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76

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is Possession hated so much?

« on: December 19, 2018, 07:31:40 pm »

Why is Possession hated so much? I don't have Alchemy, but it still seems like a decent card.

"Because it leads to degenerate games." This has been mentioned several times, but I wanted to show a clear explanation of why this is the case.

If player A goes for a normal strategy (say 1 province per turn), player B can simply go for a strategy of "play more than one possession per turn". Since both players are using the identical deck to score points (player A's deck), player B will basically always win because they get to take more turns with that deck.

Keeping that in mind, both players will try to build a deck that can't do anything except play possession. Which leads to a stalemate. Even when stalemates don't happen, the games tend to not be very fun because you're playing with decks that were designed to not be good.

It is even worse than that. Suppose Possession is the only way to gain an extra card each turn - no other +gains in the kingdom at all. You gain your first prov, I get Possession (swapping a Silver to a Pot).

With reliable decks you get prov 2, I get gold/prov 1. You get prov 3, I get prov 2(my deck) and prov 3 (your deck).

Now it is back to you. You can get prov 4, I go duchy/prov 4 and win.

It gets worse building out to double prov engines. I get my Possession when you get to $12. You get two prov, I get two prov/duchy.

Even when the decks are unreliable, Possession typically wins. After all, Possession can trash or discard-for-sift more as it needs only one card to gain whatever the other guy gets, worse with 2 gains the Possession player can opt to buy reliability cards (Scheme, Haven, Forum, etc.) on busted hands and still maintain score parity.

It is freakishly hard to outrun Possession when your points are coming from standard green, colony, or the current online implementation. Gardens and slogs can make a go of it because that such an easier price point to hit than $6, but there really is no card in Dominion that can be more space efficient than Possession. Sure, the odd money board can outrun it when you cannot build an engine or otherwise make Possession reliable ... it is just that Possession is literally the easiest card in the game to make reliable if your opponent doesn't degenerate.

Trash the rest of your deck? You can easily gain a province/turn. Run with playing 4 Warehouses a turn? Sure, whatever.

Back in the day it didn't seem so bad, but back in the day people had not figured out how quickly engines could get up and ruining. As money strategies have increasingly declined Possession has gotten stronger. I mean when you can legitimately run Wisp engines it has to be a pretty bad board for Possession not to be idiotically strong. 


Ultimately Possession was supposed to be held back by the opportunity costs of buying a Pot, having it in your deck,  buying a Possession, and carrying it in your deck ... but it just doesn't work with efficient engines as buying the Pot eats one turn, buying the Possession eats another ... and then gives it immediately back next go round. After two rounds, Possession has the whip hand. Carrying around two stop cards is a bit harsh ... but not insurmountable (particularly as you can trash the Pot back out sometimes with non-terminal trashers). And you have to be awfully ballsy to trust that your deck will win just because you won the "Lab split" 6:4.

77

Let's Discuss ... / Re: Let's Discuss Cornucopia Prize: Trusty Steed

« on: December 13, 2018, 08:40:29 pm »

The only real thing to discuss here, is when if ever you would get the four silvers.  To have gotten provinces your coin economy is already fairly decent (unless it took you like a chain of 4+ tournaments to get it) so absent a feodem situation, why would I ever want 4 silvers rather than either +2 coins or + 2 cards? i guess if you have like mega draw, princess and bank i could see it.  But one reason no one is discussing this is that almost no one ever even gets the silvers.  I think I may have done it once.  But i'm not sure. And I've played this card 100's or times if not more.

There are lots of options:
Forge bait (e.g. get a plat from three, or pair up with the estate from Followers for a province). For the price of 2 draw you can get 4 gains & $12 value. Slightly less flexible but doing that with Workshop requires 4 draws and 4 actions. If you need lots of value for some scaling TfB ... Stead is an elite level gainer.

Convert them into +buys (and +coin) with Forager/Spice merchant, particularly good if Princess is the only other +buy
Bishop bait, without draining short piles; Followers drains two piles so a long Bishop come-back (say by locking them with Rabble/Followers) is hard, particularly if they snag Bag. Other heavy trashing scenarios are possible, but Bishop is one of those cases where you really do want to trash a huge amount of copper. Tomb is another option for similar reasoning. Of the treasure gainers, few are as potent as Stead for TfB.


Keeping a good Stables/Magpie/Story teller to treasure balance, particularly if you are trashing coppers for anything. One play of Stead every few Stables gain is pretty effective at both increasing you reliability and your overall payload. With Storyteller, each silver is pretty close to being a Lab.

No draw games. You can get Stead not to hard on boards with say trashing (e.g. Chap) and no net draw outside of prizes (e.g. no Moat/Smithy/Lab/etc.). It isn't too hard to get fast Prizes, but once you start duchy gaining you will quickly tank your money density. Steed is better here than Bag and if you also have Followers is vastly better at building out money.

Quick cash infusion. Suppose you build up Province with some combo of TfB (e.g. Moneylender) and Tournaments; once you both start having provinces and you run low on TfB targets, your engine crumps without a new cash infusion. Buying $8 worth of coin is typically a two turn proposition. Steed does it in one. If draw is cheap (e.g. Hgrounds, Rsmithy/Chap, or Kc/Pearl diver) you are often better taking the silvers and just buying more draw.

Fishing for top deck. Obvious case is Star chart to hit some other clutch card (e.g. a unique card in a Hop game game, a Count after burning a couple of Madmen). More commonly if you track your deck and this is your best option to win you may well want to burn your draw deck to place potentially winning cards back in the discard back into draw position (e.g. you have a lead, one colony left, two Pdivers in hand and two Remodels in the discard, no coin in hand).

Counterfeit, Swashbuckler ... there are a huge number of potential combos.

All that said, I play many games without ever touching the option. However, when it is useful, it is often extremely clutch.

78

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Why is Possession hated so much?

« on: December 12, 2018, 05:32:23 pm »

Possession also is terrible in multiplayer games. The classic example is player A goes Gardens on a bad Gardens board, Player B wins the game by playing Possession/the next best option, and player C is simply screwed. If they build a good deck, Player B just Possesses their deck every turn, often multiple times per turn. If they build a bad deck, Player C can go for a good deck. Yeah other cards, like Smugglers and Contraband can have similar problems, but there are often far more ways around those issues.

The other big problem with Possession not yet mentioned is its space efficiency. It is pretty rare in Dominion for one or even two cards in hand to be sufficient to gain a colony, let alone gaining two or more per turn. Possession can do it easily.

For instance, getting a province from treasure requires that you draw 3 stop cards on a standard board. Their minimum cost is $15. They take three gains to get. Possession is one stop card. It takes a single gain, and yeah $6P is high, it takes exactly one more turn that a gold in a thin/reliable deck. Worse, multiple province gains just require +action (and as pointed out become insanely powerful with Tr variants). Outpost, at least, requires overbuilding your draw to turn up a province equivalent. You can quite easily gain a province with a deck of Prov x4/Possession. And will gain a prov every other turn up until the Prov pile is empty.

All the tradeoffs in building up a deck go out the window if Possession is remotely viable. How do I draw all my treasures and power terminals at the same time? Who cares, gain Possession and trash the rest. How do I deal with the influx of green making combos less likely to hit? Who cares, gain Possession and trash everything else. Balancing draw, actions, gains, and coins for a Possession deck is so idiotically easy. When decisions become this trivial, strategy goes out the window.

79

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Annoying and potentially harmful card anti-synergies

« on: December 06, 2018, 08:53:14 pm »

Has anyone said Ritual/Peddler yet?

Works well with Coffers. Yeah it means you spend a turn netting just 7VP and have to generate $4 without playing an action ... but for crappy engines, it is just another source of VP if you are losing the province split and have time to play around with it.

Mission, Fleet, Den of Sin, and a few other things can make it viable to cash out one or more 7 VP peddlers. Honestly, 7 VP is worth basically anytime you are hitting the Duchies for VP and an idiot-not-to-take it option if you are unlikely to hit 2 +buy. Draw two silvers, a Ped, Village, Smithy? A lot of end games that should be a Ritual and be glad.

80

Dominion Articles / Re: Draw-to-X engines

« on: October 17, 2018, 09:25:34 pm »

The hard limit on DtX is much higher. The trade off is you can support fewer stop cards. For the crazy 70 card decks you would need to have no unplayable cards. 70 playable, non-cantrip actions is a tall order, but not exactly unprecedented. Of course there are all manner of enablers (e.g. Bm) that make it easier to sustain a huge deck).

I'd love to see that precedence.

Bm goes a long way. Both for gaining extra villages & nonterminal actions, but also for clearing out treasures to pad your viable card count.

I believe my record is something north of 12 VP Gardens. She pulled Amb, Kc, Goons and Monument out of the Bm, so she was scoring 5 or 6 VP per turn; I snagged Possession (I was running Uni/Lib). I played Tr -> Possession and then Kc -> Amb to return problem cards (her trasher, Bm, and all her Unis). She kept racking up VP tokens with unreturnable cards, but I was returning everything else in her deck from the supply (Lighthouse, bane for Yw in Bm, IIRC). I was not able to win with Provs & Duchies and those would have tanked my engine. Every turn we played built more VP into the Gardens, and my final turn had some insane number of gains/buys (Haggler from the Bm deck was very useful). My deck was pure actions, Tr let me play a huge amount of terminals, and I pretty much sucked everything remotely useful out of the Bm deck (we had a copy of every card we then owned in the Bm deck). It was even more fun winning the bet I suggested when I saw I was getting Possession out of the Bm =)

Really the only truly hard part of hitting 70 cards in a strong Lib deck is avoiding the opponent ending the game. A Kc/Uni/Lib deck would provide everything needed for 70 but the +buys and coin needed to pile the Gardens.

81

Dominion Articles / Re: Draw-to-X engines

« on: October 17, 2018, 09:17:36 am »

Faust:

Of course Gardens and Islands are able to make the game longer. Without Alt-VP a 7:1 Prov split means game over (42 VP : a max of 38 VP, ignoring starting estates and curses). Even for a 6:2 split you are looking at winning the Duchy pile by at least 7:1 and getting more estates. Take Islands. They give you 16 VP of margin, if you pile them all you can win against a 7:1 prov split without touching the Estates. If you break Islands 6:2 you can win with a 6:2, 2:6 province and Duchy splits. With 3-4 VP Gardens you can easily win 7:1 Prov splits.

Put another way, Island lets your opponent fish for another Prov. How many bonus turns is that? Depends on what he's playing. BM often means you have another 3 or 4 turns as the 8th prov means you have to draw further out on the bell curve than the 7th (and it works better for you to have Gardens if they are hitting duchies). Engines that are efficient have increasing rates of return so you can gain a lot more points by stretching even a turn or two.

Islands in particular work well for DtX. Build out to $9/2 buys. Every turn you gain a Duchy/Island and every turn you Mat it away.  You can sustain this better than regular draw as matting increases your effective draw. You can let the opponent get 5 Provs while you get 5 Duchies & 5 Islands. Now the race is one for 3 Provinces, they have a deck with 5 stop cards. You have none. Odds are not bad that you will get all 3 Provs. If they dabble in Duchies, you can overcome them with duchies and Islands.

So this is just bad advice. Okay, I am losing the Province race, so my plan is to build even more and then get 8 Gardens and have my deck crumble. All the while my opponent will get 8 Provinces, which are still worth more than my Gardens, and I lose

So your opponent gets a 5th province. Your advice is to buy more provinces?

A 5:3 split requires you to hit the duchies and get 4 more of them than your opponent. People do this all the time.

In high skill play, you can often see a 5:3 split coming; being down 4:2 in Provs is typically not the time to spend $10 on a Prov/$2. Even though you might be able to pull out the next province, your opponent will all but certainly hit Duchy. May as well buy the two duchies now.

When you get skilled you can often see an opponent who will hit 5 provs before you, albeit being left with a weak deck afterwards. Okay, plan for it. Have the strong deck. Anticipate how to win a 5:3 split. Gardens and the like let you go further. Plan to win a 6:2 split or the 7:1. You have the option of going long - take it when it makes sense. Alt-VP dramatically enhances the odds that skilled players beat unskilled players.

And frankly your Provs may not beat my Gardens. At $16 coin a DtX engine can pretty easily support gaining 4 cards, with useful cantrips (e.g. Oasis) and not too henious of +buy, you will be gaining 5 cards in around 1-2 turns 6 in around 2-3 and perhaps 8 in 4. Depending on what is out (e.g. Vagrant, Pearl diver) I may well be able to spike to 50 cards, buy 4 gardens, and then buy 4 more the next turn and 2 coppers.

And you can make DtX green tolerant. Count, Horse traders, Cellar, Warehouse, Dungeon, Cartographer, Inn, Artificer, Forum, Poacher, Mill, Storeroom, Hamlet, Yw, Minstrel, Secret cave, Shepherd, Xroads (use one DtX to stock up on green in hand, then draw through with Xroads) ... odds of something being out there are pretty high. Sure DtX is not quite as good at being green tolerant ... but it can afford more of the enablers and to build out to a higher payload on a lot of boards. Something like Htraders lets you build up lots of coin and keep the draw running. With cost & action efficient draw this sort of thing does actually work.

Traditional draw is better at using Alt-VP. However you pretty rarely are going DtX vs Traditional village/Smithy stuff. One or the other typically is clearly better (e.g. Festival/Donate -> DtX, Workshop/Village -> Village/Smithy). More often assymetric games are not-obviously-strong DtX vs some decent-to-strong BM thing. Alt-VP is huge here. Gardens are particularly nice as you can build up to massive card counts with DtX if that is remotely profitable.

Smithy is straight limited to 35 non-cantrip cards it can draw. The pile empties and that is your hard cap. Worse you need 50% of your cards to be a drawing village or a Smithy. Even with Nobles added in, you still are going to have a very hard time playing anything past 40 cards. Smithy/Village can support ~ 40 cards, but 20 of those can be stop cards. If your village is not drawing not only do they eat into your 35 cap, they also mean you need 33% villages and 33% Smithies for the last few draws. This pushes your effective cap down towards 30.

The hard limit on DtX is much higher. The trade off is you can support fewer stop cards. For the crazy 70 card decks you would need to have no unplayable cards. 70 playable, non-cantrip actions is a tall order, but not exactly unprecedented. Of course there are all manner of enablers (e.g. Bm) that make it easier to sustain a huge deck).

In actual games, you pretty often have the villages contested. So your card cap becomes tied to how action efficient your draw is. The worst DtX is ~5 draws/action. That equals the best traditional draw.  If you can go crazy on useful actions, Village/Lib is basically spending $1/draw slot. For Smithy/village you are spending almost $2/draw. So not only will you get more draw per village with DtX, you will also have more money to spend on villages (and on multiple village boards typically have a much easier time using crappy secondary villages like Xroads or Shanty).

In real games, when DtX is a viable strat, it is typically able to support larger decks that Village/Smithy-esqu decks when they are a viable strat.

Ultimately you are telling I cannot win by doing something I have done dozens of times against good players to overcome massive early luck differentials (i.e. making the game last long enough for luck to even out).


Building DtX engines is going to typically be slower building in the early/mid game for a couple of reasons:
A. Early draw plays provide less return for the price point. Playing Wt cold is just +2 cards vs +3 for Smithy. Your Smithy will hit $5 sooner and be able to ramp up quicker if anything clutch is at those price points (e.g. expensive trashers like Altar or Forge, expensive villages like City or Bazaar, expensive payload like Gold or Goons, expensive enablers like Kc or Prince). On the top end playing Lib is far less likely to hit $5 than something like Catacombs and again is slower at buying more draw or other expensive cards.
B. Mid-game chained draw is less effective. Festival -> Wt -> Wt draws leaves you with 6 cards of buying power and $2/2 buys. Doing the same with Smithy leaves you with 8 cards of buying power, $2/2 buys. Assuming an average card value of ~$1/card before you've trashed more than half your starting deck that means you can hit $8 for Wt, good enough if you want just Festival/Wt again, but bad if you want Festival/$5 attack like Rogue. For Smithy you hit $10/2 buys and can get whatever you want (e.g. Kc/$3, Festival/Replace). And of course Festival is the absolute most unfair comparison possible, any other village is going to make Smithy have much higher relative buying power.
C. A decent percentage of boards are not going to have useful $3 buys, particularly if you are vehement about avoiding Silver. A $3 hand on say T6 for Catacombs/Bazaar is going to be a Silver most of the time and make it easier to keep building. A $3 hand on T6 for Bazaar/Lib may be a complete waste.

DtX is typically a turn or two slower at "draw your deck" than Village/Smithy. It is faster once you can play your gains same turn. For something like a $5 trasher (e.g. Count), a $5 village (e.g. Bazaar) and a $5 draw (e.g. Lib/Catacombs) you will be faster with Catacombs up until your average draw per Lib is something like 3.5 cards. Then you can add way more Bizaar/Counts pairs per Lib. This is exactly the sort of board where optimal play is to open Silver/Silver, possibly gain a 3rd Silver, and then bulk up on mass Count/Bazaar & maybe trash out the Silvers when you start to Green.

CC/CRJ: just trash out the Silvers. Early game they help you buy expensive stuff. Late game whatever you are using to nix the coppers will work as well or better on Silvers pretty much always. Running around with several TfBs (e.g. Apprentice, Spice Merchant, Bishop, Priest, Salvager) is quite strong if you are using Jack for draw. I had fun a while back using Jack/Count/Monument until the Silvers ran out. I was pulling 7 or 8 VP per turn while my opponent slowly stalled out on Colonies and Provs, while I had a rock solid deck with a Jack top decked each turn.

82

Dominion Articles / Re: Draw-to-X engines

« on: October 16, 2018, 10:48:09 am »

A couple of terribly important things for this sort of engine not already covered:

1. This is covered; see section 3.

2. So you want more Villages, but also more terminals? That does not make sense. What is true is that you need somewhat fewer draw cards total. But, since you still want to make sure to draw at least one, that's not a "terribly important" thing.

3. Is at least implicit in pointing out that this is less reliable than a standard engine, but probably doesn't hurt making explicit.

4. An interaction with a single card does not qualify as important enough to be mentioned.

5. Getting Gardens or Duchy/Island seems like terrible advice for draw-to-X. You want to be adding high-value VP, i.e. Provinces. Duchy/Island clog your deck until you line them up, which is significantly harder to do in draw-to-X than a normal engine.

6. Is as much true for standard engines as it is for draw-to-X.

7. is also pretty much the same as an engine, other than the fact that you want more villages, which is already covered.

8. That really depends. Sometimes of course you need Silver, but frequently you don't, and you want to avoid it more than in a regular engine, so putting this advice in is misleading.

Ugg, can we please avoid the ever popular "let's pretend everyone reading these articles are idiots".

1. Nope. Section 3 is about increasing reliability. My point is that DtX is extremely draw efficient if you are using action cash and because of that you can support far more terminals than in most engines. Worse if you lose the village split you cannot replace action-cash with treasures. You can have a perfectly reliable engine (e.g. two Schemes) and I would still recommend winning the village split, I would also recommend increasing your buy priority for villages because being able to manage more terminals is that much more powerful.

2. In regular engines, terminals compete with treasures. Golds are good because they pack a big effect into only needing to draw them. In DtX, this does not happen. When building an engine you have three basic inputs: draw slots, actions, and gains. You need to generate cash (or value). In DtX draw slots are cheap for actions and high for treasures. This lowers the opportunity costs for actions and gains; gains are normally extremely low opportunity costs so you should expect the ideal number of terminals to increase in DtX ceteris parabis.

4. Please read more fully. Pillage is a specific case of a general class of attacks that work by decreasing the odds of allowing chained draw. Very few attacks do a lot to DtX. All the discards can actively help DtX. Trashers are normal, yeah they might hit the lynchpin cards, but they also might hit dross. Even most junkers are often worthless by the mid game - if you can overdraw you can often just burn junk faster than it comes in. Cards that make it hard to chain draw are much stronger against DtX; Pillage, Rabble, Fteller, Sea Hag, B-crat (depending on village type and discarder types), Oracle, and Hexes can all have a similar effect.

5. Alt-VP extends the timeline of the game. DtX can be, and on most board is, a slow build out (e.g. singleton trasher, payload at $5) and you may not win the Prov race getting there ... however in a non-mirror you can easily build DtX out to a point where you can add 4 or 5 $6 cards per turn. This can either be a glass cannon option (totally possible to grab 8 Gardens in one turn) or building out green tolerance that can let you play the long game for several turns. You don't care what your deck looks like the turn after you win. Do not be afraid to plan on grabbing a bunch of junk on your final (few) turns or talking the long road to building up points.

After all a fully loaded Village/Smithy deck can draw through 35 cards if they pile both. Village/Wt can manage 65. Assuming you get equal utility for either deck with sifting, DtX at final build out can support far more cards than normal engines. This doesn't matter so much without Alt-VP as game ends before you build out to a DtX that can support 10 or 20 green, but with a long game the maximum card count supported actually does matter. With the more cost efficient draw from DtX you get compounding returns on boards where carrying large card tallies is important (e.g. Gardens, Sroads, Vineyards, Fairgrounds, Tower, and even Conquest splurges)

6. Standard engines have treasures and the opportunity cost for discard-for-benefit is almost always much higher. The odds that you have a discard full of dross is vastly higher for DtX, the gain from gambling on a mistimed shuffle is typically lower, and with larger draw volumes it is harder to be clear if the draw is safe (particularly when playing with physical cards). More importantly, DtX cannot do a number of the normal tricks to avoid reshuffle triggers. Top decking does not prevent the reshuffle (e.g. Count, Mandarin), dropping a card or three with finer draw control (e.g. Lab, Moat) can be very counter productive/high opportunity cost, and even gaining to deck top (e.g. Armory, Tracker) rarely saves you.

7. If you are timing your buys strictly the same as for normal engines and DtX, you are playing inefficiently. In a normal engine you want to err more on the side of drawing as your payload likely has treasures boosting the gains from a dead draw. Further your draw cards often come with effects that either mitigate dead draw problems (e.g. Catacombs) or have powerful effects (e.g. Margrave, Oracle). Virtually all of the power in DtX draw comes as draw, but drawing cards dead when your draw has an above average village density is a losing move often. Ceteris parabis, you want to build fewer decks with excess draw cards in DtX than in regular engines during build out.

8. Sure, just like you have to be more careful about reshuffles and want to buy more villages & more terminals with DtX in the main, you want less treasure. That said, I win a LOT of games against 50+ players who appear scared of buying Silver in DtX. I see virtually no 60+ players who fall into this trap. It is pretty rare to support both DtX in general and not being able to burn a Silver later. Think of it as a variable term Mining village. Use it to bootstrap and then get rid of it (time permitting).

These articles should be about how the card changes your play, not just stuff that is blindingly obvious after watching one opponent play it well once. Once you get through the basics, the difference between winning and losing is not often who recognizes that you can build an engine, but who recognizes how to build and play it most efficiently. This is where when to buy Silvers (early if ever), how many (1-3), and when to trash them (the turn before or after getting your first greens).

Likewise, DtX is not less reliable when the engine is running well. You basically need ~20% of your deck to be draw for DtX and ~20% to be villages to hit the vast majority of turns. With something like Smithy you need it to be closer to 25%/25%. Sure it is less reliable on boards where you need villages, terminal payload, and draw during build up, but fundamentally the number of draw cards needed to be reliable goes down with DtX as does the number of villages for drawing. We should be analyzing cards in articles that help people make a decisions informed by a 10% difference in deck composition. That is the non-intuitive part.

83

Dominion Articles / Re: Groundskeeper-- Draft

« on: October 16, 2018, 01:09:28 am »

One thing that is obnoxiously overpowered is gaining greens, trashing them, and then gaining them from the trash, lather rinse repeat. Rogue is very nice here and is just about the strongest late game terminal on such a board if you can only have one terminal (or need to alternate a terminal). Lurker and Alt-VP can also make this fun and interesting.

I had one hilarious game where I inherited Page, the only draw was Warrior, and the only trashing was Spice merchant; managed a win after their Warrior killed mine even though they had over 100 VP and I think 60 when I started buying an estate/return an estate.

You could manage similar stuff with Guardian/Amb and a few other tricks. Even without the full trick, it can totally be worth it to use Amb to increase the effective size of the the green piles by 50% if your opponent went for a fast money option and you have a strong enough split (e.g. 7/3).

84

Dominion Articles / Re: Draw-to-X engines

« on: October 16, 2018, 12:50:33 am »

A couple of terribly important things for this sort of engine not already covered:

1. Village count is utterly crucial. Yeah it is nice when your village is on your cash source, but a lot of strong DtX boards lack this. If your +coin is something like Count or Giant going in the hole on villages is really bad. 6 Villages means that you can use 3/7 actions on draw and 4/7 on coin generation $9 vs $12 is enough to buy some enabler (e.g. Cellar, Poacher) to drastically improve your reliability; $9 is not. Even if you are making coin from something like Oasis, a shortage of villages drastically increases your chances of busting a whole shuffle. This in turn means that you may want to play a little closer to the village idiot than for a comparable engine with standard draw; if you lose the village split 7/3 you can get completely hosed by all the actions the opponent can easily stack with the efficient draw. Killing villages is extremely brutal and it is completely worth it to hunt for them (e.g. Kc/Swindler).

2. Your deck will support more terminals. Even with non-terminal DtX, you are typically looking at extremely space efficient draw. You only need a few draw cards to get to every terminal in the deck. You often can and may want to stack a massive amount of terminals into your deck (e.g. A few Mountebanks, a Militia, and a Remodel).  Cost per draw with Lib is potentially 1.2 cards/$; with Smithy it is .5/$ and even Hgrounds are .5/$ (and Lib is one of the low efficiency options).  With draw being cheap you afford to draw a lot more cards than normal. Menage, Minion, etc. are even more crazy efficient as they do not need you to spring for a village. In general, terminals are much more powerful than non-terminals and with draw this cheap, non-draw terminals are much more powerful than draw. You manage a lot more terminals in DtX than other engines.
 
3. Milling green is insanely powerful. Remodel Prov -> Prov depletes VP points so you win before the green knocks down the engine; it also clears out a draw slot. Salvager or anything that preserves points is crazy good and can allow you to green sooner. It also opens up the late game chance of trashing a DtX card if you manage to draw enough to not need to play it.

4. DtX is extremely susceptible to Pillage. To a lesser degree they get destroyed by top deck control (e.g. Rabble, Fteller, and B-crat). Gumming up the first draw of a hand has extremely strong additive effects.

5. Alt-VP can make your life easier or harder. If you have anything that can clear out dross, you can build crazy strong engines and then cash out for mass Alt-VP even against a lot of fast money options. Because your deck is full of actions (e.g. sifting/villages/draws/payloads/VPs), you can easily get 4 or 5 VP Gardens. Playing Duchy/Island is a fine alternative to Provs with your draw.

Conversely if you cannot get past the green, eating 8 Provs is much harder than 4 + change. You can still play DtX, but you need to build for longer and play for the long game with an eye on piles as to when to green out. It is actually pretty rare for a true slog or alt-VP rush to beat a decent DtX, but do watch out for stuff that scales up quick (e.g. Beggar/Gardens) or can manage very quick 3-piles (e.g. Iw/Island/Sroad).

6. Time your reshuffles with extreme care. Lib is terrible for accidentally drawing into discarded dross, Jack can be worse. Do you need to draw another card (e.g. to hit a 2nd Prov)? Is it worth losing your entire next hand? Be aware of weird things that can force a reshuffle at odd moments (e.g. Herald).

7. Similarly you really want to time your village buys well. Terminal DtX is terrible with dead draw, you can burn the buying power of a shuffle without a village and as your deck gets better and treasure means less to you. Taking a $5 Xroads is going to be much better than "using" a $5 on a 2nd/3rd Scholar to "not waste" a $5. A deck with little or no treasures has absolutely terrible dead draw potential.

8. And on that note - buy the bloody silvers. Most DtX is going to need to hit $5 for the draws, the villages, or the payload. Sometimes you can get away with something like Wt/Trasher and hope to hit $5 off coppers. You will destroy your game though if you have to trash coppers early and cannot hit $5 forever. If you can never trash silvers, sure be much more careful. But the obnoxious majority of DtX games will have viable trashing. Buy them early, get the engine running, and then (if warranted) trash them back out. If you think game is not going to end "soon" you may as well keep the silvers when they one of very few stop card, just don't be afraid to trash the silvers the turn after you used it to buy 2 Provs.

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Dominion: Renaissance Previews / Re: Your reviews of the previews

« on: October 04, 2018, 01:42:02 pm »

And more importantly you can change the top deck order. This means you be sure to place villages on top (or bottom) as needed which is pretty strong.

Well there aren't many villages outside the - range.

These days there are many with Lost Arts and other tricks. The point still stands, moving your Rabble to deck top can be just as valuable to ensuring turn reliability. Even little things like moving Provs to deck top to flip away with Pools can be pretty amazing.

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Dominion Articles / Re: Island

« on: October 04, 2018, 01:37:53 pm »

So no mention of Laboratory here. Removing one card from your deck is very similar to adding a Laboratory to your deck.... which means that Island should function a lot like a Laboratory that's also worth 2. Of course, what makes it not as strong as that is that the turn you play it is really bad; being -1 action and -2 cards. But once you've gotten past that one-time downside, it should be very similar to  Lab.

So my question is... why isn't this way stronger? An actual Lab for that also included 2 would be crazy. Is it all because of the on-play downside, or am I missing something?

The on play penalty is pretty large two cards moves you from a $5 on average to a $3. Playing a Lab early is pretty close to playing $1.4 coins. One of these options lets you buy another accelerating card from the same pile, the other does not. Add in the value of playing a power terminal more often and we should expect the Lab to win out the vast majority of the time.

But there are a few other things to consider: Labs can increase your maximum hand size, not just how quickly you draw and shuffle. This becomes important when you are looking at things like building a double province engine. You can build Island golden decks that are roughly equivalent to buying a prov & a Lab ... but honestly 12$ and a buy is pretty hard to pack into 5 stop cards (baseline takes up all 5). Labs can hit 13$ and a buy much more easily - even getting out $6 cards moves you down from $2.4/card for the Island option to $2.1/card for the Lab. Yeah you can do either with cantrip cash, but there are just way more boards that make Lab work than Island for space efficiency. Similarly, things like attacks and Outpost mean that you need to deal with low initial card counts, Lab is great. Thrones, Wall, etc. also tend to prefer the lab.

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Dominion: Renaissance Previews / Re: Your reviews of the previews

« on: October 04, 2018, 10:03:55 am »

Jomini means “potions” by “pot”, in case anyone else was wondering.

Jomini thinks people reading this board will assume that "debt or pots" clearly refers to brownies because that, and only that, could possibly make any contextual sense with the rest of the sentence.

Mn, wh nds vwls? Th mnng f th sntnc s clr wtht thm.

You can aslo jsut smrbclae wrdos as lnog as you lavee the fsrit and lsat lteerts in the smae ptsiinoos.

Why can I read this with no trouble whatsoever.

Largely from how speakers of non-logographic languages store words in their brain; most people map words by sounds via circuitry in Wernicke's area. We recognize the most important sounds as the beginning and end as those tend to have the greatest variety and can recognize the rest as sounds somewhere in the middle. There are actually relatively few words that a close enough for this trick not to work. Donald's sentence, for instance has zero common words with which you might mistake these words. Things get trickier with more analytic languages and a few other quirky things.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: it's kind of hard to make swashbuckler work

« on: October 04, 2018, 12:23:40 am »

It is blindingly easy, but board specific to make this work.

The easiest option is to gain a card mid turn. Count, Iw, Wshop, Magpie ... basically anything that does not gain to hand or deck top will work. Yeah you have to play the gainer before you have <3 cards in deck ... but that is basically just an extra village to carry around and normally the right call if you are using gainers in general. Running double gainers (e.g. Iw + Count) basically assures that some of your Swashbucklers hit.

Slightly less easily you can discarders - attacks, Cellar, Inn ... again the only real challenge are drawing the enabler early enough and having enough villages for terminals.

Top decking also works great. Gain a Swashbuckler mid shuffle with Tracker, play and forget. Use Count/Scheme/Etc. to play it on a hand in the middle of the shuffle. Not so great, but fun when you can manage it is to top deck 8 cards with stuff like Haunted woods, Alchemist, Kc/Count, etc.

And if you just want the Chest, then any other coffer gainer works wonders.

Sure, 100% reliability is hard. But we are talking about coffers. Smithy with half a coffer is still a strong; Getting chest on a lot of boards is just utterly overpowering.

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Dominion: Renaissance Previews / Re: Your reviews of the previews

« on: October 03, 2018, 11:57:30 pm »

Jomini means “potions” by “pot”, in case anyone else was wondering.

Jomini thinks people reading this board will assume that "debt or pots" clearly refers to brownies because that, and only that, could possibly make any contextual sense with the rest of the sentence.

90

Dominion: Renaissance Previews / Re: Your reviews of the previews

« on: October 03, 2018, 09:11:56 pm »

Seer : Seer also needs a particular deck to work at its best, but it's very versatile and can work even in non-optimized decks. With seer you may focus a little more on the 2-4 range and sometimes you may want to trash coppers before estates. So this is a nice lab variant and we needed more lab variants. Very good.

Seer is much better than a Lab variant in most decks. It beats lab once 33% of your deck is in the $2-$4 range. Your deck starts 30% $2-4 and drops to 27.3% when you buy the seer. But honestly, it will be over 33% if you do most any of the following: trash the coppers, buy silvers, use a $2-4 action as anything but a singleton. Yeah it doesn't like debt or pots, and a deck full of $5s is bad ... but you should generally expect Seer to draw better than Labs in most decks.

And more importantly you can change the top deck order. This means you be sure to place villages on top (or bottom) as needed which is pretty strong. You also can get massive mileage with other top deck control - dump cards on top with Kc/Count and draw them all back, with deck drawing you can discard and pretend you have Champion/Hgrounds, alternating Seer/Apothecary is insanely good and even Navigator can work. Seer gets even better with silver gainers or $3/4 gainers in general - of which there are many.

Experiment : This is a very interesting lab variant and the tempo is crucial here. If you get experiments early, you will benefit from its natural deck-cycling and you will get $5+ more easily, but at the cost at losing experiments early. If you get experiments later in the game, losing the experiments hurts less and they are pretty much cheap laboratories. So, the most important about experiment seems to be gaining them at the right moment : very interesting decision. Excellent.

Expedition costs exactly the same and gives you the same net effect most of the time. Expedition is not bad. What makes Experiment is that it tends to be so much more flexible: you can choose not to play them when you draw particularly well, you can use Tr with them for engine spawning, you can gain them off most any gainer, and they can function as a pseudo +buy (e.g. Forager nets a +buy every other turn), they accept cost reduction, they are immune to more attacks than Expedition (even the things, like Swindler, that can nuke them typically have low odds), and they can draw cards gained mid-turn. You lose control over exactly when in the shuffle they hit, but in general they seem much stronger than Expedition.

Ultimately, there are a lot of times where Experiment should basically be gained every turn with spare $3 gains/buys.

The really fun thing is how the pile warps the end-game. 5 gains to empty a pile is wonderful for threatening end game. But also fun is the option of cease gaining them to stretch the game out.

Flag bearer : I'm worried that the battle for the flag can turn games into ridiculous slogs, because it seems to me that even if you are getting more flag bearer than your deck can afford, the flag is too powerful to be ignored. The on-trash effect is very useful for that kind of situations. But what if we have no trashers ? Time will say. Anyway flag bearer a nice card that use the artifact mechanic in a very elegant way. Very good.

If the Flag is worth going for, at all, is worth buying one more bearer than the opponent. The more junked your deck, the more valuable that 6th draw card is to get.

As it favors second mover, you often benefit from waiting for your opponent to flinch first & grab it (or conversely grabbing it when you opponent is going to be too tempted by the $5s). I suspect there will eventually be a bunch of high level games where nobody buys it as a single River's Gift isn't worth the worst possible terminal silver. This calculus changes if you realistically expect to empty the pile or can get something useful out trashing the suckers.

I strongly suspect this will be a terrible Bm crapshoot.

Swashbuckler : I'm not sure how often treasure chest is really worth it, to me it's not the most important part of the card. The most important seems to gain the coffers, and this is where the card gets interesting... but also a little bit too random for my taste. Good.

Chest is extremely valuable. The comparable action is a prize that takes up a draw slot and gets you the gold one turn sooner at best. Other gold gainers have some pretty big detriments (Bandit can steal from itself, Mint requires trashing treasures in play, and basically all of them but Courtier are terminal).

That something out your mid-game (when you gain coffers) is really valuable too. Eventually even gold clogs decks, some faster than others, so you can let it go pretty often in the late game.

Treasurer : It seems to me that with treasurer players have two ways to play : either they fight for the key, or they trash coppers. Gaining from the trash is potentially interesting with tfb. Very versatile. But like flag bearer, the artifact seems strong, maybe too much. Good.

Gaining treasure is quite strong, with something like Remodel or Counterfeit you are basically playing Courtier with dual-action type; oh and as a benefit you thin out the early coppers too.  I am not sure that key is really all that strong. Sure you can hit price points more easily ... but trashing coppers is also powerful. Ignoring Key is dangerous, but so is not trashing soon enough.

Silos : I like card that makes copper better (rip coppersmith). With silos, you often still prefer to trash your coppers but at least silos almost garantee a good starting hand. This is not the most interesting project to me but I think we needed more ways to play around coppers. Very good.

More importantly, silos makes it very easy to hit power cards sooner. Things like Remodel/Estate get a lot better with Silos; things at $3, like Develop are exceedingly good.

The other nice thing is that it can create a stock of cards in the discard to draw at the end of the deck. Moving copper to the end of your draws means you can tolerate a lot more coppers.

Citadel : The thing I like the most about citadel is the once-per-turn village potential. A recent game showed me that it can be a vast trap, but I think in the right situations it can work very nicely. Otherwise, citadel still seems to be an auto-buy almost always, it bothers me a little. Also there is the randomness about having the best card to throne in your hand. Good.

Citadel loves the Lab family; absent villagers/durations/CotR you either get to Throne a terminal or go for some type village effect. It oddly can also work well with cheap terminal silvers. Once you have it, you can spam the deck with Silvers and Terminal silvers. Getting to $8 is easy as all get out with when you need $4 from 4 cards.

Innocation : I love this new way to play actions during the buy phase and I did so many awesome things in just few games : With estate in hands I bought free barons, with golds in hand I got Governor for the remodel effect, I princed a candlestick maker... This one of the funniest and most creative cards of the new set. Might be too strong but I don't care. Excellent.

Almost complete auto-buy, often with your first $6. Works exceedingly well with anything that gives +buy and most attacks. It functions as a Pseudo-village, besides the obvious gain a non-terminal, you have fun things like buying a clutch terminal for a second action (e.g. Bishop/Monument, Squire/Chouse)

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Dominion: Renaissance Previews / Re: Your reviews of the previews

« on: September 29, 2018, 09:13:54 pm »

Star chart is basically an automatic buy. In a thin deck it is a permanent Scheme - worth it at $3 any day - always starting the shuffle with a village in hand is pretty amazing from the mid-game onwards. In the early game it prevents you from missing your clutch card to the shuffle (e.g. always hit Steward at the top of the shuffle). In the mid-game you can often turn mediocre turns into power turns by pick the card to top deck if your draw triggers the shuffle mid-game (e.g. place a silver on deck top if you are dead drawing, a Seer or something is you have one live draw left). In the late game you can ensure your last shuffle starts with the good card (e.g. top decking the Remodel you just bought with a spare $4). Outside of engine games, ensuring that each shuffle starts with your clutch card (e.g. your gainer for a slog, your draw for BM) is actually pretty strong.

After all your odds of missing the shuffle with important cards is something like [one to five + dead draw]/[deck size]. Spitballing the top to average out around 5 and the bottom to around 25 means that each shuffle we have 20% of whiffing.   With 3 shuffles in a game, expectation value is just under 50% of saving you a whiff. With more you are getting down to territory where you are all but assured of converting a whiffed (e.g. duchy) hand into a hit (e.g. province).

Timing your charting, well that is different. When is it worth it to give up a Silver? What happens if you want a power $3 like Fishing village? Very non-trivial. Should you get it? Pretty much any time you have $3, a good card in deck, and more than 3 shuffles left in the game.

Remember the clutch thing in Dominion is to play your good cards more often. Doing that at the top of the shuffle can make that happen for so many reasons - protection from trashing attacks, not missing the shuffle, control of sequential card effects (e.g. trash the copper with Moneylender before Foraging an estate), starting each hand with unreliable villages (e.g. Xroads, Nec, Ghost, Tr), etc. Add in deck tracking (e.g. knowing I can do an easy Tmap/Urchin lineup) and the value of charting rises to pretty high levels.

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

« on: September 27, 2018, 08:05:05 pm »

I think we might want to wait for the full release to see what is just the new Mechanics and what is actually more specific to a card.

Page pretty much lose all the villagers. Troupe lets you get by with zero collision worries and then hey, no more villagers needed. Recruiter draws and trashes so you get to hero faster (and will much more quickly get rid of useless coppers once actions a cheap than you can accumulate draw with Silk merchant). And of course Sculptor, yeah you gain a couple of silvers to hand to avoid collisions ... but then you can gain draw to hand.

In like fashion Villagers combo with a lot of cards that have had terminal trouble before: Tormentor, Golem, Counting house (where Silk merchant is really nice), Pooka, and Envoy are helped a lot and things become much more viable with Villagers than with something like Cotr.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: What percentage of the game can result in "power turns"? "Mega turns"?

« on: September 23, 2018, 01:29:13 pm »

Being able vs being wise are two very different things. Virtually any board that allows you to build a traditional double province engine allows you to build a triple and lose.

Consider the most basic engine: Workers' village/Smithy/Gold/Donate. Getting to $16 is 5 golds & keep a copper. You draw deck with a single Wv/Smithy and though a lot of green with Wv x2/Smithy x2. Going up to $24 is just 8 Golds. Argueably you need no additional Wv/Smithy as you have only one turn to draw the green. Picking up $18 worth of Gold takes a turn and a half. So you spend you first turn of potential "greening" buying 2 G and your second getting G/Prov. Your third turn would be a triple province.

You opponent does the traditional run - so they buy 2, buy, and then leave you high and dry unless you went first. If you go first, you still lose a straight 4/4 tie and it is much harder to Duchy dance.

Going for multiple provinces a turn is a way to save on draw/sifting costs. It is often very powerful because trashing is not always Donate fast so you naturally buy more draw before your deck is thinned and then the opportunity cost is less. Having the draw to reliably hit 4 Prov turns is a full province in its own right so you make back the draw investment quickly. Going to 3 Prov/turn first has trouble with your buy efficiency/turn going up only 50% from 2 prov/turn (instead of the 100% from 1 Prov/turn to 2). Secondly, carrying around that much buying power costs a lot in draw (either you need to buy draw for coin efficient golds or buy cost inefficient, space efficient action-cash).

So any board that can support 2 Prov/turn allows 3/turn but is rarely worth it; what changes it to being wise?

Cheap value gain. Take Mint. You can gain $6 a turn of value for one action/one card of draw. You can green, but while you do that, you can keep adding buying power mid turn. Likewise, Artisan and Iw can also support further build out - just by making draw cheap enough that you can keep gaining more cards, quickly. Any other sort of card explosion (e.g. Upgrade/Fort, Procession/whatever, Disciple) can likewise drop the opportunity cost enough to be viable.

High cost for holding green. Rabble is the typical example. Holding 4 Prov in your deck is brutal against an overbuilt stack of Rabble. I have routinely lost the Prov pile 5:3 or even 6:2 but buried my opponent in a wall of green as they try to make progress on 2 or 3 card hands. Of course there are other penalties for green. Cost reducers/trashers can just gut decks of green. Discard/Masq can seriously slow you down when you need to fire an engine off just 2 cards. Mandatory card actions can become highly risky (e.g. using Remake/Golem is safe until you run out of coppers/other dross to safely trash).

What I think makes for true megaturns are cards that allow for multiplicative effects. Two Trolls are more than twice as a good as one Troll; Hop typically can progress for 1 Potential province to 3-4 to 6-8 in just three turns as each Hop becomes maybe one support card away from a delayed Prov/Col. Even something like Kc/Forge can rapidly make or burn provinces. How many cards exhibit this sort of potential self-synergy? At least 10% of Dominion. Even more cards have various combos (e.g. Hermit/Msquare) that scale up very quickly.

My spitball is something around 50% of Dominion have a viable megaturn if your opponent does not counteract it.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Annoying and potentially harmful card anti-synergies

« on: September 21, 2018, 09:25:11 pm »

So then, how do you deal with that situation? It seems like Mountain Pass can bring the game to a stand still if no player wants to gain the first Province.

I don't remember if anyone ever came up with a solution other than trying to beat that with a non-Rebuild strategy.

That's still rough, because the Rebuild player likely won't have a problem bidding 40. But unmirrored, there should still be Duchies available for the non-rebuild player.

That depends on what Rebuild player does. They are going to nab 3 Provinces for a point total of 26. They will burn 3 Duchies in game so total points left are only 45 outside of estates. If Rebuild gets an Estate before the trigger is pulled on Mpass, this pushes their total up to 32 and drops the opponent down to 34 (at best). It is exceedingly hard to beat Rebuild with only the stock VP when they can take 8 and run. It certainly can be done (e.g. Knights)

The solution for the mirror is to win the Duchy split, then buy Rebuilds and Estates. Name Duchy, burn Estates, and then slowly eat the Rebuild pile. If your opponent gets a province - bid 40. If they never touch it, then you just keep eating the piles. Be careful about the Estate count; a 4:3 province lead means you cannot let them get 3 Estates ahead of you. If you lock them out of Duchy or Estate points, then you just wait for them to name province, net your 8 VP and then name Estate.

Losing the Duchy split is pretty fatal here, but it is in many Rebuild games regardless; you can get insane mileage out of Rebuilding Duchy -> Duchy.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: When seating order matters - Chariot Race

« on: September 21, 2018, 09:03:54 pm »

Generally it is bad practice to plan your strategy around the fact that your opponent is weak. If your strategy could not beat a skilled player, then the issue is not seating order, but that your strategy sucked. It's not even that your opponent profited off the seating order; they just built the better deck.

Nope. Consider the following. Player 1 is going Gardens without +gains. Even in a 30 turns game they will max out at 32 VP. Seated to their left is a skilled player. Seated to their right is you.

Kingdom: Gardens, Kc, Monument, Possession, Royal seal, Loan, Pstone, Venture, Fteller, Castles
Events: Donate, Alms
Landmarks:Baths, Obelisk (Fteller)

What's your play?

You go gardens ... good luck you can at best snag some bonus cards from the Castles
You go money provinces ... the other skilled player goes Kc x2/Monument x3 and cranks 11 VP/turn or opts for the Fteller and let's you play 4 card hands for the rest of the game while still churning 8 VP/turn till the Baths run out.
You go Kc/Monument ... they go Kc x2/Monument/Possession x2 and they crank 33 VP/turn
You go Kc/Possession ... you get to gain a bunch of $4 or less cards, they go Kc/Monument and bury you

There are cards in dominion that reward you for sitting one way or the other relative to strong players. There is nothing you can do about turn order. This obviously contrived scenario is rock solid proof that position anisotropy exists when players in 3er or higher have differing levels of skill. Smugglers and Possession mean that you will see this sort of anistropic lock a good percentage of the time in mixed skill games.

Another major anisotropic card in higher player counts is Cutpurse. Cpurse is murder in 4er and up. If everyone opens them and you are P4 (5, 6) then you can expect that is exceedingly high odds that you will have zero hands without being hit and not particularly shabby odds that you will be hit multiple times before you can play T3. Odds of P1 hitting an early clutch $5 (like say Upgrade) are idiotically higher than P4; this very often then leads to to a runaway game where P4 struggles to buy Silvers while P1 Upgrades his estates, gets more Upgrades from the higher silver density, and then trashes out the coppers to become immune to Cpurse.

Turn order in most of dominion is fairly isotropic; it gets out of whack in some cases in higher player count games and there is nothing skill can do to overcome that in some cases.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Guardian useless without attacks?

« on: July 12, 2018, 05:51:16 pm »

Holunder9:

Thanks, I am setting you to ignore. Please react as you see fit.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Guardian useless without attacks?

« on: July 12, 2018, 05:46:34 pm »

Just chiming in to note one interesting moment I had with Guardian and no attacks. I had the $2/$7 opening with Cursed Gold, and could use a Guardian buy Turn 1 to Donate Turn 2 and pay off all debt right away, leaving 5 coppers, allowing me to Windfall Turn 3.

I started to call that out as an edge case but I think that's the point we're getting across here. Is guardian useless without attacks? Pretty much, but there are edge cases.

I have never quite understood the board's obsession with calling out "edge case". We are well past the point where just seeing a given card is relatively rare. Seeing a given pair of cards is "edge case" for most definitions of the term in general.

The important thing is not knowing how rare something is, but knowing why the "edge case" makes the card good. Spiking cash for an early Donate/Windfall? Not terribly dissimilar from spiking $7 with a $2/5 for Baker/Inheritance or Cursed gold/Forge. Frankly, it is the same analysis that leads to much more common uses like $3/4 openings letting you open a power trashing $5 (e.g. Junk dealer, Count). It is more obvious in the "edge case", but still true regardless.


Knowing why is much more satisfying that just memorizing block heuristics. It also is much more helpful for learning the tempo of the gain and the opportunity cost portion of strategy.


There is precious little about Dominion that is not made clearer by consider edge cases that make interactions, opportunity costs, and the like clearer.

I'd agree with most of what you just said, particularly with the importance of understanding the Whys behinds the Whats.

The reason I think edge cases can be addressed but not emphasized comes down to that, actually, and has more to do with talking and learning about Dominion than playing any one game. As you say, there are infinite possibilities at this point, so if we allow for edge cases to dictate general points on the game, everything is true and you can't glean any insights.

For example, I say it's bad to be hit by Militia. Someone comes back with " but what if you get to discard Tunnels?"
While that is relevant context to that game, and understanding why can lead us to insights, it's probably not super helpful to include it in a general discussion on what Militia does.

Everything is true in Dominion, but it is not true all the time. This is the value of finding an edge case - where something is unquestioningly true - and then walking back to the point where it becomes marginal. $2/$7 openings cross a threshold that is unambiguous. $3/4 becoming $2/5 is still pretty robust. $5/2 giving you much better odds of hitting $5/2/5 is less a sure thing but is perfectly doable (e.g. Upgrade/Grand market). We can see the pattern, say when we start getting queasy, and then move on from there.

Rather than saying "that's an edge case" the next task after someone posts an edge case should always be "so how much of an edge case do we actually need?"

Knowing when something will be true is a very useful skill.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Guardian useless without attacks?

« on: July 12, 2018, 05:33:59 pm »

I have no idea what "block heuristics" are. Doesn't seem to be related to boardgaming.
But at least I know the difference between Peddler and Copper.

Block Heuristics are a type of mathematical formalism that relates to how to efficiently span a space with like or dissimilar elements.

In this case it refers to recognizing where into various taxonomies cards fall (e.g. Good, Bad; Good-with-attacks, Bad-with-no-trashing) and how to pick out when to buy them. It is a fast way to tell if something fits.

However, the sheer number of possibilities make it increasingly likely that some set of cards in a given game will be "edge cased" that particular game (i.e. the same sort of logic of why it is an odds on bet that with 23 people there will be a shared birthday among them).

We have reached a point where knowing why something sucks is much more important than knowing it does.

Regardless, do you wish to actually have a constructive discussion or do you wish to simply snark and vituperate? If the former, please do so. If the latter, please let me know so I can figure out how the forum's ignore function works.

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Dominion General Discussion / Re: Is Guardian useless without attacks?

« on: July 11, 2018, 06:19:59 pm »

Just chiming in to note one interesting moment I had with Guardian and no attacks. I had the $2/$7 opening with Cursed Gold, and could use a Guardian buy Turn 1 to Donate Turn 2 and pay off all debt right away, leaving 5 coppers, allowing me to Windfall Turn 3.

I started to call that out as an edge case but I think that's the point we're getting across here. Is guardian useless without attacks? Pretty much, but there are edge cases.

I have never quite understood the board's obsession with calling out "edge case". We are well past the point where just seeing a given card is relatively rare. Seeing a given pair of cards is "edge case" for most definitions of the term in general.

The important thing is not knowing how rare something is, but knowing why the "edge case" makes the card good. Spiking cash for an early Donate/Windfall? Not terribly dissimilar from spiking $7 with a $2/5 for Baker/Inheritance or Cursed gold/Forge. Frankly, it is the same analysis that leads to much more common uses like $3/4 openings letting you open a power trashing $5 (e.g. Junk dealer, Count). It is more obvious in the "edge case", but still true regardless.


Knowing why is much more satisfying that just memorizing block heuristics. It also is much more helpful for learning the tempo of the gain and the opportunity cost portion of strategy.


There is precious little about Dominion that is not made clearer by consider edge cases that make interactions, opportunity costs, and the like clearer.

100

Dominion General Discussion / Re: is royal seal underrated?

« on: July 06, 2018, 07:17:06 pm »

It’d be fine at $4.

It would, except, as Donald X once said, "look, I can't make a Treasure that gives $2, has some other effect that is always beneficial, and costs $4; that's just better than Silver, and people by Silver for $4 all the time".

And then he made Delve.

The main problem with Silver-with-a-bonus for $4 (for games where people want Silver and aren't gaining it with a Silver-gainer) is that the pile just automatically empties. It's also not great that then you have that bonus in your deck, but didn't care about it at all, weren't making a decision there.

Delve has neither issue; it hits the Silver pile rather than a new 10-card pile, and those Silvers have no other abilities.

I don't know. If Royal Seal cost $4, would players drain the pile in most 2-player games it appeared? I tend to think not. The top-decking is not an ability that stacks, for one thing... i.e., having multiple Royal Seals in play confers no additional benefit.

They do not need to drain the pile to have an impact. Suppose you had a $4 silver with something like a Survivors effect. On many boards we would open with one each (e.g. boards with the good stuff at >= $5 or boards with a good terminal $3 and no other stuff we want at $4). We both play expensive engines (say Bazaar/Margrave) so we get a $4 hand and $5 hand on the second shuffle (the most likely outcome), so we each get another of the $4 silvers. On the net shuffle we expect one ore $4. Now we pile out the villages and the draw. Than is just 5 buys for a win and $18 - easy territory for engines.

This sort of thing is very common. Sure you might be able to do something with gainers to avoid silver entirely, or cheap cantrips (like Conspirator) ... but most gainers outside of a few like Mine, Tman, and Hermit can get gain the super-silver easily as well. For engine building you normally will buy 1-3 $4 silvers.

And the big hurdle here is actually just buying 4 of them. It is very easy to get to 6 gains - just split a pile of +buys with your opponent. Getting to 8 gains - to pile out the estates, is harder and often telegraphed. This is worse because super-silvers will help you spike more super-silvers. Something like Iw will let you gain & then pay for the better part of another and as treasures you need only worry about dead drawing your gains to play them.

They will be a pretty nice accelerate of end game pile threats on many boards.

Worse whatever bonus you give them is something everyone will get with exceedingly rare exceptions. Say we place +buy on Silver. When would you not get a reasonably useful +buy at $4? Only when you already get it somewhere else. Again, being on a treasure makes it vastly less costly to utilize that bonus than most actions - no need to gain a village, no decisions about how to play the last action on your turn, and no real worry about buying more than your engine can support. Just get more draw and life is good (obviously limited draw like Lib, Wt, Jack, Menage, Diplo, Vassal, etc. are exceptions).

Cards this generally useful diminish the strategy space. It can be fun with something like Chapel that completely warps the game. But any standard bonus on a Silver is not going to play that differently from Silver. So the game loses strategic depth regarding whichever standard element gets put on the card.

Between less time before end game and a loss of strategic depth, $4 super-silvers seem to be less interesting to play than cards that just try more interesting things. I certainly would not give up Quarry or Talisman to get a simple Silver replacement.

I have toyed around with is giving Potion a bonus (we had good fun making it duration w/ +1 action next turn or trash a card next turn). This makes sense to me as Pots are often completely foregone buys on boards - buy exactly zero, one and often trash them after you no longer are buying more Alchemy cards. As a big pile, Pots don't accelerate end game. As something completely different (but useful), Pots are far less likely to be a brain dead buy. Of course I am weird and like the potion mechanic and wish it were more frequently used in Dominion.