Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: LastFootnote on March 04, 2015, 03:31:23 pm
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Let's say you have exactly two Actions remaining and two Action cards in your hand. One is Library and the other is a terminal Action that doesn't draw. It used to be that I would always play Library first, hoping to keep my "engine" going, such as it was. Lately I've been second guessing myself on that. I've found that, assuming I have some decent amount of Treasure in my deck, I sometimes get better results by playing my other Action card first and then taking advantage of Library's ability to draw past Actions to my Silvers and Golds. Not surprisingly, this works best when the other Action card decreases my handsize by more than one, a la Remodel or Horse Traders.
Obviously this is highly board-dependent, etc., etc., but does anybody else do this? You know you could potentially draw more Actions, but go for the big Treasure payoff instead? Do you have a rigid Library policy, or is it more flexible?
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I think this applies just to draw-to cards. I would always play Smithy before another terminal Action if I had 2 Actions left, hoping to draw a Village or something. But since static draw cards vastly outnumber draw-to cards, I tend to forget that decreasing my handsize before drawing is a thing. Especially with Library, with the whole skip-over-dead-Actions thing. I guess it would depend on if I were gung ho on an engine (which I usually am) or doing an Action/Treasure blend.
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Well, that's another question: should the presence of Library push you toward an Action/Treasure blend?
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I think I would call this more situation-dependent than board-dependent. My initial thoughts:
Things that skew your decision towards playing Library first:
1. If I have a reasonable chance of drawing an action I would rather play than the current <other terminal> I have in my hand.
2. If I have a high chance of drawing an additional non-terminal action I would like to play.
3. If I only have 1 buy, and extra treasure is not likely to have an impact.
Things that skew your decision towards playing Library second:
1. As mentioned in your post, if the other terminal can discard cards, I would be more likely to play Library second.
2. More treasure is likely to improve my buying position this turn (hit Province, increase chances of buying two engine components, ect.)
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I think this applies just to draw-to cards. I would always play Smithy before another terminal Action if I had 2 Actions left, hoping to draw a Village or something. But since static draw cards vastly outnumber draw-to cards, I tend to forget that decreasing my handsize before drawing is a thing. Especially with Library, with the whole skip-over-dead-Actions thing.
Yes, the thread was definitely meant to be Library-specific. Both the fact that it draws to 7 and can skip past Action cards is pertinent. Even with Watchtower, it's usually pretty trivial that you should play other hand-reducing cards until you have 2 Actions left, then play a Watchtower. With Library, I'm not sure it's so clean-cut.
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If I have an action-heavy deck and a lot of villages, I would play Library first most of the time. Also, if drawing that extra card would trigger a nasty reshuffle, then I would play Library first.
If I have 6 or 7 cards in hand, have an engine that can't reliably fire every turn, or a deck that relies on some treasure and I need some coin to get over a key threshold (say $8 to buy a province), then I would be very inclined to play the terminal first.
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I can't think of many situations where I would want to have a Library in my deck and not want to play it first.
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Urge to crack stupid library policy jokes successfully suppressed.
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I think the original question is a simple computation for a current deck state. It's about the probability that you draw the village and how much you stand to gain from it. But most of the time if you have Library and a village, you don't have many treasures, so there's little to gain from dead drawing.
Also related is when you're drawing with the Library, you have to choose which actions to keep. You don't want to overkeep terminals and fail to draw a village, but if you're not likely to draw the village, you might settle on a decent terminal.
The more interesting question is:
Well, that's another question: should the presence of Library push you toward an Action/Treasure blend?
I think the answer is "not really". If you're getting villages, you don't want treasures. They screw up draw-to-X. However, I do think Library-BM with extra actions is a thing. A couple years ago when isotropic was still a thing, I was writing a Library article that I never finished. Looking through the game logs I was going to use, my decks either have villages or treasure, but not really both.