Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Variants and Fan Cards => Topic started by: Graystripe77 on July 25, 2011, 07:57:11 pm
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What if smithy was +2 cards, +$2? How would it be better? Worse?
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Compare it to a vault.
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... It would be the only opening 4-cost move I can think of that would be extraordinarily likely to get you 6 for a Gold, if not more, on your first draw of it. The only way it wouldn't that I can see is if you ended up (in your resulting 6-card hand) with all 3 estates (or your second action, if you were silly enough to do that instead of a Silver) and no Silver. That feels, instinctively, better than straight +3 cards, but I haven't run the math. Certainly feels better than any $4 opener we currently have...
Seems like it would be crazy powerful in the early game, and only somewhat weaker late game *if* you manage to push your avg. value above $2.
Some of this reaction is based on my wife really not liking attacks, so we tried some home-brewed variants that tried to replace the "attack" with what felt like the opposite "benefit" to you instead. A witch that gave +2 cards and let you trash a(or a few) cards, etc. We tried Militia at first as +2 cards, +$2, and it was really dominant. Even +$2, +1 card was solid, though at least it wasn't head and shoulders ridiculous. Of curse, that was Base set only and we were sorta-noobs back then.
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Envoy is really likely to get you a gold on your first draw of it.
This would be extremely powerful at $5, totally broken at $4. Heck, this is probably broken at $5. Maybe fair at $6 - I'd actually prefer it to gold fairly often.
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$2 is generally better than a random card, at least if it's a province game(if it wasn't, you wouldn't want to buy silver past a certain point). I'd rather have that Smithy unless I was playing a deck that really needed to draw a lot of cards for some reason.
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I programmed this variation into my simulator and found 2 of these Smithies (+money) would beat Grand Envoy 63% - 35%. If you up the cost to $5 it's still beating Envoy 49-41, at $6 it loses 32-63.
It's funny how this variant still doesn't make Village/Smithy viable.
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Envoy is really likely to get you a gold on your first draw of it.
I figured there was something that wasn't occurring to me, yeah. Envoy would.
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Wow, thanks for all the replies! Keep it up.
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I don't know if this is a helpful observation, but +2 Cards, +$2 is apparently what Trusty Steed was originally going to be. Then the extra options were added later to spice it up a bit. Frankly, I think just +2 Cards, +$2 is still going to be more useful in more situations than Diadem and Bag of Gold (though, admittedly, in the situations those two Prizes were made for, they are powerhouses).
Point being, we're talking about a prize-level card, or very nearly, which makes it absurdly better than the real Smithy.
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How about:
Rum Runners
Action ($3)
+$1
+2 Cards