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Dominion Articles / Re: The Infinite Number of Fundamental Deck Types
« on: September 18, 2017, 04:14:03 pm »If I tell you I played an Engine, do you immediately know what my specific solutions to the obstacles were?Yes. They were a generalized version of this: http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=17572.msg719842#msg719842
You said "yes", but then you linked me to an answer which is a definitive 100% "no". I can't just say "Engine" and have you understand what that deck's solution to the 7 obstacles are, as evidenced by the fact that you and Faust discussed 2 completely different yet equally enginey engines, each with different solutions to the 7 obstacles.
I mean, Faust literally said "So would you say that "engine" actually is a term that encompasses multiple similar, but not identical, strategies?"
So no, not one thing, and not one unique set of solutions to the obstacles.
Furthermore, can you really say that all of your Big Money decks are purely Big Money with not even the slightest hints of an Engine? You never pick up a Smithy or a Governor or a JoaT to supplement your money? I suspect you would argue that that's still just Big Money. So then where would the cutoff be? If I pickup a Lab to supplement my Smithy/BM, is it still BM? Exactly how many Action Cards must I be running to qualify as an Engine? As far as I'm concerned, the only proper way to resolve such questions is to consider it on a spectrum, where Engine and BM are inversely correlated. And really, that doesn't contradict your argument that the two should not be mixed. If they're inversely correlated, it's not a stretch to argue that perhaps there are very few (or no) cards which support a mixture of BM and Engine. I'm just arguing that such a deck, however terrible, can be created.You can run 239487523194085723049857230948750923 Action cards in your big money deck. Being big money or being engine doesn't have anything to do with the number of Action cards — the number of Action cards is a superficial attribute so we don't have to pay any attention to that.
This is the same misrepresentation Faust used a bit ago. It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the definition of Engine I have used multiple times, in favor of this "You're saying Action cards = Engine" thing, just to be able to knock down the straw man easier.
It's a big money deck if its solutions to the obstacles are the ones I posted in the article, and it's an engine deck if its solutions to the obstacles are the ones faust posted in the first reply.
Your article never claims "This is the definition of Big Money". It says "This is how Big Money overcomes the obstacles". Furthermore, neither your definition of BM or Faust's 2 differing definitions of Engines are all-encompassing or rigid. So can they really be called definitions? I considered them examples of Big Money and examples of Engines when I read this. I didn't realize (and I would guess others didn't realize either) that you were aiming to say that all Engines must fall into one of those two types.
So then, for example, the article says that with BM, "All the high-quality cards you buy are good on their own". So if I buy one card that isn't good on its own, it's no longer BM? I think most people would disagree with you on that. This is the slippery slope I was trying to establish earlier. There is no black and white point at which the BM stops being BM just because I add in one more card which isn't good on its own. Having cards which are good on their own (ie "no moving pieces") makes something more BM, and having cards which are not good on their own makes it more of an Engine.
Additionally, the article says this about BM: "Also, green cards will take a while to show up because your deck is fairly big and you’re not cycling through it very fast". So if I cycle through my BM deck fast it's no longer BM? Again, I think most would disagree with your definitions here. If I throw a Warehouse or Smithy into my BM, it doesn't magically become not-a-BM. You're acting like BM and Engine can't possibly be on a spectrum because they have rigid definitions, but then your definitions upon further examination are not at all rigid and don't hold up to scrutiny or common examples.
If you don't address the 7 obstacles, you don't have a strategy
Says who? What definition are you using of "Strategy"? Because any definition I have ever seen of the word allows for the Strategy to be ineffective. I could plan to win by 3-pilling the Estates, Ruins, and Poachers. It's a terrible strategy, but it's still a strategy.
A pure big money deck handles the challenges of deck building perfectly.
This is almost too bizarre of a claim to even respond to. It should be obvious why this isn't true. If pure BM handled all challenges posed to it perfectly, nobody would even build Engines in the first place.
If you play big money and lose, the problem isn't that you didn't have enough moving parts in your big money deck
Which is not what I said
the problem is that there was something better than big money available and you should have built that instead.
Which is exactly what I said, unless you ignore the fact that I have stated that "more moving parts is what defines an Engine, and less is what defines BM", as you and Faust have done.
1) The phrasing "You need a good economy" or "You need a way to draw your good cards" gets the job done in a more generalized wayI don't think it does it in a more generalized way. The fact that you only draw 5 cards applies universally
It doesn't though, because in many games this problem goes completely ignored. What never gets ignored is the fact that you need a good economy. You said that Rush decks don't have an economy, and that just leads me to believe that we're not even using the same definition of "economy" (I'm noticing a trend here).
But it seems like you think that's one solution, and it's not. There are many ways to not have leftover money. You could get +Buy, you could use Plaza to convert them to Coin Tokens, or you could dump them into OverpaysI don't think the exact method of achieving your goal that is not having leftover money is relevant to characterizing your strategy. Either way, you're achieving that goal, and achieving that goal is the solution to the obstacle.
But it feels like you're losing sight of the reason we're even talking about +Buy. You originally made it sound like you were considering removing the "You only have 1 Buy" thing from the 7 obstacles, and the reason you gave (as I understood it) was that there's only ever really one solution to that problem. As we have just established, this is not the case. I can name at least 3 (since we're disagreeing on the Gainer thing), but you're still acting like those 3 are just 1.