Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion Articles => Topic started by: WanderingWinder on June 13, 2011, 04:08:56 pm
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Hunting Party is one of the "Power Cards" which emerged from the new Cornucopia release. The obvious comparison is to Laboratory, against which it is usually better but sometimes worse. Like Laboratory, it usually nets you +1 card (+2 cards +1action -1card and action for actually playing it). But the ability here is really key, in that it gets you a card you don't already have in your hand. This makes it look like it would combo well with Menagerie, but it can also get your hand so big, and you often want so many Hunting Parties, that the synergy is not so strong as it might be.
The cons of Hunting Party are, in addition to the uselessness of Lab when you're drawing your whole deck every turn, when there are no more cards in your deck that you don't have in your hand, it turns into a cantrip with the chancellor effect. This is still not so horrible, but not really what we're looking for in a power $5. So naturally, Hunting Party is at its weakest in a very trimmed deck and/or a deck where you have one card (especially a treasure or terminal) that you want to spam a lot. Hunting Party is also not so resilient against handsize-reducing attacks, as the cards you're dumping away are probably going to be the ones you want Hunting Party to skip over anyway, and now it won't.
On the other hand, Hunting party is at its best when you have a handful of cards that you want to all draw at once. Want to be able to play KC and Bridge in the same turn? Hunting Party is your card. Want to have multiples of each? Not so much. But generally a good Hunting party strategy is to use it to need only one of the top money (gold or platinum, depending on whether or not there are colonies) card and still be able to draw it every turn. For instance, in a non-colony game, I'll often get a single gold, an attack or useful card that nets me $2, at least one silver, and then a bunch of Hunting parties. This nets $8 pretty reliably, with an attack every turn to boot. It's important to note that in this kind of deck, every turn you get $5-$7 after you have your one Gold, you want to go Hunting party until either a) they run out or b) it's time to turn for duchies. But this is extremely powerful. Check out this game where I smash my opponent's Chapel(!) opening with a good Hunting party deck of this type, with Cutpurse as my $2-gaining terminal.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110610-211238-aabfd032.html
Obviously you'd rather have Militia, Monument, or Mountebank for this spot, but even Cutpurse is pretty good.
You can also play every Conspirator in a deck with pretty good frequency in a HP deck, which is a fairly good combo to have. Just remember to play your Conspirators BEFORE your HPs after they're non-terminal. It's to remember that if you do get the chancellor-effect out of HP because you have everything, you probably don't want to play that last card-drawer in your hand without another HP, as then all of the actions you've just played in your chain will miss out on the reshuffle, and your next time through you'll see only the cards you've got multiples of - your coppers, estates, and maybe silvers - without having a shot at any HPs to restart the chain.
Works With:
Other Hunting Parties
Spammable non-terminals (see Conspirator)
Fairly tight decks where you want to get exactly 1 of every card
Attacks, which it lets you play very often
Opponents' curse-givers (sort of), which it helps you sift through
Conflicts With:
Spammable terminals (see Goons, Wharf)
Opponents' Handsize-reducing attacks
Your own trashers
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Hunting Party really strengthens the Baron, too. If you have either a Baron or Estate in your hand with it, it gives you strong chance of drawing the other.
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I think Hunting Party might be one of those rare good cards that is still underrated. Its drawing power is incredibly useful when you have one particular card in your deck you need to hammer over and over again.
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Really ? I feel like it's overrated actually. Most people seem to think that it's just better than Laboratory when it often isn't.
Of course when there's an insanely powerful card in your deck, such as Mountebank/Witch, Chapel, Ambassador Possession or arguably Platinum it's very good, but it can also be very lackluster.
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I think it's basically better than a Lab, except in rare situations. Certainly a super trashed deck might be one of those situations, but I still would like opening HP + chapel, since the HP is going to hunt down and find that chapel so I can get to play it more early, even if the HP eventually becomes a pearl diver in my super trim deck.
http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=Laboratory%2CHunting%20Party
Certainly, you can more easily overdose on HPs than labs. You want to be careful about not having so many of them that you play until you cycle your deck (turning the remaining draw into mostly copper/estate garbage) and then draw further, turning the garbage from discard (fine) into garbage in your deck and killing your next turn. And you also want to be careful that you are actually almost always getting +2 cards with the HPs, so you can't have all that many HPs in a small deck.
It's fine to have multiple copies of non-terminals with the HP, just play the non-terminal before the next HP so you can draw other non-terminals of the same kind.
It's great with Goons or other nasty attacks because it so quickly turns them from purchased in discard to in hand. And it's fine to a have a pretty terminal heavy deck (as long as you have corresponding village types). Indeed, for the mixed terminal and +action deck, HPs are probably better than labs. With a terminal heavy deck, if you were free to order your deck in anyway that you wanted, you would put infrastructure (village, throne rooms, etc) cards first and then terminals last. In fact, HP pushes your deck in this direction. Start with a hand of 4 junk cards and a Lab or HP. If the next sequence of cards on your deck was Goons, Goons, Village, Village, and you had one Lab in hand, you'd draw into two Goons, never hit the Villages, and be sad. With the HP, you skip the second Goons and hit the juicy Village chain, and you can possibly draw through the deck and find the Goons that was discarded earlier in your turn. You can keep one of the terminal in your hand for most of your turn, and use the HPs to hunt down +action cards, and then unleash the nasty terminals after you've got enough actions (because you used it to find your infrastructure) to play the nasty terminals and still keep your turn going.
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I think the Chancellor effect of HP is further underrated. Near the start of the game, HP can act like a partial chancellor that leaves you an action to play and drew two cards. That's gigantic if you can get it in the first shuffle, and still great if you wait until the second shuffle. Only a few 5s overpower it early--the attacks, mainly, Vault with GM available, possibly a couple others.
And to RR: yeah, I just got outplayed in a HP/Village/Goons game. Boloni was hitting 4 or 5 Goons almost every turn the last couple turns. Amazing.
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HP is one of the best engine lubricants for spammed terminals.
Hunt for a village/goon pair. Play them out of hand... hunt again... etcetc ad nauseam
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i.e. it skips over goons when u need the farming village, finds the goons when u dont have one.
Drawing multiple goons and no farming village is half as likely than with a lab... and thats just with 1 HP
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Yeah, thinking about it, rrenaud is totally right here - all the situations where I said HP isn't good, it's really that it's not ridiculously good there, but even then it's almost always better than Lab, which is itself a really strong 5. The couple situations where I still don't like HP so much are a) with chapel, b) with coppersmith decks, where you want a lot of copper, and c) bank and/or venture decks, though you'd probably prioritize HP over venture.
Let me repeat that: HP better than what I think is the most underrated and on of the top 10 5s. So a bank/Tactician deck is the biggest, clearest place that both is good and prefers Lab to HP. On the chapel thing, HP is good as an opener, better than silver, but there are, I think, a number of 5s, 4s, and even some 3s maybe that I'd rather have than it, including lab, as an opener with chapel.
Overall, I think it's on average the 3rd best 5 behind Mountebank and Witch, and actually even with them, I'd start buying it after only the 1st of those, in lieu of multiples.
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HP fails when you open huntingparty/-
=]
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Oh man, someone made an example of my Dominion play! :O I vaguely remember that game, I wtf'd pretty hard when I realized your strategy was working.
Hunting Party works pretty well with Tournament!
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HP fails when you open huntingparty/-
And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.
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Hunting Party overrated???
This is such a great card, sometimes you even dont have to trash your deck out, cause the coppers and estates are discarded anyway. Its a perfect tutor (sry for Magic-terms) for combo- and chain-like decks. You only have to keep in mind that you dont need 5 golds in the deck anymore, and get for example a royal seal over a gold to keep hitting both.
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You only have to keep in mind that you dont need 5 golds in the deck anymore, and get for example a royal seal over a gold to keep hitting both.
I think this is a very important point. If copper, silver and gold are your only sources of coins, you will have a hard time reaching 8 for a province.
HP fails when you open huntingparty/-
And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.
I think opening Huntingparty/- is not as bad as it seems. If you play the hunting party in turn 3, it draws you one card and puts your deck into your discard pile. If you play it in turn 4, it draws the card you bought on turn 3. I would say it's more like a chancellor at the beginning of the game and turns into a lab later.
Overall I would say that it's as good as a laboratory. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse.
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This is such a great card, sometimes you even dont have to trash your deck out, cause the coppers and estates are discarded anyway.
I think this is a very important point. If copper, silver and gold are your only sources of coins, you will have a hard time reaching 8 for a province.
The game I linked to is a good example of both these things, and I think where HP really shines. copper+silver+gold+(useful action that gives +2, optimally probably militia)+ a zillion HPs is a really, really powerful deck. Obviously Goons is better than militia, but it slows you down to pick one up. But also, there are tons of cards that work here. Militia, Goons, Cutpurse, Monument, Baron, Bridge, Black Market (though you don't really want to go there), Steward, Chancellor, Conspirator, Festival, Fortune Teller, Harem, Grand Market, Hoard (there's a little anti-synergy here, but so much raw power), Jester (again some anti-synergy), Stash, Navigator, Merchant Ship... in short, there are so many good cards, I'm almost always going to be able to play this deck in a non-colony HP game, and win with it.
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And yet it's still a level+1 opening, while Laboratory/- is level 0! I take this as a strong sign of how good Hunting Party is: it's better than Laboratory even when it is almost guaranteed to fail the first time.
The first HP will fail less than you think. If you draw it on turn 4 or 5 rather than turn 3 (which is more than half the time), and you also buy something on turn 3 like a Silver, it will actually still draw 2 cards and find that Silver.
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Here's a game where got badly beaten up by one hunting party and a transmute. My opponent got near perfect draws (assisted by my council room ) but it shows again how a hunting party can match up key cards. In this case it matched a transmute to the three estates, turning them to gold, then finding the potion and turning it into another transmute. I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.
There are certainly some bad cards to use with hunting parties but in general I'd skip those bad partners and keep using the hunting parties. I actually have quite a bad record with hunting parties and rather than telling myself I'm playing them wrong, I'm telling myself that my opponents are using hunting labs to short cut deck building, allowing them to perform better than they might do otherwise. Some day I might even stop calling them hunting labs.
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It's only natural to want to compare hunting party to lab, because they are both non-terminals that increase hand-size by 1. But really, the comparison ends there. A lab-based deck looks very different from a hunting party-based deck, because the best part of hunting party is not the lab-like part -- it's the fact that it's guaranteed to not just draw a bunch of copper *even if you don't trash*. This is key. To get labs going, you need to buy a trasher and use multiple turns playing it. Hunting party allows you to really shorten this set-up phase. It gives you the advantages of big money decks (fast startup and the ability to work in the absence of trashing) in decks with card combos.
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I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.
These links seem to be temporary - there are similar problems in other threads. It seems to be generally better to link to councilroom game links.
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I was left ducking the last province on turn 11 as I'd have lost on points. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html.
These links seem to be temporary - there are similar problems in other threads. It seems to be generally better to link to councilroom game links.
What makes you think that?
I can still access logs from November. E.g. http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html.gz
Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.
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Both these link don't work in my browsers (neither Firefox nor IE):
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html (http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html)
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html (http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html)
They give a 404 not found error. Or is there something wrong with my browser settings and you can open the links from above?
I can download and unzip die gz-Version - but why not use the councilroom version:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html (http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html)
I think it's more comfortable anyway - showing the current decks and colored. In addition you can link directly to a specific turn.
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At FAQ I found this (at the very end):
# don't scrape individual game logs (the individual .html.gz URLs; I will probably start making these expire after a week or so anyway) — if you want all or most of them then downloading the daily tarball is much more efficient.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/faq/ (http://dominion.isotropic.org/faq/)
We are a little off topic now - sorry for that.
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I am happy to have links to the cr.com versions, but I don't think Doug will follow through and expire his game links. He just didn't want people to go and download all million game pages one at a time, instead he'd rather have you download ~200 compressed tarballs.
If you want to download the all the tarballs, I wrote a script that will first try to download the tarballs from cr.com, and then from isotropic if my server doesn't have them, which minimizes load on Doug's server. https://github.com/rrenaud/dominionstats/blob/master/scrape.py
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Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.
!! Heh, it never occurred to me that the .html.gz files weren't meant for browsers — Firefox and Chrome always loaded them quite happily. But I just tried a gzipped link with my iPad, and it no worky …
That seems weird. Wouldn't people want to encourage widespread support for gzipped stuff? It's quick, and it saves on bandwidth; what's to lose?
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Both these link don't work in my browsers (neither Firefox nor IE):
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html (http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/13/game-20110613-164751-a5a8b17e.html)
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html (http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201011/19/game-20101119-161130-1c5b8d6b.html)
I can open that without any problems with my Firefox 4.
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I plan on posting an expanded version of this article (incorporating many of the helpful suggestions in the topic, as well as some of my own thoughts) on Friday. Feel free to chip in before then to add to the article.
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@Theory: is there a possibility that the articles you post in your blog can be discussed here in the forum? Like placing a link to the forum thread at the end of the blog-article.
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I disagree on the conflict with Goons that you noted, though not sure if you meant Goons because you called it spammable.
The curse-negating powers of Having a Hunting Party heavy deck lets you also buy up lots of crap with your goons for VPs. In a game with Hunting Parties, Working Villages and Goons, being able to grab a pile of coppers without fear of them gumming up your deck can give you a great lead.
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Yeah, the Goons thing has already been mentioned. It does help a Goons deck, and better than say Lab does (which is really good!), but not as much as it helps a more standard deck.
Also, you still have to be careful about buying up those coppers to some extent, as gummed up decks can still come to haunt you a) in that the first card you draw is both weaker and less likely to make your second card one of your power cards ('cause it's likely to be ANOTHER copper), and more importantly b) you'll be significantly less likely to get Hunting party OR Goons in any given hand.
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Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.
!! Heh, it never occurred to me that the .html.gz files weren't meant for browsers — Firefox and Chrome always loaded them quite happily. But I just tried a gzipped link with my iPad, and it no worky …
That seems weird. Wouldn't people want to encourage widespread support for gzipped stuff? It's quick, and it saves on bandwidth; what's to lose?
iirc, web servers are able to send gzipped versions of content automatically if they detect that the client can unzip (and modern browsers can) the gzipped content. in other words, the .gz versions are just a caching mechanism (static content only needs to be zipped once), rather htan a bandwidth saving tool.
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I don't think it helps Goons enough in getting crap away to compensate the fact that it will sometimes prevent you from drawing that essential 2nd, 3rd or Xth Goons that allows the megaturns.
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As I wrote in the article (that is appearing in ~20 min), and was mentioned earlier in the thread, you gotta compare it to Lab. I think HP is way better than Lab if you have a mixed HP/Village/Goons deck, because you aren't going to be able to play those extra Goons unless you have +Actions, and if you do, well, why not just play the +Actions and then play the Goons and then the Hunting Party to hunt down your other Goons?
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In fact, hunting party is good with ANY action chain, since as long as you have spare +actions, you can play your action cards before hunting for more. In this sense, hunting party is not really a hand size increaser per se, since your "hand" size remains small, but you keep playing actions. It's more effective than increasing hand size in these decks, since it looks for the cards you already have in play (and thus don't have in your hand) rather than the stuff that stays in your hand until the end of your turn.
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I just played a game where I came up with an interesting HP strategy that I would love to have some feedback on.
Inspired by this thread, I tried to make a Baron + HP deck in a province game.
Here is the log http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/18/game-20110618-124104-1bab4faf.html
I opened Baron Silver, hoping to Jump to Gold's and HP's quickly.
My plan is to buy 1 baron, one gold, one silver, and as many hunting parties as possible. As soon as I had my 1 gold I would buy a Prov. every time I had 8$+. There were also Scouts on this board which I felt would synergize very well with this deck so i bought 2 of those with some 4$ hands. I also planed to buy estates all along when i had only 2 or 3$, and still play baron when it would mean gaining an estate instead of 4$. I thought this would boost my VP count, and feed my Baron while not clogging my deck too badly with enough HP's.
As it played out I had a few interesting turns. I got lucky and hit my gold on turn 3. Then on turn 5, worried my deck would stall out early i bought a second silver rather then an estate. I think this was a good choice and possibly what allowed me to start getting Hunting Parties on turn 7.
On turn 10, I hit a 10$ hand with 2 buy's rather then get prov + estate I felt getting 2 HP's with still only 2 Prov. gone was a better choice.
By turn 14 I'm in trouble, even though he has purchased 4 terminals in a set with no + action, my opponent already has 4 provinces, and I only have one. I would say he has gotten lucky with hits Baron, treasures, lining up to score some early provinces.
But now i have 7 HP's and my deck is about to take off.
Turns 15, and 16 see me buy 2 provinces and my 6th estate, while my opponent only gets a silver and a market. With one province left my opponent disconnects.
It is his turn and I'm forced to make him resign. When I check the log I see that at this point in the game we were exactly tied with 27pts. Then I check his hand and see that it was Ironworks, Silver, 2 copper, and and estate. He could not have bought the last Province, and the most VP he could have gotten with that turn is gain an estate + buy an estate emptying the pile. My final hand was 3 HP's + 3 estates. With that I'm pretty sure I could have bought the final Province on my 17th turn. So even if my opponent had of made the smart choice on turn 15 and gotten a Duchie instead of a market and gotten the last 2 estates on turn 17. The last province + 9 estates would have given me the victory by 1. I think my only obvious mistake was getting a Prov and a scout on turn 15 rather then a Prov and an estate. One scout early on can help cycle the deck or pull an estate into a hand with a Baron, but by this time in the game I should have been going all out for the last VP's.
I'm interested to hear what some of the better players think of the deck that I built, the choices I made on certain pivotal turns, should I have purchased any scouts on this board or just more estates, and also if this strategy would have worked at all if I was playing someone rank 30+ rather then a 0 ranked player, who made mistakes like getting a mine he never uses and buying an extra market when there are only 2 Provinces left.
Cheers
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I think scout was probably an error here: you want your hunting parties to build you into your ideal hand of estate+treasure+baron(+province, assuming you've already bought 1), and having a scout means that your hp might find a scout , which maybe it'll bypass a lot of green for you, but the hunting party does that already. If your entire deck consists of copper/hp/silver/gold/baron/estate/province, you only have 6 diff cards & hp will almost always find that hand.
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I agree that you don't need scout, and I'm not sure if you even need gold. I just played a baron/silver into hunting parties and provinces (no gold) game today. It seemed to work out just fine (I think I had 5 provinces by turn 15). If you get a hand of baron, estate, silver, and 2 coppers, that's $8. Since you don't trash anything, you end up with a second copper most of the time anyway just from your initial draw or the first +1 card from hunting party, so gold doesn't seem to be necessary. I feel like it might be better to just spend $6 on another hunting party so you can keep hitting that baron, but I'm not sure.
EDIT: I just tried it solitaire and got the 5th province on turn 12 -- probably much better shuffle luck this time, and/or I just remembered the game wrong. I invite you to try it yourself. I didn't play the baron to gain an estate, and if I had ever got $2-$3, I don't think I would buy anything. Buying estates just increases the chance that you draw a hand without hunting party. You only need 1 estate in your hand to make the baron work, and you will draw that with hunting party without having to buy/gain more than your original 3.