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26

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #4: Butcher

« on: June 06, 2013, 10:59:25 am »

Oh, here is a fun trick.  Butcher a copper, spend one coin token.  Gain a card costing 1 coin, which is no card in most kingdoms.   So, if you draw it without a better target, you can still trash out a copper and get a coin token out of the deal.  Might not be the right play in all cases, but might make sense in some cases.

You'd gain a card costing up to $1.  So probably just your Copper again, unless you're really eyeing a Ruin.

Although I'm a little surprised Donald X felt the need to take this option out,  even when the card text was so long already. It's not THAT strong of an option (pretty clearly weaker than Junk Dealer or even Upgrade trashing, unless coin tokens are way stronger than I think) and it does carry significant opportunity cost. Maybe there's some nasty interaction I'm not seeing?

I also love the fact that you don't have to trash anything, so if you somehow get your deck thinned enough or all your good cards are in your hand, you can still gain two coin tokens.

Yeah this is nice design. I would have been disappointed if there weren't a Coin token "Terminal Silver" here, but blending it with a Remodel variant is brilliant, especially in an expansion that has room for so few cards.

27

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #4: Butcher

« on: June 06, 2013, 10:36:53 am »

Sorry to get a little off topic but I can't really find a better place for token chat.

Has anyone yet talked about the obvious fact that Coin tokens are a big power boost for Possession? They take all the shuffle luck out of buying Possession, and then you can spend all your opponent's Coin tokens even if you don't use the money. I guess they can prevent this by always using tokens immediately but that's pretty painful especially if they wind up wasting money. Though it's probably old news to people who play with fan cards.

Anyway yeah,  I'm going to love Butcher. I'll especially love using my starting Baker coin to Butcher an Estate into Baker; then use the coins from THAT Baker to turn my other Estates and Coppers into Bakers, then use THOSE coins to turn everything into Provinces. The Steak Sandwich Makers' guild is born! Now if we can just get some cheese on that.

28

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 05, 2013, 06:12:37 pm »

With Bridges/Highways on the board, it's typically the case that the things you want to buy immediately are more Bridges and Highways, even if their cost is reduced to $0 now. In such a situation, you might find yourself overpaying for a $0 Doctor.

I was thinking something like this; if you play enough Bridges that everything you want is free,  then you have a lot of money left to blow on Doctor.  The problem though seems the same as with many late Doctor buys: how and why are you getting this fairly big Bridge turn prior to thinning your deck? Why are you relying on your engine to go off before you've thinned it?  Did you do a one time Inn buy, or something? It's especially strange with Bridge (somewhat less with Highway) because if you're planning on a mega turn you don't have this situation of "My deck works now but I have to make room for Provinces so I can keep going while I green," which in principle might justify a late Doctor buy in some other finely tuned engines.

Beyond that, I suspect the overpriced Doctor is comparable to $7 cards like KC, which also might be in the same situation of being the only non-free card you buy in a turn. It helps and all but it feels pretty weird to call it synergy.

29

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #3: Journeyman

« on: June 05, 2013, 11:37:53 am »

I immediatly thought to Gatherer in the Fan-card Contest too, because there are some fan cards you just can't forget...

But as part of a 5/x opening, when you play it on turn 3,4, all it does is drawing 2 coppers + the card you bought for $x... great if you play with Baker and opened 5/3 maybe ! Otherwise, it seems a not-so-better Smithy, as Sage from DA was a "cantrip only good on beginning" ? or am I wrong ? Okay, it's still a nice drawer if you need it, but I don't know whether it should be above Catacombs

I expect this is strong enough to be worth passing up your $2 turn in order to take full advantage. Of course if there's a $2 card strong enough to be worth the risk of drawing it dead (or if there are no good $2s so you're not missing out anyhow) that's even better.

30

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 05, 2013, 10:15:09 am »

Well, calling Doctor/MS a combo specifically is not much different from calling "any trasher"/MS a combo I think.

I generally like MS and as any trasher is more fun with MS on board, so is Doctor.
And the reverse is also true of course.

Eh,  maybe.  I guess I'm more wondering whether it would be practical to rely primarily on the on-buy power when you're doing this,  or whether you treat Doctor mostly like a conventional trasher with occasional tactical buys.

Let's take the most extreme case. I open MS/MS and just continue buying MS until I start to get turns of $4+MS, whereupon I buy a Doctor,  and continue in this vein. (I'm probably willing to trash MS and/or Doctors at some point).  Does this work? What if I compromise just slightly by mixing in some Silver, or buying a Doctor at any price on T4 if I haven't yet gotten one?

31

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 05, 2013, 09:33:52 am »

Doctor+Market Square: Combo or nombo? On a good day, a hand of $4+MS is better than $4+Silver: you get your Gold plus free trashing and a free Doctor (which combos with MS in the future). On a bad day, you get $3+MS and would probably rather have had the Silver,  and on a really bad day you get $4+MS but you turn up a card you don't want to trash. 

32

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 05, 2013, 08:56:31 am »

I'd bet midgame Doctor is largely just a tactical decision.  It's not so rare to get an unwelcome $8 on an early turn,  and when you do,  it's because all your good cards are safely in hand.  That's 4-5 junk cards gone,  guaranteed, never mind the Doctor which is hopefully welcome in your deck. Would anyone really argue that's a bad play?

Strategically it would favor cards that tend to suffer from this problem.  Baron and Death Cart come to mind,  and both are quite happy to see some Copper leave town,  as it would happen. A lesser example might be something like Cache. Or you could buy it on your $12 post-Treasure Map turn. (This would let you trash surplus Treasure Maps or cards whose only use was to connect the Treasure Maps,  possibly enabling some TM combos that you would otherwise reject because their end result is ungainly.)

33

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The In No Way Official Dominion Podcast.

« on: June 04, 2013, 01:24:15 pm »

It's a nice idea but I'm a little skeptical that people will be able to retain much from a two-minute summary of ten cards. If you can cut out some nonessential cards and blend it with the strategic discussion so they have some context to help them remember things, then maybe. Otherwise though, maybe you should just put pictures of the cards up on your website or something and encourage confused players to use it as an aid.

34

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 04, 2013, 12:09:47 pm »

Weird thought, what about a Mandarin/Doctor opening? It mitigates Mandarin's speed problems (though not as compared to other Doctor openings), it mitigates the economic costs of Doctor's early Copper trashing, and if necessary you can combo the topdecking ability with Doctor trashing. Getting rid of the Copper is also great for later use of the Mandarin on-buy ability, though that's probably a separate question.

Coin tokens and overpay seems like more of a nombo than a combo to me.  Both give you a way of solving the 7$ hand problem, but you can't use both of them to fix a 7$ hand at the same time.
Am I missing something here?

I generally agree. I think the thing you could theoretically be missing is the ability to hoard Coin tokens and buy a $15 Doctor, but I'm not so sure if that's worth doing.

35

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Preview #2: Doctor

« on: June 04, 2013, 10:35:49 am »

This could potentially be a really nice counter to top-of-the-deck attacks. Sea Hag is substantially less brutal since you can trash that Curse. Rabble risks becoming helpful to your opponent because it nicely puts those Estates on the top of the deck where the Doctor can find them.

Not only this but (at the risk of stating the obvious) you don't even need to own a Doctor yet, or have it in hand, to do these things. Much stronger than Lookout this way.

It reminds me of Noble Brigand, being able to react to your opponent's moves as quickly as this. I guess it wouldn't be Dominion if there were too much of this, but it will be fun having a little more.

36

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Needed card titles

« on: May 10, 2013, 10:41:43 am »

There's a little part of me that wants to see the Cheesegrater's Guild.

37

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: THE WAIT IS KILLING ME

« on: May 03, 2013, 01:44:30 pm »

I think this order form is for local distributor

Well, I intend on distributing ten piles of cards on my own kitchen table. Can't get much more local than that!

38

Dominion: Guilds Previews / Re: Box Image and Description

« on: April 24, 2013, 04:04:30 pm »

So for wild unfounded speculation's sake, how do we think these new mechanics will play in practice? My thoughts:

* +Buy will become less important, or at least face competition, since now you can cheerfully use your leftover cash on other things without the effort of picking up a Woodcutter or whatever. $2 cards may also face competition, although I bet we see an "overpay to gain another card" card which functions along the lines of "when you buy this +1 Buy"

* Cards that often lead to overpaying get stronger. I'm looking at Spoils, maybe Death Cart (although that's quite severe overpayment), Platinum (likewise) and probably some others.

* Planning is in, improvising is out of style (relatively speaking of course). You don't have to worry quite so much about shuffle luck since overpaying for the card you wanted won't hurt so much, and coin tokens obviously afford a measure of control over your cashflow, especially if they're available early.

39

Dominion Articles / Re: Shelters

« on: January 17, 2013, 06:49:30 pm »

I found the edge case!  I found the edge case!

Trash Hovel to Estate on a 5/2 opening when Bishop is on the board, because you'll get more points that way.

I'm sure there are edge cases involving Crossroads, Baron, Remake etc. Shelters hurt all these cards but they're all still going to be viable SOMETIMES; even Baron is sometimes your only source of +Buy.

40

Dominion Articles / Re: Death Cart

« on: January 15, 2013, 03:31:16 pm »

So to sum up, the issue we're debating is whether Death Cart is viable as a long-term trash-for-benefit, or if it's best used as a one-shot.  Personally I lean toward the former, but everyone seems to be disagreeing with me.

Is this really the debate? That wasn't my impression, and it sounds like a silly debate to have. Obviously either approach can be good depending on your deck/the board, so both are worth discussing, though of course if one is somewhat more prevalent it's worth knowing.

Buying an endless stream of $2s for Death Cart isn't much of a strategy, seems to be the biggest thing people are saying. But the same would go for any other TfB, though for different reasons (i.e. most of their benefits are cost-dependent). It doesn't mean using Death Cart as a TfB isn't viable; it just means that neither Death Cart nor say Bishop is so broken that buying up all the Moats to trash becomes a winning strategy.

41

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Cute Trick

« on: January 15, 2013, 02:19:57 pm »

Cute indeed. You could also do Catacombs into Gardens/SR/estate etc.

42

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Tactics: Steward + Familiar

« on: January 15, 2013, 12:52:48 pm »

If you opened Potion, it should be because you think it's very important to get a Familiar asap. So you should do the +cards and buy the Familiar. If buying the Familiar asap is not important, maybe you shouldn't have bought Potion. On its own, Steward is not a reason to ignore Familiar. But Familiar can play very differently on boards with strong trashing. Depending on the engine, sometimes it's better to build the engine first, then add Familiars. If you buy Potion, then Familiar on early turns, you're giving up a lot of tempo on the engine building, since neither are useful for anything other than giving curses.

Faulty logic.  If you opened steward, it should be because you think it's very important to trash asap.  Otherwise, it should have been a silver.

Now, I personally do think +2 Cards is right, but it's tough.  For example Potion-Steward-C-E-E.  Trash, or +$2.  Still a tough decision.

Or you might have bought Steward because there are no other interesting terminals, so it was strictly better than Silver. Even if you ARE especially interested in trashing, perhaps this is mostly because it would help you play your Familiars more often, in which case prioritizing the trashing over Familiar is putting the cart before the horse.

But it's probably more interesting to assume you do care about trashing primarily for other reasons. Even given that, I don't think you want to trash the Copper here. You have a Potion in your deck and are skipping your turn 3 buy: you have money density problems here, even before you start getting Cursed. Trashing two Coppers makes it more likely you'll have a $2P turn next reshuffle (which could well be fatal at that point) and also makes it harder to buy whatever other cards might have benefited from your new thin deck. So in the short term it's bad. In the long term it's very questionable as you're likely to wind up with 2 extra Curses replacing your 2 Coppers. Maybe some really good stuff happens in the interim period, but it would have to be really good.

This is a very minor issue in most games but, also, you would feel pretty silly if the following situation arose later. Imagine you're trying hard to thin your deck, and you get a chance to trash your Potion, but you have to buy a Familiar instead because you passed one up earlier.

43

Dominion Articles / Re: Big Money

« on: January 10, 2013, 04:25:49 pm »

Are you planning a followup article on "hybrids" (either on your wheel, in general, or the engine-money hybrid in particular)? If not, I'd be very interested in your thoughts on when money/engine hybrids are viable/when they're better than a "real" engine or money deck.

The main factor I can see is you want a +Action component that's easy to get the desired concentration of without going too far out of your way. So FV, Hamlet, and possibly Walled Village (made for this situation, obviously, though this doesn't necessarily mean it's GOOD). Maybe also BV if you have a terminal that's worth passing up Gold, though this is starting to sound more like engine territory?

Obviously you also need Actions that are worth the effort, but maybe not capable of supporting a real engine. Beyond this though, I'm not sure how I'd read a board and decide to play something like this.

44

Dominion Articles / Re: Governor

« on: January 10, 2013, 12:31:39 pm »

Remember: Your opponent gets the effect before you do.

...I'm pretty sure this isn't true?

Also, you might want to add Possession to the "works with" list.

Isn't that rather "conflicts with"?

It's definitely a "works with". You just play all your Governors for cards which allows you to draw you Possession, then you play it, and get to spend all the other cards in your big hand, and then their big hand as well.

Yeah, I guess the counterargument is that the opponent with Possession can abuse your Governor for +Cards guilt-free? But that doesn't work because you have a Possession too; you are the one who's going to be playing that hand of his. In fact you are playing Possession reliably, practically every turn, while your opponent who passed up Governor probably only gets to play his Possession once every few turns.

45

Dominion Articles / Re: Shelters

« on: January 09, 2013, 03:30:51 pm »

Fun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):

Harem-with-Hovel beats Gold, from a totally naive raw money density perspective, as long as your money density is greater than 1. It's like trashing a Copper: one less coin, one less card.

Let's say you have X total cash and Y cards. Money density with a Gold is (X+3)/(Y+1). Money density with a Harem, sans a Hovel is (X+2)/Y. If money density = 1 then X = Y. (X + 3)/(X+1) != (X+2)/(X)

In reality, the choices are equivalent when X = Y - 2; which is actually a good bit sooner - as in turn 2 if you buy a silver (X = 9, Y = 11). The only time you should not take a Hovel trashing Harem over a Gold if you are just looking at money density is if you've been heavily cursed/ruined.

Sorry, I meant the money density AFTER the purchase needed to be greater than 1. (After either purchase; it doesn't matter which option you choose.) Post-purchase money density is described by the formulae you gave, (X+3)/(Y+1) and (X+2)/Y, so we seem to agree.

I didn't want to get too nitpicky about the specifics, since in a real game people probably aren't tracking money density closely enough to tell the difference. Even if they were, if it's that close, they are probably going to decide based on the Harem VP or some other factor.

 But I should've known someone would check my math (and thanks for doing so!)

Edit: To everyone else, yeah this does of course overlook a ton of factors. Including the difference between "raw money density," "effective money density," and "this deck doesn't care about money density."Also including the question of how long that Hovel would have been around anyhow. I don't mean to downplay any of this; it's left as an exercise for the reader, since most of the readers here can probably address it better than I can.

46

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dirty way to decide on platinum/ shelter use

« on: January 09, 2013, 03:18:07 pm »

See, I just ignore those "rules," particularly since they're only in there because a lot of Dominion players need specific guidelines for when to do something (for some reason).  For IRL games, I'll add Platinum/Colony and/or Shelters if I feel they add to the kingdom.

The funny thing is, some of the best Platinum/Colony games are the ones where a Province rush is viable. And you don't get nearly as many of those with high-powered Prosperity cards in play, making Plat and Colony stronger than they need to be.

47

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dirty way to decide on platinum/ shelter use

« on: January 09, 2013, 02:00:57 pm »

This rule isn't from Androminion.  It comes straight out of the official rules.  IRL, you just use the randomizers for the kingdom cards -- no need to make an extra deck out of Coppers and Gold.

Incidentally, if you have access to Androminion, you also have access to Dominion Shuffle and various other apps which do all this for you.

48

Dominion Articles / Re: Hermit/Madman

« on: January 09, 2013, 12:10:42 pm »

I would mention that Hermit/Madman is good for setting up megaturns.  Governor, Horn of Plenty, KC/Bridge.  All of these can make good use of a few Madmen for the massive cumulative draw.  Governor and Horn of Plenty even give you ways to continue gaining parts while eschewing buys for Madmen.

What would it take to do something like NV/Bridge using Madmen instead of NV?  It's problematic because your Hermits and Bridges collide, but on the other hand there is major synergy between Hermit gain and Bridge cost reduction. This would let you build faster, and in the end you could keep some Madmen around to gain free Provinces on your megaturn (which might let you get away with just 5 Bridges).

I have to imagine it's viable on some boards, even if not many. Seems like at minimum you need another source of +Action, preferably one gainable by Hermit such as Village or Hamlet (or even NV itself for a sort of hybrid strategy). Or FV, obviously. I can see how the need to pick up Villages might use up all the time you gained with your Hermit gain, but then again it might not, especially in FV's case. Then you might need Copper trashing or something on top of that.

49

Dominion Articles / Re: Shelters

« on: January 09, 2013, 11:47:00 am »

As for Island; while it's certainly better to buy with Hovel in hand, it also seems like you would be less likely to want an Island in a game with Shelters instead of Estates. If you have no way to trash, then setting aside an Overgrown Estate or I guess Copper can be good, but not as good as setting aside Estates. Similar to how you might not open double-Amb in a Necropolis game, even though you have less risk of colliding.

On the other hand, buying Great Hall with Hovel in hand is roughly comparable to buying Island in an Estate game.

And similarly, of course, having Hovel in hand can help you make your decision between Gold and Harem.

Fun calculation (which is probably obvious to many if they've considered the issue):

Harem-with-Hovel beats Gold, from a totally naive raw money density perspective, as long as your money density is greater than 1. It's like trashing a Copper: one less coin, one less card.

50

Dominion Articles / Re: Shelters

« on: January 08, 2013, 02:52:14 pm »

One other thing I never see people mention is that sometimes Shelters are actually doing Remake and Upgrade a favor. Fool's Gold is an obvious example but not the only one.