits into Madmen ASAP — being fast is more important than having more Gold than you need.