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Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Hermit/Madman + Market Square
« on: March 08, 2013, 02:17:51 pm »Quote
I want to preface this by saying that this is probably a combo for advanced players. It requires a careful balance, a knowledge of exactly what's in your deck, as well precise timing to pull off correctly, without which your deck could easily flop.Great article and a really impressive combo - on par with the impressive and intimidating nature of mega strategies (KC/KC/Bridge x3) or Scrying Pool-enabled engines - these are the key phrases to understanding this combo. The combo is a melting of mega-turn with an engine, and that's what to me makes it a very high-level combo. I haven't played Dark Ages but I had to read through the cards several times before I feel like I scratched the surface of how these cards interact and how to properly play them to make this combo go boom. It feels most like Native Village/Bridge, where on your megaturn, you Native Village to draw/set aside all but your last NV on your mega (to continue setting aside cards, and pick them up with the last NV and lather, rinse, repeat until all NV's have been played) and then play all of your Bridges and you know how it ends.
As for how to kill it, I agree that a constant discard attack (Torturer may be the most effective because it can act as a junker, too, but the hand-size increasing nature of the curse-in-hand may negatively affect the Torturer player because it increases the amount of cards drawn by Madman) or a good junker (Hag, Moutebank) may be the best way to slow it down subject to the notes in the article re: trashing curses. The problem is that the combo draws so many cards so quickly that even with three cards in hand (two of which are Madmen, or if you know you have at least one Madmen in next four cards if you play (i.e. if you have a small draw stack remaining)) that this is a difficult combo to beat.