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76

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: June 23, 2012, 03:21:01 am »

Diadem!

Here's one.

Plague

Action - Attack - $1

+1 action
Each other player may discard a plague. If he doesn't, he gain a plague.

----

Setup: Place as many plague cards in the supply as curses.

77

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Card Ideas: $2 Attack Cards

« on: June 23, 2012, 02:30:10 am »

KC-Enchantress is devistating. Another pin: KC-KC-Enchantress-Enchantress-Monument.
Parade looks fun, along the same lines as B-crat. An attack that gains a Silver.
Some more:
?
$2 Action-Attack
+1 Card +1 Action
Each other player discards the top card of his deck.

?
$2 Action-Attack
+1 Card. Each other player gains an Estate.

?
$2 Action-Attack
+1 Action
Each other player chooses one:
+1 Card Discard 2 cards
Discard the top 5? cards of his deck.

I think the second attack would be too strong. An estate giver is basically a curser, so this card should play a lot like sea hag, a top-tier $4.

The third attack would help the opponent more often than hurt. The first option is basically an improved version (from the opponent's perspective) of the vault secondary effect. Discarding off the top helps the opponent on average until the greening stage, since every time you reshuffle you put the new cards you bought into the deck. Discarding with no information on what you're discarding just hastens the reshuffle. Take away the second option and you've got a card that would probably help the first time you play it, but would start to hurt if you played a second and would be really, really painful if you played a third. Too brutal without some limitations, but I think there's potential for a cool card idea there. Maybe something like this?

$2 Action-Attack
+1 Card
+1 Action

Each other player with 4 or more cards:
+1 card
Discard 2 cards

78

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Card Ideas: $2 Attack Cards

« on: June 22, 2012, 06:33:50 pm »

Here are a couple of ideas which probably needs some tweaking:

Surveyor
Type: Action - Attack
Cost - $2

+1 action
Look at the top 4 cards of each player's deck. Put them back in any order.

The card has some potential engine use (with wishing well, for example), but you'd hate to have more than a couple in your deck since they don't stack at all. The attack could be used to gum up your opponent's engine a bit or arrange dead draws for smithy-type cards, but in most situations, it won't do a whole lot.

Barbarian
Type: Action - Attack
Cost - $2

Discard a card. Gain an Estate. If you do, Each other player gains a curse.

This card may be too strong as written. It's a +2 vp swing each time the attack hits, although the lack of buying power should help balance it. It has some interesting combo potential, e.g. crossroads or silkroads, where it could easily be dominant. probably not as bad as ironworks, though.

Diplomat
Type: Action - Attack
Cost - $2

+2 cards

You may put each other player's deck into the discard pile

The chancellor effect as an attack. The card should reward paying a lot more attention to your opponents' cards than usual.

Evil Pearl Diver
Type: Action - Attack
Cost - $2

+1 card
+1 action

Look at the bottom card of each other player's deck. You may put it on top.

Hey, why not? (Edit: blueblimp beat me to it)

79

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s) 2.0

« on: June 21, 2012, 12:27:16 am »

I would very much like to see a ranking of the "0-2 Province" strategies.  Ways of winning the game without primarily using Provinces.  There's sort of a line you cross when your strategy is enough about alt VP that you avoid depleting the Province stack.  With 3 or 4 Provinces, that doesn't really seem to be the point, alt VP is just "some Duchies" if you have at least that many Provinces. 

So the cantidates I'm envisioning here are, these other cantidates for ways of winning the game, are

Duke
Gardens
Silk Road
6 pt Fairgrounds (4 pt fairgrounds always serve the Duchy function)
Bishop (Golden deck doesn't use the points printed on the Province cards)
Monument catchup engines that will actually win with 0-2 Provinces (a rarity)
Goons
IGG
Saboteur (In extremely rare cases you can play the card so much that your opponents deck is nothing but coppers and estates.  If you avoid depleting the Province stack in order to accomplish this, it would qualify imo)

Anything I forgot?  Any simple 3 pile rushes I'm unaware of, like Ironworks + Tunnel or Island or somesuch?

Whoa.  Posting the word "Island" just reminded me I had a dream last night where I was explaining to someone how Island synergizes with Silk Road because you can buy a bunch of green cards and set them aside.

Whoooooa.

(my subconscious clearly has an ego/obsession with the game I beat Ambassador with no Ambassadors using Island/Silk Road.)
(Not that I'm sure that should usually work I think maybe toggling the number of ambassadors used would ruin it)

Colonies

80

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Ignore Saboteur at your cost.

« on: June 21, 2012, 12:14:17 am »

Saboteur is really only effective when you can hit your opponent's cards as fast or faster than he can replace them. The obvious way to accomplish this is with a strong engine (*cough* king's court), but if there is a lack of +buys, or if key cards are irreplaceable, like cities or minions once the pile has run out, one saboteur played frequently is still pretty strong. You probably want to slow down the game as much as possible since the damage you do is cumulative and meanwhile you'll be lagging in buying power (every sab in hand could've been at worst a silver. King's court sab? you probably could've king's courted a terminal silver for $6).

Here are a few games I dug up from my history (Sorry, I cherrypicked games where I win. They're the ones where I clearly understood what was going on and wasn't just experimenting/screwing around):

Here's a colony game where my scrying pool/festival/saboteur deck causes my opponent playing BM + mine to ragequit. I think scrying pool is something of a saboteur enabler because a) having saboteurs in a scrying pool deck doesn't hurt your buying power so much since you draw them "for free," and b) scrying pool gives you some control over what cards you sabotage. Silver on top? Discard it, since trashing silver isn't a big deal. Province on top? Leave it there and destroy it.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120610-052035-3a8bcf46.html

In this game I have some bad luck with YW bane and lose the city split 4-6, but with my better trashing and a single saboteur, I knock out four of my opponent's cities.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120613-214232-35514452.html

Here's an old game I don't really remember and probably didn't play very well, but it looks like a decent example of saboteur as a desperation tactic. I get the dreaded and highly improbable single copper-potion-3 estate hand on turn three of a university/golem game. I'm behind most of the game, but among other things, I hit two colonies and a province with the saboteurs.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120316-114326-d71f79f0.html

In this game my opponent (an excellent player, by the way) plays a throne room/stables/smithy/hamlet/saboteur engine against my simple BM + smithy/apprentice deck. He hits me hard, four times per turn for a few turns, but some late-gained lighthouses and the apprenticing of my provinces let me run out the province pile before he can totally destroy my deck. I think his strategy would've been devastating had it not been for the endgame acceleration apprentice provided.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120619-124650-eb76ce05.html

81

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which card is best for you?

« on: June 20, 2012, 04:25:24 am »

Incidentally I think "effect with" is probably the best column to go by when judging your effectiveness with a card, as "winrate given availability" tends to be down to the strength of the cards mostly.

Well, your opponent has equal access to to those cards (black market cards and tournament prizes excepted), so your winrate given availability shouldn't have a lot to do with the card's strength over large sample sizes. Notice no one has listed witch or mountebank in their top ten.

82

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which card is best for you?

« on: June 20, 2012, 01:52:23 am »

Here are my top 10 by winrate given avail. Feel free to let me know if my thoughts on the ranking are unwarranted or just plain stupid.

IGG -- No surprise to me. I know I play the IGG rush pretty well.
Thief -- I buy it 12% of the time, more than I expected. My winrate is probably high since it's a trap for new players.
Cache -- I buy it 22% of the time, primarily in gardens games and sometimes in BM games. No idea why my winrate is so high.
loan -- -.52 effect with but +2.78 effect without. I buy it around 22% of the time, much less than the average of 41%. I guess I know when it's a bad buy.
swindler -- I don't really like the card since it's so swingy. I have a +2.71 effect without, so I guess I'm good at determining when there's a better option.
pearl diver -- I like the card and think it's slightly underrated, but I'm surprised to see the card is evidently relevant enough to have an effect on my winrate. +2.26 effect with, maybe because the fact I buy it at all likely means I have an engine with +buys and money to spare.
haggler -- I do like the card, but I don't really have any idea why it's one of my best. I think I tend to ignore it in BM games.
council room -- I buy it 40% of the time, compared to the average of 55%. I avoid using more than one in engines unless a discard attack is available, and I prefer most other terminal draw cards.
bishop -- One of my favorite cards. I seem to do equally well when I buy it (71% of the time) and when I don't.
embassy -- A lot of people seem to underestimate BM + embassy. It's great for engines, too, since you're practically guaranteed to be able to put together the next link in the chain.

83

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which Cards are the least fun?

« on: June 19, 2012, 06:56:46 pm »

I like possession and saboteur, too, and not necessarily only when I'm the one playing them. Earlier today, I played BM + smithy + apprentice against a strong opponent's stable + throne room + saboteur engine. It was really quite exciting trashing my own provinces to draw most of my deck and run down the province pile before he could totally smash my deck to bits. Admittedly, both possession and saboteur suffer from the problem that in certain situations they can completely take the opponent out of the game, either by forcing them to sit through possessed turn after possessed turn or by reducing their deck to rubble. I have no problem with resigning when I know I'm beat, though, so this really doesn't bother me too much.

Actually, the card I hate the most is lookout. It's Russian roulette virtually every time you play it past the first, and the fact that the odds are low of lookout doing serious damage when used responsibly just increases the outrage when you inevitably draw gold-gold-mountebank.

84

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What expansion do you play best with?

« on: June 19, 2012, 06:12:30 pm »

Prosperity   -0.37%
Dominion      1.61%
Seaside      -0.26%
Hinterlands   2.23%
Intrigue      -0.58%
Alchemy     -0.27%
Cornucopia   -3.13%
Promotional -5.46%

I kind of expected the promo cards to be my worst since I hate black market and it took me a long time to get used to envoy, but I had no idea I was doing poorly with Cornucopia. It makes sense that Hinterlands would be my best since I do well with IGG, haggler, embassy, and apparently cache. I probably do well with the base set since it's the only one I actually own. Apparently thief has my 2nd highest winrate, with feast (somehow) and chapel up there, too.

85

Dominion General Discussion / Re: THE Dominion Card List(s) 2.0

« on: June 18, 2012, 11:55:41 pm »

Thanks for doing these surveys. I've only started posting recently, but I've been lurking for a while, and I always enjoy reading the discussions. Have you considered doing a survey categorizing cards by type, rather than cost? In particular I'd like to see a best alternate vp card list, considering how difficult it is to compare them to actions and treasures.

86

Dominion General Discussion / Re: What card is worst for you?

« on: June 18, 2012, 01:15:00 am »

Treasury is my worst card. I think I got overwhelmed by it a few times when I was new to the game and have tried way too hard to do that to my opponents since then.

Incidentally, Cache somehow managed to become by 3rd best card by winrate given avail. It's not so bad in big money games, and the coppers can actually help when you're greening or swimming in curses.

87

Game Reports / Re: Dear My Opponent: I am Sorry

« on: May 26, 2012, 01:58:45 am »

Dear dr. girlfriend,

I'm sorry for possessing you 23 times in two turns, stealing most of your good cards with your ambassadors. That was probably a bit excessive. I just wanted to make sure you could never, ever do the same thing to me.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201205/25/game-20120525-224133-076ae953.html