126
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Alternate (pure) VP Cards
« on: July 06, 2012, 08:33:38 am »
It's not very safe to assume your BM opponent is going to favor Provinces on a Duke board, though.
Show Posts
This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
127
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Alternate (pure) VP Cards
« on: July 06, 2012, 08:04:29 am »That is relevant only if you're aiming to maximize the points you get with one purchase. You shouldn't be doing that, you're aiming to maximize your points at the end of the game.
This is true.
Due to those formulae, your points are maximized when you have 2-4 more Duchies than you have Dukes. (2 and 4 wind up exactly the same, 3 just means you have an odd number of Duchies+Dukes instead of an even total.)
But what this means in practice is Duchies are in much more demand than Dukes, for Duke players as well as for Province players, and hence more likely to run out. Thus you should always buy at least four Duchies before your first Duke (at this point you're maximizing immediate points AND prioritizing Duchies) but probably more like 6 or even more. As long as you're confident the game won't end before your Dukes can "catch up" to your Duchies then you may as well keep getting Duchies so your opponent can't. (And really if the game is going to end when you have 6 Duchies and 1 Duke then you probably would have lost anyway; 5 Duchies and 2 Dukes is not much better). Then later you can buy tons of Dukes before you start to disrupt the balance, whereas if you just maximized your points on every turn, later there might not be a Duke when you want one. It also means if your opponent wants to disrupt you in a meaningful way by buying Duchies, which is probably a bad idea but sometimes people do it, he has to do it earlier than he would like.
Edit: it is really really hard to think of an exception to this guideline. Edge cases pertaining to specific cards hardly even exist because how many cards specify Duchy beyond its cost or type? Unless you have some wild plan to get all your Duchies through Transmute I'd say stick to the rules.
128
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Playing board a la Thunderstone?
« on: June 27, 2012, 09:59:41 pm »
The Amazon base/prosperity/alchemy big box comes with one.
129
Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Best Designed Card
« on: June 27, 2012, 12:38:17 am »It's also worth noting this is another good case of synergy between on-buy and on-play effects. The on-buy effect is likely to lead to a bunch of action cards clustered together in your deck; the on-play effect gives you the +actions you need to play all those cards.
Not to mention the mini-Warehouse effect is uniquely well suited to Inn. This is something I never see people talk about, but it's brilliantly done.
Of course handsize reduction weakens Inn megaturns and keep them from getting totally broken when you stack the deck. But when you HAVEN'T stacked the deck, you might have the problem that your density of important actions is a little low. Isn't that why you're relying heavily on Inn to draw your hot combo? So hey, here's some sifting to help you out. And you'll hardly even miss that fifth card, because you're playing a combo deck and you don't care about anything except playing a double Goons or whatever. (If you are playing a +Cards/+Actions engine you'll probably miss the extra card, but if your engine is going off even without stacking the deck then you don't need the help.) It'll even help you cycle your deck faster, so you can fill up your discard pile with good stuff and buy another Inn that much sooner. All these things together give a complicated card like Inn a very clear and coherent strategic use, and a very distinct one at that (compared to other Villages it's much better for setting up non-card-draw combos without the need to draw your deck, though it can sometimes do that too.) And to top it off, variance is also reduced by slightly strengthening the off turns and weakening the megaturns while also making them more frequent, so that game outcome depends a bit less on that timing.
130
Dominion Articles / Re: Cache
« on: June 22, 2012, 05:12:11 pm »
Is it really worth buying a Watchtower just for this trick? If you replace it with Silver you could just buy a Gold in the first place instead of all this rigmarole. Sure, you get the topdeck effect, and if you play the Watchtower as an action then with some luck it might equal Silver's buying power in a pinch, but it's not really that amazing. (If you're already doing a Watchtower combo on the other hand, then of course great.)
More generally speaking, I could be way wrong and would love to hear a counterargument, but it seems like the true test of "a Cache strategy" is whether you'd buy it over Gold or not. If you want the Coppers, then go Cache. Otherwise, isn't it going to look stupid when you build your deck around a Cache plan and then you draw all $4s and $6s? Maybe you can use deck control like Havens or Courtyard to get a bunch of exactly $5 turns but it doesn't seem worthwhile. Then the only other way to use Cache might be to consider it a contingency plan and play a flexible strategy. If anyone has some thoughts on how to approach this, I'd be fascinated.
More generally speaking, I could be way wrong and would love to hear a counterargument, but it seems like the true test of "a Cache strategy" is whether you'd buy it over Gold or not. If you want the Coppers, then go Cache. Otherwise, isn't it going to look stupid when you build your deck around a Cache plan and then you draw all $4s and $6s? Maybe you can use deck control like Havens or Courtyard to get a bunch of exactly $5 turns but it doesn't seem worthwhile. Then the only other way to use Cache might be to consider it a contingency plan and play a flexible strategy. If anyone has some thoughts on how to approach this, I'd be fascinated.
131
Dominion Articles / Re: Oracle
« on: June 15, 2012, 12:30:34 pm »
Can you elaborate more on how to play Oracle as a Ghost Ship counter? Straightforward play looks pretty clearly losing. If the timing is right you get to discard two junk cards and draw two cards for a four-card hand, but by playing Ghost Ship he gets to draw two cards and keep his junk (which might be a couple of Coppers for instance) still giving him the upper hand.
Do you think the Oracle attack alone makes up the difference? I guess it's possible but seems a little unintuitive to me. Or is there something else you have to be doing to make it work?
Do you think the Oracle attack alone makes up the difference? I guess it's possible but seems a little unintuitive to me. Or is there something else you have to be doing to make it work?
132
Dominion Articles / Re: Request: Shanty Town
« on: April 04, 2012, 04:49:14 pm »I've always believed that Shanty Town and Walled Village are consistently underrated by the community. This is because they improve the times where the village use fails- and people argue that should never happen. But in reality this happens to a degree in 85% of engines and in those cases the cards can be critically useful.
The problem is that sometimes you need that extra card to prevent the engine from failing later in the turn, even if you've already found the next card you need. If your hand starts with Shanty Town/Smithy and you draw three Coppers with the Smithy, that's engine failure too. Maybe a Village could have prevented it.
In fact, working from the general principle of "one great turn is better than two mediocre turns," one could argue the exact opposite of what you're saying. Perhaps Village is better because it makes an already-good turn better, whereas Shanty Town just helps a bad turn limp along and maybe find one last Smithy. Honestly I don't know if I care for that argument, but I do know Shanty Town's draw is simply far too unreliable to merit serious consideration in any engine deck worth playing.
133
Dominion General Discussion / Re: Let's talk about - the most difficult card in Dominion
« on: March 30, 2012, 01:19:36 pm »I would like to nominate all the famous trap cards, like City, Alchemist and to some degree Nobles.
I'd add Shanty Town. I'm willing to bet everyone here went through the phase where you try to construct a Village/Smithy style engine that somehow functions despite having so few Actions that your Shanties regularly go off.
Hell, from all outward appearances this is the intended purpose of the card. Both the Village-style name and the big bold "+2 Actions" at the top followed by a "special ability" just scream out "Use me as a Village, it'll feel great! Suckers!"
Then after that comes the phase where you just think it's a crappy card (or at least I did). Finally you read about or stumble upon the idea of using it as a cheap Lab. That's when you realize it isn't named for a type of Village: it's named for the place where scientists can best set up a Laboratory for their insane and unethical experiments.
134
Dominion Articles / Re: Combo: Cartographer/Tunnel
« on: February 20, 2012, 11:06:41 pm »
It seems to me like Harvest and Cartographer don't synergize so well. What's the use of sifting crap out with Cartographer if everything you leave on top of the deck is going to be discarded anyway? It seems like your Cartographers are really going to waste here.
Even on the occasions where you'd rather have a $4 Harvest now than a carefully sifted hand next turn, the Cartographers can't guarantee you'll hit $4. I'd imagine a single Cartographer probably increases the value of your Harvest by about $1 on average, making it approximately equal to a Market. (Multiple Cartographers probably won't add much to the Harvest, though of course they still stack nicely with each other).
Of course there will probably be many occasions when you'd rather have a Cartographer-sifted hand next turn, since your deck is mostly very strong cards (Gold, Cartographer) and very weak cards (Copper, Victory) with little in between. Plus, you're missing opportunities to discard Tunnels every time that you Harvest a Cartographer, and every time you blind-draw a Tunnel in your starting hand. Too bad, unless you want to leave the Harvest unplayed...
Even on the occasions where you'd rather have a $4 Harvest now than a carefully sifted hand next turn, the Cartographers can't guarantee you'll hit $4. I'd imagine a single Cartographer probably increases the value of your Harvest by about $1 on average, making it approximately equal to a Market. (Multiple Cartographers probably won't add much to the Harvest, though of course they still stack nicely with each other).
Of course there will probably be many occasions when you'd rather have a Cartographer-sifted hand next turn, since your deck is mostly very strong cards (Gold, Cartographer) and very weak cards (Copper, Victory) with little in between. Plus, you're missing opportunities to discard Tunnels every time that you Harvest a Cartographer, and every time you blind-draw a Tunnel in your starting hand. Too bad, unless you want to leave the Harvest unplayed...
135
Dominion General Discussion / Re: [spoiler] Full Hinterlands card list
« on: October 23, 2011, 01:39:45 pm »
Scheme is great! All it does is let you play your favorite Action card more often. Probably not twice as often, probably not even quite as often as if you had another copy of that card instead of the Scheme (although it'll never collide with itself, which can be nice!). But still quite a little bit. And of course multiple Schemes stack, until you're basically playing that card every turn and you finally hit diminishing returns. (Of course, you don't HAVE to Scheme the same card every time; it's just the simplest example.)
Of course the utility of Scheme depends on how powerful the best Action card in your deck is, and how difficult it would be to simply buy more copies of that card instead of Scheming it. I'd say it's worthwhile with good $5 actions in play, but with good $6 or $7 Actions it's awesome.
Of course the utility of Scheme depends on how powerful the best Action card in your deck is, and how difficult it would be to simply buy more copies of that card instead of Scheming it. I'd say it's worthwhile with good $5 actions in play, but with good $6 or $7 Actions it's awesome.