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126

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Still A Better (Love?) Story Than Twilight - The Thread

« on: April 14, 2017, 12:55:10 pm »

There once was a poor Vagrant who wandered from town to town, accomplishing virtually nothing. One day, a kindly business owner with wares to sell took pity upon him and gave him some job Training. He's now very successful, gathering even more green than the other Peddlers.

When Vagrant + Training came up in an IRL game, I had to laugh at Vagrant + Training = Peddler. It's even something worth doing.

127

Dominion Articles / Golden Decks

« on: April 07, 2017, 01:32:44 pm »

Fun exercise: Enumerate every way you can think of to make a deck Golden.

Definition: A Golden Deck is a deck that achieves its intended purpose reliably, every turn, and fundamentally cannot stall.

Worth noting is that any deck that buys VP cards for points must be able to do something about them. Even if an engine can kick off with any one action card, if there is even the remotest possibility of drawing five VP cards to start the next turn, that's not Golden. It's just "reliable."

(The Classic: Bishop/Money/VP, trashing a single VP card for tokens every turn, rebuying.)

Hand reliability techniques:

-- Junking down to a 5-card deck (Chapel/Donate/etc.)

-- Having a deck of any size containing no more than 4 stop cards.

Stop cards include all terminals, treasure, VP, or non-drawing splitters. In addition to cantrips and non-terminal draw, Action-fixers like Champion/Lost Arts/Teacher can turn decks golden in an instant.

-- Starting each turn with a hand size greater than 5

Duration-draw, such as Tactician, Haunted Woods, Enchantress. Prince. Even Summon can do the trick. Also noteworthy are Gear/Archive/Haven. Also Expedition.

-- End-of-turn deck stacking

You may be able to turn a deck golden with topdecking. This includes the classic Scavenger/Stash, but also Secret Passage, Scheme, etc. This could completely and utterly prevent any possibility of stalling even if the deck contained 6 stop cards, for example, by ensuring that the top of the deck was guaranteed to grow your hand to 7 cards with an action to spare.

Points reliability techniques:

What to do about greening so that the deck doesn't turn from gold to lead while you buy VP cards?

-- VP token strategies. (Duh. Goons/Groundskeeper/Watchtower/etc. Multi-Monument, Just about Everything from Empires...)

-- Setting VP cards aside.

Island, Native Village, and arguably, Archive/Gear/Haven if carefully managed.

-- Sifting?

Sort of. If you can guarantee a minimum starting hand size, each sifter in a Golden Deck can "spend" VP cards for extra draw, but you still can't expand your VP cards beyond your guaranteed minimum starting hand size - 1.

Attack vulnerability:

Attacks often destroy Golden Decks, but there may be exceptions. Some can play three-card hands or four-card hands, making Discard attacks irrelevant, possibly including Minion. Some can play trashers every turn, making junking attacks irrelevant. Note that Prince and duration draw resist discard, but Expedition does not. Trashing attacks and/or topdeck attacks can also spoil a Golden Deck, but could possibly be mitigated by gainers.

128

Dominion Articles / Re: Refreshing the Dominion Paradigms

« on: April 07, 2017, 12:45:51 pm »

A few comments.

Do we need another Engine category of duration-draw? I mean, sure, there's Wharf, but there's also Haunted Woods and Enchantress which don't draw until next turn, but which can dramatically increase the reliability of an engine if it can always set up the draw for the next turn. They're especially good with multipliers. I recently played a KC/Haunted Woods engine that needed almost nothing else. 14-card starting hands every turn works even with only a tiny amount of trashing.

Is it really OK to add a few non-terminal actions into a Terminal Draw/BM deck? I'm not so sure. Their play value vs. drawing them dead seems dubious.

Just the fact that there's some argument about what constitutes a weak engine vs. a money deck is illuminating. Is cantrip money still money? If you open Forager/Forager and manage to grab 8 Peddlers and simlutaneously trash down to just 8 Peddlers (Ok, fine, you throw the last Forager on a Bonfire) so that you can reliably buy a Province a turn, is that an engine or a money deck? Sure, you're drawing deck every turn, but you're not building up to anything interesting.

Or what if you buy a few Village/Draw pairs and some cash, but you never draw deck and you start Greening at approximately a Province a turn, or maybe you get lucky once and draw a bunch of golds and a Nomad Camp and sneak in a double-Province. Is that an engine or a money deck? I suspect there's some disagreement here.

And even if an engine can draw deck, there's a further reliability distinction. I would submit that the "golden deck" terminology be included as an archetype of engine-building where the construction and point-gathering mechanism is sufficiently robust that it is fundamentally impossible for it to stall. Not just unlikely; impossible. There are a number of mechanisms for this and it may be worth another forum thread. I'll start one just for fun.

I suspect there may also be some disagreement about what exactly constitutes a rush or slog. That said, I wouldn't call them obsolete. However you do it, you may build up your deck to a particular point, then spend a few turns grabbing a particular set of VP cards with the intention of emptying piles before your opponent can finish building up to the bigger point cards. At what point does the distinction between the game being a "rush" and simply winning by intentionally piling out apply? Just because you were planning on winning on piles at the beginning? Or that you recognized that both players were likely to be grabbing alt+VP so fast that Provinces were going to be irrelevant? Perhaps one of the most important pieces of advice might be: Watch for piles...starting with turn 1.

And does a slog always involve curses or attacks? Could it just come from a really weak kingdom that happens to lack trashing and +buy, and particularly if it has cards that encourage junking your own deck for short-term gain like Banquet/Treasure Trove/Death Cart? It feels like there might be a bit of a continuum between slog and money, as well, if an engine is simply impossible, depending on the relative strength of attacks you can't reliably play every turn vs. money enablers.

I know I've been asking a lot of questions, but I'll register an opinion:

I think that the classic archetypes all still have meaning, but that the strategies are no longer as simple or as prescriptive as they once were.

Instead, I would suggest that players look at a kingdom and ask "what does this kingdom want to do?"

Are there junking or discard attacks that are going to slow the game down? Any trashing/engine pieces that can neutralize them? If not, it might be a slog, virtually guaranteed to end on piles before anyone gets to $8, so forget high-VP and plan accordingly.

Are there strong cheap gainers, twofers like Haggler and Border Village, Remodelers, or other cards that are going to drain piles quickly? You might be able to plan a VP-rush. If you start gaining points a turn or two before your opponent and they keep building to a bigger payoff, if you can end the game on piles before they do so, that's pretty much what constitutes a rush in my book: A points sprint that can't be overtaken before a three-pile. I mention Remodelers because I would categorize many milling strategies as rushes, even if they rush the Province pile. Also, Salt. Just sayin'. Rush isn't irrelevant.

Are the action/draw pieces good enough to draw deck? Is there +buy? Is there any payload? If an Engine isn't viable or interesting, it might be a money game. But don't just play money because there's no other option. Some cards like money a lot. Embassy not only hits $8 with startling reliability, it also junks engines with Silver in the mid-game.

Finally, there's one more engine distinction worth mention that I've seen in other articles: Good ones can build exponentially. Gainers, +buy and multipliers can all make an engine "explode" once it gets going. Drawing deck isn't the end goal, it's sort of the minimum starting point. It's worth noting that some kingdoms have enough action/draw/sift power to draw deck, but without +buy/gains, the build may be linear instead of exponential. The difference is enormous; arguably bigger than the difference between some of the other classic archetypes.

So if anything, we need more archetypes and distinctions, not fewer. And I agree that it would be pretty great if the wiki could get updated with concise articles on these subjects. The forums are a great place for learning and information gathering, but at some point it's worth boiling it all down to good advice for new players.

129

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat card interactions that were useful in the game you found them in.

« on: April 07, 2017, 11:23:16 am »

Donate + Poor House

On your first 3 turns, pick up 2 Poor Houses and a village, if possible.
Donate your starting deck on turn 4, and by turn 6 (at the latest), you'll have a debt-free 3-card deck producing $8. Groovy!

Well, at least until you buy your 4th Province, at which point it has a chance of stalling if you don't draw the village, and that chance goes up with each additional Province. Sure, it seems as though six or seven Provinces should win, but the deck is missing pile control. You can't end the game. With Donate on the board, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that lose to an engine that could do something with Alt+VP and/or piles, or maybe even raw speed.

Poor House makes such fantastic engine economy with Donate and +Actions, what you should really be doing in a kingdom where they're present is figure out how MANY Provinces you want per turn, and that number is almost certain to be more than one. Assuming there's +buy. Which, if there is, almost guarantees some kind of Megaturn since the Poor Houses themselves are super-easy to pile with extra buys. Play what you're describing, and you're likely to see

Player 1: Province
Player 2: Stuff
Player 1: Province
Player 2: More stuff
Player 1: Province
Player 2: A lot more stuff
Player 1: Province
Player 2: The other four Provinces and a Duchy.

I gotta stop thinking about Donate. I'm drooling on my keyboard.

130

Dominion Articles / Re: Challenge: write a Moat article

« on: April 07, 2017, 10:54:52 am »

Of note is a tiny piece of counter-intuitive math that I like to bring up to newish players. It applies to all draw-2 cards, not just Moat.

A draw-3 action isn't 50% more powerful than draw-2. It's twice as powerful. New players see it as "almost as good."

Since each card you buy also adds a card to your deck, when you're engine-building, buying a draw+3 effectively shrinks your deck by two cards. buying a draw+2 shrinks your deck by one card. It's half as good. It's like the difference in trashing power between Steward and Trade Route. (Notably, non-terminal draw+2s are effective because you buy the same number of cards for the same amount of drawing power as a village/draw+3, with the added benefit of more reliability.)

When a player sees that, with no trashing, it would take 5 copies of Village/Smithy to draw deck, but all 10 copies of Village/Moat to draw deck, that should hammer home the point.

Speaking of hammering home points, something else I see with alarming regularity is players underestimating the importance of +card in general. They buy too many terminals, or too much treasure, or too many +action cards that don't draw at all. Drawing even one card is a BIG DEAL. Seriously. It's what makes those yellow cards poison. It's why Baker is $5 and Candlestick Maker is $2 (and it even needed a +buy bump to be relevant!) Also, Pathfinding says Hi.

131

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Relative strengths of 2 card combos

« on: December 02, 2016, 12:40:20 pm »

I really admire the amount of work you put into this list.

And as much as I hate to be that guy, I'm afraid I'm going to have to be one of the first to say that I have significant doubts if this information is particularly useful for anyone other than beginners, and even then, it may even harm their ability to get better at playing Dominion if they take it too much to heart.

To begin with, playing a few sample games, either IRL or on-line, really isn't helpful. You should have started with the simulators from day one. In fact, the simulators show that some extremely naive old-school strategies are competitive with some of the combos you list here. Double-Jack gets to four Provinces at turn 12-13, and no one plays double-Jack these days. There is already an extensive discussion of Counting House-Travelling Fair, complete with detailed statistics and simulator results demonstrating its effectiveness; that's a real combo. Many of the items on your list are not, and should not be used as a benchmark for anything.

For example, I refuse to believe that the Jack/Bonfire "combo" is a real thing. Bonfire is a very good copper thinner, and its presence in a kingdom is often going to mean that an engine is viable. The fact that you won a single game against an engine player is virtually meaningless. Jack/Bonfire as you describe it is a trashing/money strategy, and that is known to be extremely weak, for the exact reason you list: It hates greening. There's even a whole thread, started by a relatively new player quite some time ago, describing Chapel/Money as a strategy, because that player had just discovered the incredible power of deck thinning. But this player was simply thinning and buying Gold, which seems powerful until you buy green. Experienced players jumped into that thread and explained the situation, including simulator results and statistics outlining the damage greening does after thinning, which is why flooding beats thinning in the absence of mitigating actions.

I don't really mean to be critical; it's just that this thread looks like it has a lot of information, and if anything, I want to warn newer players against taking too much from it. If a player sees Forager and Highway in the kingdom, if their first thought is "combo" and thinking about this list, they're going to lose a lot of games. Highway is a spectacularly game-warping card, and yes, it likes trashing and +buy to enable the megaturn, but Forager is possibly the worst example of both. The same goes for Ferry: If a player sees Ferry with any of the combos you list and "recognizes" something from this list and acts on it, they're going to lose a lot of games. Ferry is another spectacularly game-warping card-shaped object and there's almost always something better to do with it. And look at poor Fishing Village/Wharf. 13-14 turns to 4 Provinces? Two of the most powerful engine cards in the game, and this list makes them look weaker than Jack/Bonfire? I can't accept those results.

Here's a reality check:

Most beginners play engines, and they're really bad at it. Chaining together actions is fun, and money is boring. Testing any of these combos against bad engine building isn't helpful. Optimized engine building is extremely tricky, but is the ultimate test of Dominion skill.

I've learned a lot about playing properly by reading this forum. Learning to think in terms of shuffles instead of turns. Triggering shuffles, gains missing the shuffle, the importance of cycling and whether it makes certain cards more or less powerful, careful management of economy, principles of exponential growth in engine building, building engines for overdraws depending on the presence of sifting...not to mention the various effects of discard/junking attacks and how they determine whether the game is going to end on piles or not. Then there's pile control. The list of important play principles goes on and on.

Look at the game reports thread and how people analyze a kingdom, or how some players will experiment with a kingdom and try some alternate strategies. "Combos" almost never appear; What I was saying originally about the danger of attempting to analyze combos in a vacuum still applies: With very few exceptions, it's not useful information, and can actually be detrimental to player advancement if taken too seriously.

Card interactions are unquestionably important. It's just that their role in decision making can't and shouldn't be oversimplified into a combo speed chart. If you see Tunnel with a discarder, your question should never be "how fast can those two cards get to 4 Provinces by themselves." It should be whether or not there are cards that allow you to intentionally collide the tunnel and the discarder, when you should buy Tunnel (on what shuffle) whether the cycling is good enough to buy Tunnel and use "free" gold as economy, skipping Silver in the process, whether that economy is going to be used in an engine or money strategy, and whether the engine is going to support single buys, double buys, or a mega turn. Buying a bunch of Tunnels and a bunch of one other card is almost never going to be the answer, and information about how fast Tunnel/whatever gets to 4 Provinces simply isn't useful in answering the questions you need answered.

Bottom line: This thread is named "relative strengths of 2-card combos." I do not believe that what you have posted so far actually represents the relative strengths of these combinations of cards when they're used optimally.

132

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads

« on: December 01, 2016, 02:21:10 pm »

And then, if they were only limited to vanilla effects, they might not even need any sort of API to be created.  I would imagine they could be made from the front end as a create-your-own-card feature or something.

Yeah, as a developer, I can tell you that creating a user-interface for something like that would be an unspeakable nightmare. However, exposing an API for functions that probably already exist in the code is relatively simple, which is why I suggested it that way. Honestly, the build-a-card functionality is last on my list for a reason; it's arguably the least interesting suggestion. But the bots/campaigns possibility is a strong one.

In fact, they might even consider releasing an API and asking for user-submissions for future updates, then actually release versions with official campaigns and other content that were entirely user-created. A bit of licensing IP paperwork and you're all set, and it could save the developers the ton of time and effort it would take to create content.

Part of the reason that I bring up these ideas is because an on-line-centric implementation with matchmaking can be extraordinarily intimidating for most players who don't see themselves becoming top-level Dominion experts. I enjoy a lot of games, and I play Dominion well, but probably not at a super-high level. I personally enjoy the MF campaigns and am still working my way through them, usually beating everything on the first try, but occasionally getting stuck having to try one five or six times.

I'm reminded of some of the on-line videogames I've played, particularly team shooters. I've enjoyed the single-player campaigns, and I've enjoyed playing with friends, but in several games I've thought I was reasonably OK at the game and jumped into some random on-line games and absolutely had my head handed to me (angering randomly assigned teammates in the process.) Good single-player or circle-of-friends play can keep players engaged with the game and enthusiastic about it. Jumping into the matchmaking pool and repeatedly getting destroyed by really skilled on-line players is alienating, and Dominion is too good a game to suffer from a syndrome like that.

133

Dominion Online at Shuffle iT / Re: "Features" threads

« on: December 01, 2016, 12:06:10 pm »

I'm guessing that a lot of these are already taken care of, but I'll list them for the sake of completeness:

1. Always make the entire card name in your hand readable. The number of times I've had a big hand in MF and have had to identify my hand by the top-left corner of the card art is silly. I assume this was done on day one of the new client.

2. Disambiguate the card-selection actions better. The MF colored borders aren't enough, as has been pointed out many times, and the plus sign on the pile selection even when not gaining is terrible UI design.

3. Allow undo for non-information-providing actions. I allow this in IRL games. For example, if you play a terminal draw card, then realize you didn't play a village first, there's no undoing, because you have looked at the cards that you drew, which provides information you didn't have before making the "error." However, if you trash a card, then change your mind, you should be able to pick it back up and trash a different one, or even rewind the trasher action to your hand (as long as it isn't something like Junk Dealer or Lookout, which draw or reveal cards.)

The implementation of this wouldn't be too difficult: Keep a list of the information-providing occurences that can occur in a game of Dominion and use those as stop points beyond which the undo command is not permitted to rewind. Playing actions or treasure cards from hand is not inherently information-providing (information given to your opponent would not count.) Going from action to treasure phase is not inherently information-providing. Trashing cards is not inherently information-providing. Gaining cards is not information-providing, except for gains from a randomized pile (Knights.) Drawing cards or revealing cards from your own or your opponents' decks is information providing, and should place a stop point. "Look through your discard pile" actions are information-providing.

A well-implemented undo can make up for a ton of misclick-creating UI problems that users are almost certain to complain about, no matter how good your design!

4. An API for developers

Ok, this might sound like pie-in-the-sky, but hear me out. I'm a software developer for a living, so I know that developing user interfaces for new features is often the most difficult part of the development process. Often more difficult that the feature itself. However, exposing some of the internals for tweaking by other developers is relatively easy. If you're using any sort of internal scripting language, it would be great to expose that for hobbyists. Failing that, allowing some sort of plugin system would be great. Here are some things that I would love to be able to experiment with:

-- creating custom bots, both for pre-constructed and random kingdoms
-- a "bot league" where bot matches could be set up (and play something like 100 games against each other almost instantly for a good statistical sample.)
-- custom kingdom creation rules
-- custom campaign creation, including bot setup, starting conditions and rule variants like MF. MF's campaigns seriously lack imagination and I'm guessing a lot of users could do better.
-- custom kingdom setup rules (my IRL group plays with 4 Provinces/Colonies per player for up to 6 players.)
-- custom hybrid cards

That last one is a bit tricky. Note that I didn't just say custom cards. Some users have asked for the ability to create user-designed cards, but that opens too many cans of worms. However, the ability to create cards that are simply a variation on existing mechanics, using the already-present code modularly, would be an interesting thing. For example, people have asked, what would a card that did +1 card, +1 action and nothing else cost? $0? $1? Usually skippable, but could be huge in the right Kingdom. What about cantrip-money that came with two Coppers? What about a vanilla terminal $3 +buy?

Sure, none of that is "real Dominion" but just look at the incredible amount of discussion this game has created in this forum. The puzzle section has some truly astounding stuff in it that will never happen in a real game, but what if someone turned some of those puzzles into campaign stages that were actually playable (with achievements; perhaps even mandatory ones, making the puzzle an integral part of the gameplay!) The variant card forum is interesting, as it usually produces dramatically overpowered (and sometimes underpowered) cards, but the ability to playtest those online would be great.

Expose an API, and it allows for an explosion of creativity among the developer-player community. I'm not sure how bit that community is, but I think it's worth considering.

134

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Second Edition Cards: Sentry

« on: November 27, 2016, 10:54:11 am »

Junk Dealer is a much better trasher. Heck, even Doctor is a better trasher, because it trashes on buy, and it looks three cards deep when trashing on play instead of just two. And Doctor is known to be relatively weak on play. Both Doctor and Sentry suffer from "bad thinner" syndrome. They work ok until your deck starts getting thin, at which point you're much more likely to have your junk in hand, which is what makes trashers that work from your hand so much better.

That said, Sentry's topdeck control/prediction can be the most useful thing about it. On boards with a use for topdeck control, it's great. On boards with no other trasher, it's okay. On boards with another trasher and no use for topdeck control, it's skippable.

135

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Landmarks: Tomb

« on: November 15, 2016, 12:07:15 pm »

Donate + Tomb

There's a rules question: Can you donate nearly your whole deck for tomb points on the turn where you end the game if you have a +buy? For example, you buy the last Province, then a Donate, trashing everything other than the green. Since Donate happens after your turn, and the game ends at the end of your turn, my guess is that it doesn't work.

136

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Greatest Card -- FINALS (?) Voting Now Open

« on: November 07, 2016, 09:22:34 pm »

You still have to take into consideration the time it takes to get to the card.

...and that's where the entire discussion breaks down. In the original discussion, I even tried to get the poster pinned down on criteria, which wasn't done.

If you have to consider the card as a whole, then you have to consider the cost, and you have to consider the value of all of the page/peasant line, because those are ALL part of the opportunity cost of playing the card, just as much as the number of turns it takes to play it.

If you can take cost into account in evaluating the "greatest" card, then Chapel, because of its incredible cost/benefit ratio, jumps well over Teacher, Champion and King's Court easily.

137

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion and Intrigue second editions

« on: November 07, 2016, 04:22:04 pm »

I mean, yes. I'm not electing to skip buying it because I don't think it's good later, so I'm still using it. But, it just hasn't been good for me if I don't open with it. It trashes like maybe 3 cards.

And really the Cartographer thing barely helps - you either want the card out of your deck or you want it in your hand until the late game, and by then either you got thin enough that it doesn't matter or you draw it at the end of your line anyway.

This has been my experience so far, as well.

Unless you have topdeck control, Sentry is a weak trasher. I would much rather have Lookout, which digs three cards deep looking for trash, and you can always open with it.

I only look hard at Sentry if I either have deck manipulation and can put back things to trash, or if I have some use for the Cartographer effect like Mystic/Wishing Well, etc. Otherwise, it may not be worth the $5 buys. If it's the only trasher, it may simply not be possible to get thin. At its best, it's a key piece. At its worst, it feels a little Pearl Diverish.

138

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Greatest Card -- FINALS (?) Voting Now Open

« on: November 07, 2016, 11:09:54 am »

I agree that Teacher enables more engines on more boards, but think about this: How many boards can't be engines at all because of the attacks? How many boards are automatically slogs because the attacks will slow everything down?

Imagine you could wave a magic wand and start a game of Dominion with a Champion in play, or with a Teacher on the mat. You don't know what the rest of the kingdom looks like. Which one would you choose? The ability to completely ignore ALL cursers, looters, discard attacks, topdeck attacks like they're not even there...better yet, if it's asymmetrical and your opponent chooses Teacher and you choose Champion and you win the Curse/Ruins split 10-0...there's no contest. Sure, the flexibility of Teacher does make better engines. But isn't completely ignoring attacks better in more kingdoms than the extra flexibility?

I just realized that I didn't include a vote.

Champion Donate

I guess it's not surprising that in a discussion that started about the most powerful things in Dominion regardless of coin/debt/opportunity cost we ended up with a list of close to the most expensive things in the game in terms of coin/debt/opportunity cost. Go figure.

139

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Improving my game

« on: November 01, 2016, 12:40:45 pm »

Necroing my own thread here, but I just wanted to report: A lot of the advice here has been very helpful.

But also, I might be playing better than I was giving myself credit for. I'm traveling, and my normal playgroup can't get together in person as often, so I'm introducing them to Dominion Online one at a time (the new subscription feature is nice to unlock all the cards without shelling out $100, and I'm hosting games so they can play on a free account.)

I've been playing them one-on-one so far just to introduce them to the system, and absolutely destroying them repeatedly.

...won a Peddler split 7-3 on the back of Worker's Village and Candlestick Maker (Treasure, shmeasure. Also: Chapel! Yay! )

...buried an opponent under curses with Mountebank

...trashed an opponent's entire deck with KC/Knight. He almost recovered with a Knight-proof KC/Poor House strategy to take the lead single-Provincing, until I made him draw a bunch of Copper with Council Rooms and ultimately ended the game on double-Province (I had Necropolis and the +2 Actions Knight to go along with some village or other, so I had terminal space available to add the Council Rooms after his big money was gone.)

...thinned quickly with Masquerade/Spice Merchant/Forager into a whoooole bunch of IronMongers, then passed the redundant trashers with Masquerade while single-provincing forever, as IronMongers do (he resigned at 30-0)

...played a fun Marauder/Conterfeit/Young Witch deck, burying the opponent under ruins AND curses, counterfeiting Spoils for $7 for single-Provincing easily (no handsize-increasers, and the sifting of YW makes getting those key 3-card hands of Spoils/Counterfeit/Copper easier. Not exactly spectacular, but you gotta play the kingdom you get, not the kingdom you want.)

In IRL, we've been playing with a harsh blacklist and a veto round, so we almost never have strong attacks. (Actually, one guy would constently veto strong trashers, including Chapel, because he wasn't very good at building tightly-constructed decks, so we had to add a "reserve" round before the veto round where everyone picks a card that can't be vetoed. I'm starting to hate the blacklist and the veto round altogether; just learn to play Dominion already!)

No such capability in the online client, so I think they were surprised by the effectiveness of some of the attack cards. Setting up an engine to play a key attack payload reliably is awesome. And cruel. I may have to use the randomizer app and manually enter some cruelty-free kingdoms instead if this keeps up. But for now, I'm certainly enjoying myself. It's like I'm actually playing Dominion instead of Multi-Player Engine Party.

140

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: October 31, 2016, 12:47:41 pm »

with modest Village support, Courtyard and Chariot Race basically guarantee VP and Coin when played together.

Found another use for Chariot Race: Seriously punishing your opponent(s) if you win the Peddler split in a game with heavy trashing. You win a lot of races with a preponderance of $8 cards. (Beating King's Court in a Chariot Race is particularly satisfying.)

141

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Relative strengths of 2 card combos

« on: October 31, 2016, 11:06:14 am »

I think some clarification is in order.

It seems to me that what you're looking for are indications of which monolithic strategies are fastest when those strategies involve a specific combination of (usually 2) cards.

The question is this: Which combos are truly monolithic? When playing Scavenger/Stash, Hermit/Market Square or Counting House/Traveling Fair, is it ever possible to add any other cards to make the deck perform faster? My guess would be no, because the interaction between those combinations of cards is extremely specific. On the other hand, Stash and Counting House cost $5...do you open Silver/Something on a 3/4 when playing those decks?

Many of the "combos" listed cannot be said to be monolithic, because many of them are just exceptionally fast BM strategies, or quick Duchy gainers like Upgrade/Rats, or Rebuild, which can be helped by sifting and gainers, or any number of other strategies that would benefit from playing additional cards.

You can't compare combos directly in a vacuum if they can be accelerated by adding other cards, so evaluating "relative strengths" becomes difficult.

That said, an interesting starting point would be to post sim results for these combos, including the non-monolithic ones, just to see the average turns to 5 or 8 provinces.

Of course, as interesting and potentially useful as this information might be, attacks really throw a wrench in the gears of some of these, not to mention that Empires also blows up everything by adding huge number of Alt+VP in the form of token generators and Landmarks, meaning that even when you recognize a kingdom with a great combo in it, the sim results are thrown out the window.

142

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Favorite Card--NOMINATIONS OPEN

« on: October 28, 2016, 05:55:09 pm »

Secret Passage

Maybe the novelty will run out at some point, but I just love this card. Non-handsize reducing sifting is good anyway, but the ability to re-deck the card anywhere is just too much fun, finally enabling cards like Herald, Wishing Well, Vagrant, etc. I love putting the card somewhere other than the bottom or the top of the deck, which is what most other players do. I love that SP/junk in fourth position/SP/junk in second position/Sentry allows you to trash two junk cards reliably. I love that you can SP from a hand with terminals and no village, draw a village, then put a second terminal in sixth or seventh position in case your subsequent village/cantrip/draw sequence fails to turn up another village, allowing you to save it until next turn rather than draw a bunch of actions dead.

143

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Best Dominion moments 2016

« on: October 27, 2016, 09:18:56 pm »

IRL 4P game. I was invited to a game night with players who have <50 games experience, so they're still learning. I have all the cards.

I always brief them on all of the cards before the veto round, explaining all of the different strategies possible. We had a very interesting set of cards, but sadly, they decided it was just too much to keep track of (all they are comfortable doing are weak engines that single-province or double-province if they get lucky.)

I've played megaturns against them with Highway or HoP. I've played multi-Province engines. I've played Triple-Gear BM. I've played Distand Lands rushes. I've played decks designed to maximize landmark points (boy are there some unskippable landmarks) and I've played brutal attack-machines like a deck-drawing Catapult engine (a better curser than I expected) and the classic Champion/Page/Page/Page/Warrior/Warrior/Warrior/Sorry your deck is mostly gone sequence. I've always told them it was a thing ahead of time.

So...the kingdom. I pointed out that Feodum was on the board and that Page upgraded to Treasure Hunter could gain a ton of Silver and make a Feodum rush possible. They vetoed Page (see above, mostly.) There was Counterfeit in the kingdom, and Capital. I pointed out that if you counterfeit a Capital, you get $12, two buys and no debt! Counterfeit two and you get $26 and a bunch of buys; enough for two Provinces and two Capitals, or three Provinces on the last turn. They vetoed Capital. Nothing tricky or interesting could be allowed to stand. I did explain that Rebuild was a monolithic strategy and how to play it (buy a few and hammer the Duchies) but no one vetoed it. Rebuild it is, then. Especially because the only draw was Envoy, making an engine extremely difficult.

The Event was Banquet. Yeah, the copper hurts, but opening with two Rebuilds is nice, and then Counterfeit to help hit $5 and trim some copper. Also, buying Duchies with a hand of 5 copper is a thing.

But I like to try to show them new ways to win when I can. I looked hard at the board and thought...when am I going to get this chance again? I had to try it.

Banquet more Rebuilds. On $4, I bought a Stonemason and two Settlers. Cute in a deck full of stupid Copper. Bought some Duchies and rebuilt them into Provinces like you're supposed to, but...

Stonemason an Estate into two Coppers. They looked a bit confused. I had Counterfeits, right?

Counterfeit for $4 and two buys. Banquet a Rebuild, use the extra buy on a Copper. Now they were super confused.

Counterfeit for $6 and two buys. Banquet a Copper, Banquet another Copper, gaining 6 Coppers altogether. Two other piles were already empty.

My left-hand opponent put down his cards and said "Wait...are you....?"

then he looked down at the Landmark.

Tower.

It was too late. I piled out the Copper on my next turn. Ended up with 20+ Coppers.

I swear I warned them. I pointed out that with Feodum and Treasure Hunter, the game could have piled out Silvers for massive Tower points. I even mentioned the Banquet/Copper possibility, but until you see it with your own eyes, I guess the idea of being beaten by Copper just seems insane.

So there it is. A Copper rush. Awesome! (Yes, they could absolutely have stopped me by emptying another pile if they had seen it three or four turns earlier, but it was soooo worth the risk.)

144

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Relative strengths of 2 card combos

« on: October 27, 2016, 08:49:26 pm »

Listing Donate combos starts to get silly, almost like listing King's Court combos. I recently opened Treasure Map/Cellar/Treasure Map/Donate. Silly!

145

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Matching up cards

« on: October 22, 2016, 11:21:19 am »

Hmm. It just occurred to me...

This is the YMYOSL article.

It's hardly surprising that I don't feel qualified to write it. I'm not a top player, merely an avid student of the game. But the upshot is that the phrase "You Make Your Own Shuffle Luck" is a Dominion meme, and yet most of the time, it appears in forums when losing players complain about their shuffle luck. Experts exclaim YMYOSL!, drop the mic and walk away.

In a way, what this article seeks to do is broadly enumerate all of the ways in which you do, in fact, make your own shuffle luck. The wiki doesn't have such an article. Shouldn't it?

I thought of a couple more:

Don't Dilute -- synergistic cards are going to match up a lot less often if you buy a bunch of other stuff. Silver Dilution is definitely a thing among weaker players who buy Silver on a dud $3 hand rather than nothing.

Avoid blind terminal draw -- if the synergy is really important, don't play a terminal draw without knowing what you're drawing; try to estimate the risk of drawing actions or synergistic cards that will then miss the rest of this shuffle. Goes nicely with deck tracking.

146

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Neat and potentially useful card interactions

« on: October 22, 2016, 10:39:12 am »

Diplomat / Courtier

Cute. I keep wanting Diplomat to be good, and it keeps not being. I watched several players buy one in a kingdom with no attacks and not a single handsize-reducing action because it was the only card that had +2 Actions printed on it. Oops. Nice $4 Moats there, guys.

147

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Matching up cards

« on: October 22, 2016, 10:32:42 am »

I found an article on the wiki that addresses a couple of these issues loosely:

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Luck-based

particularly in the "line-'em-up" section, but I still think a couple of separate articles might be worth posting:

A "savers" article enumerating all of the savers specifically:

Virtually all "topdeckers"  http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Top_decker
Save
Gear
Archive
Haven
Native Village

I can only come up with five additional cards, so the question becomes, does that deserve a separate article, or an addendum to the top-decker article, since setting aside a card for the next turn (or some future turn in the case of Native Village and Archive) is very similar to top-decking?


A "matching up" article enumerating all of the ways to match up cards. The "line-'em-up" section of the "luck-based" article is a little too specific.

Gain large numbers
Draw deck (draw/trashing/both)
Savers (see article)
Sifters (see article)
Gain-to-hand or upgrade-to-hand such as Transmogrify (list?)
certain Reserves (CotR/Ratcatcher/Duplicate/Transmogrify/Royal Carriage/Teacher) benefit from waiting around until the right card is in your hand.
Diggers (see article)
Chameleons (Band of Misfits/Overlord/Inheritance with good timing)
Deck-inspectors + Actions that interact with the top of the deck vs. the hand
Deck-tracking with a limited number of cards left

The reason I think an article like this is important is because it adds to the planning process. Knowing that you can or can't intentionally match up synergistic cards can help you plan how early to buy them, or if you want them at all. A lot of players recognize synergies and buy cards that go together, but completely fail to account for how they're actually going to use them and then curse their luck when they don't just match up magically.

148

Dominion Articles / Re: Mission basics

« on: October 22, 2016, 09:24:51 am »

Nearly all of those items already appear in the wiki article for Mission, with a couple of exceptions, such as paying off debt (which is somewhat conditional: You have to have $4 and an extra buy now and be assured that you're going to have more than $4 on your Mission turn. Good on Royal Blacksmith engine boards with +buy)

http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Mission

It might be worth updating the wiki article slightly, though the article in this thread is a little wordy and says things that are intuitively obvious for all but the most beginning players. (If that isn't the pot calling the kettle black! I've suggested a few articles, but I've stopped short of actually writing them because I know they'd be five times as long as they needed to be.)

I think the best thing the wiki does is enumerate synergies between cards and card types without duplicating information in lots of different articles. For example, in the "mission" article, it just says "gainer" with a link to the gainers. Done. Elegant and useful.

149

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Greatest Card -- NOMINATIONS OPEN

« on: October 21, 2016, 05:18:13 pm »

Someone has to be Debbie Downer. I'm just hoping to have some fun with this.  Feel free to skip this if the lack of specific criteria ruins the experience for you.

Hey, you're talking to the guy who doesn't even like the QVist rankings. I can criticize just about anything! Don't take it personally.

Actually, if I didn't think it was worth doing, I wouldn't have commented on it at all. I actually like the idea of rating all the cards as a community (as opposed to ranking them) and have posted extensively on the possibility of compiling ratings that would take cost into account.

So in a way, this subject could theoretically be a tiny first step in this direction. (But only if we were explicitly taking cost into account.)

150

Dominion General Discussion / Re: The Greatest Card

« on: October 21, 2016, 02:36:31 pm »

That 8 debt is a lot cheaper than you realize. Also, Donate is much more reliable than Chapel.

Oh, believe me, I'm totally on board with debt. I play IRL and I make sure to always put debt cards lowest in the cost arrangement on the table since they require no coin to buy. And after a Donate, paying off the debt should be virtually automatic unless you've done something terribly wrong.

If taking cost into account, would you say that Donate is overall better than Chapel? In most kingdoms, if both were available, would you build up and donate, or Chapel and trash down/build up? I don't think I've played a kingdom with both yet.

Side note: I recently played an IRL game where Donate was ignorable, but only by accident. A bunch of (other) players opened Bishop, and by the time that I even thought about playing Donate, I had no junk left at all! Bishop with 4P+ is really dangerous.