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2351

Dominion General Discussion / Re: CARD OF THE WEEK #9: Inn

« on: May 20, 2015, 07:36:47 am »

In my shitty opinion, the best way to think about Inn is that Inn is always best in decks when you have to line up particular Action cards with each other. This is obviously true for its on-gain effect, but also with how it plays as a sifting village.

On-gain, obviously you want to buy it near the end of a shuffle if possible, and you want to shuffle in Actions that you want to play together. You don't always want to shuffle all of them in; you want a good mix of each of the Actions you want to combine with each other, you want about one Village per terminal, etc. This is usually just common sense though.

Once it's in your deck, it king of plays like Warehouse, but it enables combos. You use it to find the cards you *must* pair together to make your deck work; maybe the King's Court and the Bridge, or maybe you can sift to a Smithy to get a larger hand size. It's a pretty bleh regular Village, since it reduces your hand size, so you can't just have a ton of Inn (unless the Inns themselves are the targets of the discard effect), but it is functional in decks with slight Trashing and good draw, or no trashing and great draw. It's essentially like you played Village, then a Dungeon. Not the worst two things in the world to combine into one card, but the hand size reduction does hurt.

2352

Dominion League / Re: Signups - Questions & Answers

« on: May 18, 2015, 10:31:26 pm »

Posted in the wrong thread for this, I guess:

Dunno where to post questions about league rules, but I've got one.

I'm fortunate enough to be paired with one of my real life friends for a match, so I'm wondering - if we opted to play our matches using physical cards, would we be able to play with Adventures cards? I can see this not being allowed since the cards are not available online yet. Don't worry about deck tracking - I'll be sure to sleeve them.

I'd probably do some magic with a tripod and webcam to stream these games.

2353

Dominion General Discussion / Re: At what point should you resign?

« on: May 18, 2015, 10:21:28 pm »

You never have any obligation to resign, even when it is mathematically impossible for you to win the match. If the would be winner isn't willing to play out the whole match, they shouldn't win. That simple.

That said, I tend to resign once it is literally impossible for me to win the match, unless the game is just a few turns from ending anyway.

2354

Dominion League / Re: Birthday Party

« on: May 18, 2015, 10:57:19 am »

Great format. This would be a really cool way to seed a short term elimination tournament as well. Top 4 advance to traditional semis and finals after a 2 hour qualifying period.

2355

Dominion League / Re: Birthday Party

« on: May 17, 2015, 06:12:41 pm »

Log of my loss to liopoli: http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20150517/log.5363eea1e4b03d4f275f8625.1431900691791.txt

Won vs Yed - http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20150517/log.51102b6ee4b06719e45eef9d.1431902012162.txt

Loss vs Iguana Iguana - http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?/20150517/log.5363eea1e4b03d4f275f8625.1431902817933.txt

I'll edit in the rest as I play more, juts want a place on the forums to reference these later.

2356

Dominion League / Re: Season 8 - Signups

« on: May 17, 2015, 04:11:20 pm »

Dunno where to post questions about league rules, but I've got one.

I'm fortunate enough to be paired with one of my real life friends for a match, so I'm wondering - if we opted to play our matches using physical cards, would we be able to play with Adventures cards? I can see this not being allowed since the cards are not available online yet. Don't worry about deck tracking - I'll be sure to sleeve them.

I'd probably do some magic with a tripod and webcam to stream these games.

2357

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Had this Kingdom tonight as I only own (Base and Seaside)

« on: May 17, 2015, 02:46:42 pm »

Chapel / Wharf is a totally reasonable opening here on 5/2. I am pretty sure Wharf is pretty much always better than Library here, but a part of me would want to consider a Chapel / Library open instead and build more of a Library / Festival draw-to-x engine. After the first shuffle, if you have something like Library / E / C / C / C, you can skip over Chapel to ensure your early $5 for a Festival for example. Later when you have a few of each and you're really trying to just trash your last junk, you can play one festival, then library, skip everything except Chapel, and clear out. The deck control Library gives you is interesting.

That said, Wharf is still definitely better, I just think it could be more fun if you were playing more casually and just wanted to fuck around like that. I think you want some mix of Festival and Bazarr with Wharf, slightly more Bazarr but also a few Festivals for the extra Buy more than anything.

If I opened 4/3, there's not really any choice but Chapel / Silver.

2358

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Thoughts on the Adventures Physical Box Stuff

« on: May 12, 2015, 09:27:41 pm »

Just don't let it influence your choices.  It's not hard to not look for it.

If you don't find it difficult, you don't have the problem to the same extent that I (and I guess some others) do. It's not a choice. Some cards are light tan, some cards are dark brown, it's not a thing you can really not see. Even with differently worn cards, you have to try to look at the cards and examine the white spots on the edges.

I bought some opague sleeves which I've used for the past few days while I wait for RGG to get back to me. Does anyone know how long it normally takes for them to follow up?

2359

Game Reports / Re: WTFool's Gold and the Stef Rule holds true AGAIN!

« on: May 12, 2015, 10:38:23 am »

All points about game 1 are embarrassingly valid. I was considering the game a FG rush insread of terminal draw BM.

The most pedantic-est way to put it would be to say that there was a rush for the Fool's Gold pile in order to quickly improve your terminal draw BM money density. If the game itself was a rush, you'd generally be going for three piles, though that doesn't usually work for FG.

2360

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which 26 Kingdom cards for travel set?

« on: May 12, 2015, 10:34:09 am »

If you're avoiding brutal attacks, Giant isn't really a good idea.

Giant doesn't hit often, the attack part is not that strong overall.

It's not that it's *strong*, it's that it's brutal. It's really dickish to new players. Kind of like Saboteur - not going to single handedly win you many games, but playing against it as a new player sucks anyway. People don't like losing cards. Not the biggest deal in the world, by any means, but just a thought. I don't think it would ruin the game.

I substituted out Workshop / Gardens for Ironworks / Feodum as both cards are a lot more useful if you fuck up the strategy (a bad Feodum rush at least has some buying power; a bad Gardens rush is just useless and sad to play with). Feodum also works better with Chapel and Junk Dealer.

It seems like Feodum would be bought for the VPs less often than Gardens (set has few Silver gainers other than Workshop or Ironworks, or repeatedly trashing Feodum).

I would have taken out Trading Post, since it's kind of shitty compared to Junk Dealer and Chapel, but it works well enough with Feodum that I left it in.

It’s a flaw that Trading Post is so outclassed by those two. But with Chapel and Junk Dealer any of the weaker trashers will usually be outclassed. They can’t all be the best $5 cost ever? Or do I need Explorer for that?

[/quote]

Basically my thinking was if there's gonna be a weaker card included, there might as well be some support.

I don't see how there are fewer Feodum enablers than there were Gardens enablers before I made the substitution. Ironworks and Trading Post are great Silver gainers, and you can play a somewhat similar, sloggy strategy with them. The pure rush isn't necessarily as good, yeah. I just really like how people who are playing "creatively" and going for Feodum just to be different are gonna be far less screwed than doing the same with Gardens if the strategy backfires. They can revert to Provinces pretty easily and quickly.

But like above, both Gardens and Feodum I think would work. Whichever you prefer, really.

Library is the other card I would really strongly consider here - Library is a terminal draw card that's extremely forgiving for new players with the skip-over-Actions feature.

Library seems complicated; people often forget about the skip-over-Actions feature and the setting aside can be confusing. But having terminals that help with drawing terminals dead is useful.

Maybe Embassy instead of Dungeon? Dungeon is there mainly because it's from Adventures (Warehouse is simpler). Embassy adds more non-attack interaction and adds another $5 cost. However, Embassy + Council Room might make for too many fast money games, and Treasure Map needs an enabler.

Hmm... what about Gear? Gear is a soft terminal draw (you tuck your Actions away for next turn), it's a phenomenal Treasure Map enabler, and it's just fucking cool Adventures in general.

2361

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Which 26 Kingdom cards for travel set?

« on: May 11, 2015, 05:44:03 pm »

Here's some tweaks I made, feel free to use them or not, I juts wanted to procrastinate for 15 minutes.

I started by trimming your list a bit, then added a few suggestions. You probably don't need more than 3 Villages. I took out Worker's Village mostly to make +Buy harder to get. Engines are nice but you don't necessarily want to hand them everything on a silver platter. The draw was also pretty lacking. If you're avoiding brutal attacks, Giant isn't really a good idea. I substituted out Workshop / Gardens for Ironworks / Feodum as both cards are a lot more useful if you fuck up the strategy (a bad Feodum rush at least has some buying power; a bad Gardens rush is just useless and sad to play with). Feodum also works better with Chapel and Junk Dealer. Soothsayer is probably the gentlest Curser and it is more fun for new players than Witch etc so I left that in. I would have taken out Trading Post, since it's kind of shitty compared to Junk Dealer and Chapel, but it works well enough with Feodum that I left it in. (Not sure on Tactician or Hireling yet)

So at that point, I've got 23 cards. So 2 additions plus any other substitutions. At this point there are only 2 +Buy, so I think Nomad Camp is a solid addition. Nomad Camp also has strong synergy with Fool's Gold and isn't too bad when combined with Ironworks in a Feodum /Silver rush. I'm trying to support multiple different strategies here and give it less of an engine bias while still leaving strong engine potential on the board. I think Cellar would also be a good idea here. It's a nice card to help new players who may have messed up and have to discard a bunch of terminals they collided, etc.

This set has a really similar card value distribution to the base set, but with gentler attacks, more cool / fun cards, and friendly player interaction. Other cards to consider substituting in would be Bishop over Junk Dealer if you'd prefer another 4 and another terminal. Maybe replace one of Tactician or Hireling; those can lead to a lot of decks where a really good player wipes the floor with everyone else. But they're not inherently bad at all, and I particularly like the strong double Tactician engine here. Library is the other card I would really strongly consider here - Library is a terminal draw card that's extremely forgiving for new players with the skip-over-Actions feature.

$2: Chapel, Fool's Gold, Lighthouse, Cellar (4)
$3: Fishing Village, Fortune Teller, Menagerie, Village (4)
$4: Conspirator, Cutpurse, Feodum, Remodel, Smithy, Treasure Map, Nomad Camp, Ironworks (
$5: Council Room, Festival, Junk Dealer, Laboratory, Soothsayer, Tactician, Trading Post, Treasure Trove (
$6: Hireling (1)

2362

Game Reports / Re: WTFool's Gold and the Stef Rule holds true AGAIN!

« on: May 11, 2015, 05:18:23 pm »

I think this will probably rehash earlier points, but here's my thoughts:

Game 1:
T5: I have no idea why you bought Trader here. If there are Fools Golds on the pile and you're trying to win the split, you should really only buy cards that give you a future advantage in buying Fool's Golds (such as Margrave or Nomad Camp.)

T6 (and several others): Spy is really not that good in general, and specifically here it doesn't synergize very well with terminal draw at all. You were afraid of a second Margrave, but dead drawing a Spy with Margrave is about as bad as dead drawing your second Margrave.

T6 (specifically): With $7 left for your remaining Buy, you had a number of good options. Gold is more valuable than you give it credit for even in a Fool's Gold game. Think about it: A hand of three Golds and a hand of three Fool's Golds have the exact same value. Even the hand of 2 Gold and 1 FG is just barely worse than a hand of 2 FG and one Gold. No shame in picking that up. Alternatively, you could grab a Margrave here. With 16 cards in your deck, collision isn't a huge concern, and the more frequent +Buy and attack make up for the occasional collision. If you collide with Trader, you can always just use your second Buy to gain a Silver instead.

T12: By now your deck has 11 Treasures (and only 5 of them worth anything, though you only get the benefit of four of them) and 23 cards total. Margrave really starts to lose value here. This is why your opponent kept buying Money; in the absence of really strong engine potential, you're going to want to sustain your money density, and just Fool's Gold isn't good enough for that. It's true that you're diluting your Fool's Golds a bit by doing this, but the Fool's Golds themselves can enable purchases of Gold (or you can use the Reaction if you have one FG and a Margrave, etc in your hand). You basically didn't commit to terminal draw hard enough. You can have a few Actions, but you can't reliably count on cantrips at all.

So basically, buy Gold and Silver over cantrips in terminal draw big money. Also, Spy's pretty bad.

=====

Game 2:

Overall, I think it would have been better to go for Silk Road first. To get 4 point Silk Roads, you need to get 13 more Victory cards on top of your starting 3 Estates. This is actually a lot easier than getting 30 more cards to get Gardens to 4 points, and once you saw your opponent go for Mercenary on the first shuffle, you could have seen his deck was less well equipped to contest Gardens then to contest Silk Road.

T3: I actually would have gone Gold / Copper (or with Silk Road, Gold / nothing here), for one simple reason: Gold / Copper is far better to have than Silver / Silver in the presence of discard attacks.

T5: I agree with your buy of Horse Traders on 6 here. You really want at least two as soon as you can and you didn't have many great opportunities prior. Horse Traders is a fairly soft terminal that tolerates collision well.

T7: I think I would have gained one more Horse Traders before starting the rush / slog, but clearly you had some time on your hands. Remember that in the event of terminal collision, you can still use both Reactions, and the HT is a good target for the other HT discard. You can see it's evidently clear that your opponent has no intention of contesting Gardens at this point, and even if they did there's another pile for you to get VP from, so I would have spent a little longer building. You end up buying another HT on Turn 9 anyway.

Overall I think you made mostly the right calls here - the threat of Prince Militia here makes an alt-VP strategy your most effective counter-attack. I would have just bought a few more Horse Traders, gone Silk Road first, and then Gardens to end the rush.

2363

Game Reports / Re: My opponent passed on Mountebank and Rebuild and still won

« on: May 11, 2015, 11:53:57 am »

Talisman by itself isn't that great of a Gardens enabler, but if you're bombarding him with Mountebanks AND he grabs a few Talismans (Talismen?) then suddenly Gardens looks pretty good. Especially considering that he can trash Curses no problem with Hermit. Skip Mountebank and even a poorly played Rebuild strategy should destroy Gardens, I'd think.

I think you're forgetting about Hermit's Workshop-like card gaining effect here, which with Talisman makes a Gardens (rush? slog?) very possible. I don't think it would inherently lose if Mountebank was ignored, though it certainly would be far, far more difficult

2364

Dominion FAQ / Re: How many sleeves do I need?

« on: May 11, 2015, 09:26:32 am »

While it's still not a good idea to spill drinks around playing cards, I think if someone spilled a drink, you'd much rather the cards be sleeved. It is a bit harder for the cards to get wet, and fewer cards will get soaked, and with a new sleeve a soaked card isn't totally unplayable anymore.

I know some people who double-sleeve their cards in order to fully seal them - they use a penny sleeve inside a real sleeve. Not sure if that works with commonly available Euro size sleeves, but maybe it does. Not a huge deal for me, really.

I ended up getting 500 sleeves, so I can sleeve all my Base Cards, plus then I'd have enough for up to 11 Kingdom cards, all the Ruins, and a bunch extra in case a clumsy player rips up a sleeve when removing / adding cards to them. In many cases I could sleeve two Kingdoms in advance to speed things up a bit too. I'm going to try and see if I prefer playing with sleeves enough to invest in the Hobby Lobby box, wood dividers, a dremel, etc. Maybe I can make use of dramatically inefficient resources and 3D print dividers for the box.

Thanks for your help everyone

[Edit: I don't see the point in sleeveing Events. Who cares if my cards are damaged, they're not collectible. The only reason damage matters is if people can cheat and track their deck via card damage / if cards get gross and stick together, which don't apply to Events]

2365

Game Reports / Re: My opponent passed on Mountebank and Rebuild and still won

« on: May 11, 2015, 09:21:26 am »

Once you see him going for Gardens, I would avoid Mountebank. Really, as soon as he bought the Talisman, I wouldn't go for it. He didn't do anything to hit $5 quickly or at all, so you can tell before the first shuffle he wants Gardens. Buy Rebuilds on $5, Gardens on $4, and Estates on $3, and just rush for three piles. If you contest Gardens, he's not going to be able to keep up, and you basically don't care how little Gardens is worth to you since you can trash them and Estates into Duchy later. That's how I see it.

2366

Dominion League / Re: Signups - Questions & Answers

« on: May 11, 2015, 09:09:17 am »

Right now there are some players in E with an iso level above 20. Apparently their rating went up quite a bit during the season. I am going to try to get them all out of E (and into D) because level 20 is approximately the maximum I want to allow for E players. I want reasonably novice players to also feel welcome. But I can't make any promises, because in the end I just have to make 6-player groups.

Of course, there are also some dummies with ratings well above 20 who get dead last in their D pools and muck everything up.

2367

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Potion-costing Events

« on: May 10, 2015, 12:18:33 pm »

I feel like the best Potion costing events would be ones that let you get rid of your Potions... Think like a Salvager or Counterfeit type thing. Not sure of a name, but $4 cost, +1 Buy, trash a [treasure] card from your hand, gain its cost in coins. Or something.

What would be more interesting to me is an Event that produces P that doesn't cost P. Maybe a $3 cost that produces P and 1 (or 2) Buys. Enough so that buying familiar, etc is a substantial hardship without real potion cards, but tempting enough that you consider forgoing Potion altogether.

What about Gundpowder-costing events?

Bomb
1G - Event
Trash this and a card in your hand.

Can you trash an event?

Well, none of the official events allow you to trash them, but the effect of removing a card from your deck without having to add a trasher to your deck is so incredibly strong, the event has to be balanced by making it only usable once in the entire game. It is okay that only one player gets the opportunity to use this event because there is precedent in the cards Black Market, Tournament, and Knights.

I get what you're trying to accomplish, but Events *aren't cards*. They just have cards saying what they do. You would want to use a token and a once per game clause like Inheritance.

Also, "trashing" an event this way would mean only one player could use it?

2368

2015 / Re: discussion: seeding

« on: May 10, 2015, 12:11:45 pm »

I don't understand why you wouldn't seed as many people as you can. Maybe there's a certain point (i.e. below Iso level 10) where you treat everyone left as in one big vague "low seed" group, but I don't think seeding just 16 people in a 128 man tournament makes sense or is even fair at all. The fairest way to do single elimination is best available vs worst available; any other way to do it kicks good players out of the tournament far earlier than not so good players. In order to properly do this you have to seed as many people as possible.

I would use Isotropic ranks, give people a few days notice to really try and push their rank up if they so choose.

2369

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Should I buy Adventures now, or wait for the reprint?

« on: May 09, 2015, 12:03:06 pm »

Until then; I've ordered a few hundred sleeves in order to try out the idea of playing with sleeves without committing to 2800 sleeves and a new mass storage solution. You only need ~300 to sleeve all of your Base Cards plus the 10 Kingdom cards you're playing with at that particular time, which can be as low as $8 shipped.

Resleeving 100 cards between games seems like a HUGE pain in the ass.
OTOH, 8$ for 300 opaque sleeves? Seems quite low. What brand are they?

I ended up deciding to buy 500 sleeves from here: http://www.miniaturemarket.com/mdg7042.html?___store=mmonline&___store=mmonline&utm_source=GoogleShopping&gclid=CKiM4-27hcUCFc3m7Aod9CIA1A Total order was like $9.40 + $6 shipping. If these work well, and I find a storage solution as convenient and fast as my binders, I'll probably buy the other 2000 or so I need once I start my job.

2370

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Should I buy Adventures now, or wait for the reprint?

« on: May 08, 2015, 03:22:40 pm »

I took a semi random sample of Adventures cards and a semi random sample of non-Adventures cards to compare. Here's the results - some are obviously more affected than others. http://imgur.com/a/Cprqc

My list of affected cards in my set is here. There were a few borderline cards I didn't list, these are just the blatant ones. I'm curious if it matches any other lists? I'm going to look at all 30 stacks at once to make sure I was thorough, this is just what I compiled in 5 minutes of flipping through my binder.

Code: [Select]

Most Affected Cards:
Amulet
Artificer
Bridge Troll
Caravan Guard
Duplicate
Gear
Guide
Magpie
Messenger
Ranger
Ratcatcher
Raze
Transmogrify
Page
Peasant

2371

Dominion FAQ / Re: How many sleeves do I need?

« on: May 08, 2015, 10:14:32 am »

For sleeving "every" card, I figured I wouldn't sleeve the second set of Base Cards as I pretty much never use those, and I'm trying to save a bit of money. I.e. what's the minimum amount of sleeves you need to be able to play a four player game of Dominion of any kind without having to put unsleeved cards in sleeves. Does 2794 include the Intrigue base cards?

I'm also curious how many sleeves are needed if only the Base Cards (including Platinum, Potion, Ruins) are sleeved and the remaining 100-120 Kingdom cards are sleeved before the game begins (or as the game goes along). It's a time investment but something I'm considering while I try out the idea of playing with sleeved cards.

I can probably figure this out later as well, just wondering if anyone had that info handy.

2372

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Should I buy Adventures now, or wait for the reprint?

« on: May 08, 2015, 09:57:11 am »

I've read reports and can myself report that sometimes the cards are actually damaged. I don't know if that gets addressed in a reprint.

What do you mean "actually damaged"? If you're talking off-center, torn, etc. RGG replaces those, like always, so there's no risk there.

I mean nicked and torn at the edges showing white card material against the black edges. Whatever machine puts them in the shrink wrap most likely did it because it was isolated to the topmost face out card in each brick.

A few of my cards had some of these dings, but they were pretty much limited to the kind of damage that a few game's worth of plays would give to the cards anyway, so I didn't really care too much.

I'll be uploading a few pictures of some samples of my Adventures card backs compared to "new" (never been shuffled) card backs from each of the older expansions. It seems that the dramatic discoloring is limited to 1/3rd-1/2 of my Adventures cards, and I've just had the bad luck of repeatedly playing with those cards over the last few days. All of them seem a LITTLE off but not all of them are as bad as previous examples. Leads me to believe one of the printers was running out of ink or something.

2373

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Should I buy Adventures now, or wait for the reprint?

« on: May 07, 2015, 06:17:31 pm »

I'd be interested in seeing a few other people with Adventures sets taking pictures of their card backs next to other random Dominion card backs. Obviously lighting will impact the colors but it should be good enough to get an idea. I haven't seen other people complain about miscolored cards on the forums so I could have gotten a bad batch. I assume it would be quickly noticed since the vast majority of people seem to play with clear sleeves here. I'm going to see what RGG thinks about these cards and report back.

Honestly, the printing issues aren't great, but the game is fantastic, so I think buying a set and then getting card replacements if you get a bad batch is probably the best idea. From the posts I've seen on the forums RGG is very willing to send replacements if you have an actual issue.

Until then; I've ordered a few hundred sleeves in order to try out the idea of playing with sleeves without committing to 2800 sleeves and a new mass storage solution. You only need ~300 to sleeve all of your Base Cards plus the 10 Kingdom cards you're playing with at that particular time, which can be as low as $8 shipped.


(By the way, I know there are some color variations between sets, and if I stare at my Intrigue cards and my Dark Ages cards long enough I can kind of tell which are which, but my card print was just dramatically different. If you shuffle a bunch of dark brown cards and a light brown card is in there, it's hard to avoid.)

2374

Dominion: Adventures Previews / Re: American edition low quality???

« on: May 07, 2015, 06:01:43 pm »

If I have any lighting in my game room at all, the card backs are so different the game is completely unplayable at this point. While before I could kind of tell how new-ish a card was by looking at the wear and trying to think about it, now I'm forced into that knowledge without any conscious thought and it ruins shuffling and play decisions for me. I have to buy sleeves or not play Adventures now.

You can send them in for replacements you know. The set is not just universally miscolored.

I didn't know that; I'll be contacting RGG shortly then. Thanks for letting me know this was an option.

2375

Dominion FAQ / How many sleeves do I need?

« on: May 07, 2015, 11:46:58 am »

Couldn't find this by searching (quickly), and I figure it's a common enough question to go here?

How many sleeves do I need to buy to sleeve every single regular card (including one set of Base Cards, not including any randomizers)? [EDIT: I think the answer to this is 2,576?]

How many sleeves do I need to buy to sleeve just the Base Cards plus the cards used in a single game? How few could I get away with if I didn't sleeve literally every Copper, etc?