Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Game Reports => Help! => Topic started by: jotheonah on December 31, 2011, 02:45:23 pm
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http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201112/31/game-20111231-114132-2f46e160.html
A weird game where Secret Chamber was worth buying: it helped me get GMs fast and defended against both Swindler and Cutpurse. And he kept Swindling my SCs back into SCs and my Estates into SCs, anyway! I thought I had this in the bag. Suddenly, I didn't. The only thing I can think is that I waited too long to green. (the triple Market buy was probably a bit arrogant with him already greening).
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The silver buys struck me as quite odd in this game ; you already had a ton of good virtual coin sources yet you bought 3 silvers, including 1 after turn 10. These silvers increased the # of "stopper" cards in your deck from 12 to 15.
More concretely, there's the fact that on turn 18 you bought the penultimate province immediately after your opponent spent a turn doing nothing. That's an endgame mistake, as you should be fairly confident that after a terrible turn, your opponent will have a good turn. 2 duchies and an estate would've given you 2 fewer points on turn 18, but allowed you a turn 19 that you could've used to gain 6-10 points.
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Yes, you broke the PPR (http://dominionstrategy.com/2011/03/28/the-penultimate-province-rule/) and you have been punished. I can write a lots of words, but it would be only the things I learned from the article, so read that ;D
I agree with the Silvers (first one was IMO good, the others not) and I don't understand why did you buy 3 Markets and then 2 Provinces before reshuffle. I would either wait for green on both turns, or go for the Province on both turns, this seems a bit wierd to me...
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Province games can be a sprint. If you'd had 10 gold in your deck it would have been too much. The same can be said for 9 grand markets, a gold, 5 treasuries, and 2 markets. If you'd been able to draw your deck every turn then it might have been different, but the kingdom didn't allow that.
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You started greening too late, you broke the PPR, and you may have hit a slightly bad stretch of luck in terms of the draw (both you and your opponents). The silver thing pointed out above is correct, I think. Grand Markets without a draw and without any trashing are not NEARLY as good as they are otherwise.
On turn 12, you bought two Grand Markets when you could have bought one and a Province. And on turn 14, you had already bought out the Grand Markets and had $15 to spend, which you put into three regular Markets. I would definitely get a Province and Gold at that point. You got ONE play of a Market in the whole game. That's basically $15 that ended up wasted.
Now, to some extent that might be bad luck. But you make your own luck, etc. It took you 18 turns to get 4 Provinces and 2 Duchies, which is not particularly fast.
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Yeah, the Markets, I've admitted, were a bad buy. I got cocky because in every game I've played with Grand Markets, getting them all has been tantamount to winning.
Honestly, I think the Treasury stack gave me a distorted view of the effectiveness of my deck, and part of my putting off buying green was not wanting to lose my Treasuries. But also, I thought, "I have a really strong, consistent deck" when really, once my Treasuries became Peddlers, stopped being the case.
So lessons learned (in no particular order):
1. Don't break the PPR.
2. Don't delay greening unnecessarily.
3. You don't always have to buy Silver (or anything) with $3 and in a cantrip-heavy engine anything that breaks the chain is bad. (or better yet, don't build an all-cantrip engine at all)
4. Treasuries can make your deck seem better than it is when the greening starts.
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1. Don't break the PPR when you have a more powerful deck than your opponent.
FYP. (I think PPR is overrated, but when you have bigger buying power and have been catching up is exactly the situation where it is most important.)
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I've been increasingly leery of Grand Market. I'm pretty sure that my win rate when I go for them is worse than when I don't. They just don't seem to have enough punch to make up for the pain it takes to get them. What's aggravating is that when I've set up my deck to buy Grand Markets, most of the time when I can afford them, I can also afford provinces! So I end up not getting many!