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Archive => Archive => Innovation Articles => Topic started by: BitTorrent on March 24, 2013, 11:51:56 pm

Title: [Featured] Advanced Mechanics: Icon Surge
Post by: BitTorrent on March 24, 2013, 11:51:56 pm
Advanced Mechanics: Icon Surge

*Before you actually try to understand this, first you must know all the 105 cards in the base set, at least what icons on it and what dogmas they carry. Of course the color too. To extend these knowledge to echoes play would require further knowledge in the echoes play.

Consider only base game.

Each card gives you 3 icons. Assume you don't have any splays, 5 top cards would give you a total of 15 icons.

But then, since your opponent can also get 5 top cards, how do you got a lead in a particular icon you want?

This is all about icon surging.

Let me back to the basics first. Each color do have a featured icon which the majority of the cards are related to that icon. Castles and Factories for red, Leaves for yellow, Bulbs for blue, Crowns for green. Purple is the funny one which consists of a few each type of icons(and serves as a wildcard, later on that).

So if you got yourself lack of leaves, usually what you want is not a yellow card with leaves, unless your yellow card don't have leaves at all. What you want is something out of yellow who do have leaves, like Pottery from blue or Clothing from green. That is, a wildcard rather than the mainstream card.

In order to do proper surging for each of the 6 icons, you have to know all the exact info of all the cards. Really. Or, you may have a look on my general guidelines below:

Castle:
Red is the major powerhouse of castles while purple helps a lot too, which means that anything rather than red and purple will provide the extra castle you want. Masonry and The Wheel are very annoying since it gives a lot of extra castle you want with some good dogmas bounded with it. Alchemy sometimes serves well, too.

Leaves:
Yellow is very concentrated with leaves, while other colors do not consist of much leaves with a very sparse patten. Pottery is extremely deadly as a wild card and Reformation is very helpful as well. Note that red card do not give a leaf and green cards never give you 3 leaves(actually only 1 green card give you 2 leaves which is Clothing). I even say that Fermenting/Reformation is a wrong concept, it should be known as Fermenting/Pottery or Fermenting/Calender which provides a huge surge of leaves and makes Ramming for the Reformation becomes possible.

Crowns:
This one is rather complicated. Green owns the most crowns but there are wildcards in all 4 other colors and in basically all ages, except age 9 and 10. Wildcards are: Optics, Pirates, Combustion and Flight in red, Canal Building for yellow, Translation and Encyclopedia for blue, Code of Laws/City States, Enterprise and Societies for purple. Mastering crowns are hard since overuse of crowns will make your board become dull, though. (I can write another 2 or 3 articles related to it, really)

Bulbs:
Blue cards contains most bulbs, while the most famous wildcards are Philosophy and Education from purple, Classification, paper, invention and measurement from green and Perspective from yellow. It is rather straight forward for bulbs.

Factories:
Red consists of most of the factory cards, including the famous Industrialization. Now in order to make sure you dominate in factories, there are Chemistry in blue, Steam Engine and Canning from yellow, Emancipation from purple and Electricity/Corporation from green. Sometimes the 1 factory icon from invention helps a lot, too.

Clocks:
This one is rather rare, since only a few cards have clocks printed on it even in the later stages. While 5 out of 6 blue cards from age 8 contains a majority of clocks, the first clock base card is the Railroad from age 7. Another color with impact on clocks are green cards which Satellites and Database would provide 3 clocks while Bicycle, Mass Media and Collaboration both provide 1 clocks. But then, to be honest if you have to get a clock surge you better splay some of your colors up/right which will be way better.

So when you are working on card counting, try to bare in mind of all these cards so you will know when can your opponent get some extra icons from nowhere or when can you benefit from it. ;)
Title: Re: Advanced Mechanics: Icon Surge
Post by: theory on April 01, 2013, 08:34:38 pm
This is a very interesting point which I hadn't thought of before.  +1!