Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

76

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Transmute, Revised

« on: April 07, 2018, 12:10:53 pm »

If the "First Game" had Fixed Transmute instead of Remodel (and still had Workshop), you'd probably open Potion to get it.

Seems right. Actually, in "First Game" it'd be great at injecting payload and getting rid of your estates. In your kingdom you wouldn't have the Remodel/Gold tricks around, which is probably OK... I think I'd like "First Game, Fixed" with your Transmute and Remodel rather than Transmute and Workshop; it seems like it overshadows Workshop, except you can option Potion/Workshop. Meh. Maybe.

77

Dominion Articles / Re: Fortress Big Money

« on: April 07, 2018, 12:03:59 pm »

I decided to run the numbers through my bot and I think the results speak for themselves: [...]

This is spiraling out of control

78

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: "Savings", treasure with overpay for coin tokens; balanced at what value/price?

« on: April 07, 2018, 11:53:18 am »

[...] it would probably be much better as an event

Second Savings Account
Event
Cost: +
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. Gain a Curse. If you did, take a coin token for each you overpaid.

This looks pretty good in combination with Watchtower, but pretty much any trashing will do in most engines. It looks like a less good fit for money-ish strategies now—or at the very least, you want to use it very sparingly.

I like the design of Second Savings Account, though it has drifted from my original vision. I read your comments (thanks for those) as saying "You could also do this" and not "there are problems with your initial design, do this instead". Am I reading you correctly?

I was thinking a little about my original design. I think a good buff might be adding +1 buy.

Savings, revised
Treasure
Cost:

+1 buy
—
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. If you do, take a coin token per you overpaid.

I think it makes thematic sense: you save up money now, such that you can buy more things later.

It's a treasurized Woodcutter with an overpay option, and it costs $1 more. Seems familiar: Venture vs. vanilla Peddler for $4, Plunder vs. Monument, even Counterfeit vs. Moneylender, kinda'. In engines, it lets you focus on trashing and draw; on that turn where you draw deck and payload all your untrashed coppers and it's time to add +buy and payload, this is better than a $7 Herbalist because you get some of your money back next turn, and hey, Silver is a decent payload — I think it might see some more play like this. It might also provide a lot of support for the build-up-to-octuple-Province megaturn play, so, you know, if I wasn't a lazy git I should playtest this

On the other hand, another way of saying what I just said is that it diminishes the roles of at least one trade-off, that of getting +buy earlier vs. later, because you waste little by getting +buy later. Or maybe it doesn't diminish this trade-off, it just moves the right answer in one of the directions. I dunno.

Some analysis in the moneyish context: if you overpay by $1, Savings is like a Gold the first time you play it (if you save the coin token) and then a Silver. If you overpay by $2 it's a Gold twice, then Silver—but with the flexibility of coin tokens, of course. If you make it a $3 for $1 and overpay by $3 it's a Gold once, then a Silver, then Copper. That is, the lower the value of the treasure the fewer times you want to play it—so you'll want to buy it later in the game and play it less often, and you're more likely to want to get it out of your deck. That suggests I want $4 for $2 over $3 (or less) for $1, such that you'll want it sooner and play it more often.

At least that's what I think. Am I trying to optimize for the right thing? One of the warnings in a sticky thread was "don't make the card too powerful"—I think I'm avoiding the pitfall where you optimize for the attractiveness of your own baby to the detriment of the game as a whole, but I did just write a paragraph or two about how to tweak my card in the direction of 'more powerful' such that it'll be played more.

A quick observation comparing the two: Second Savings Account puts both the benefits and costs at a more extreme place than Savings (revised or not)—fixing the amount of $ spent, it gives you more coin tokens but adds a much worse card to your deck. It'd be cool to find a place between the more radical Second Savings Account and the more conservative and a little bit bland Savings, Revised—if for no other reason than just exploring the design space.

79

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Offering, the Heirloom that time forgot

« on: April 05, 2018, 05:36:07 pm »

This could end up better than Grand Market for one player and a Navigator Bureacratty thing for another!

Here are some ideas to make it less swingy:

1. When you discard it from play, if you have 3 boons set aside, the player to your left picks a boon; you discard that boon.

That's very wordy, though, and the card is already full of text. No more Saboteur squint-o-vision plz

2. Have a shared pool of set-aside boons (maybe 4 or 5 instead of 3). When you play Offering, you may discard one of them. When you discard (or maybe that should be play) Offering, you may add one if the limit hasn't been reached. [Maybe the discard option should only be there if the pool is full.]

The benefits are symmetrical, which is very different from the posted Offering. It fixes the "You got Swamp and Flame while I'm stuck with the lousy ones" problem. In case of a non-mirrored strategy, it lets you steer the pool towards what uniquely favors your strategy (but your opponent gets to do the same to you).

It also doesn't dry up the Boons deck, so it interacts with Druid and other booners less b0rkenly.

If "look at the top card of your deck, you may discard it" and "draw cards until you have 5 cards in hand" were things, this could be a Jack of all Boons

80

Variants and Fan Cards / "Savings", treasure with overpay for coin tokens; balanced at what value/price?

« on: April 05, 2018, 05:18:14 pm »

The basic idea is this:

Savings
Treasure
Cost: ?
?
—
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. For each you overpaid, take a coin token.


Assuming its on-play is just money, at which <price, value> points would this be non-broken?

The no-strictly-better rule suggests that it should cost at least if it provides , at least if it gives and at least if it gives .

At or greater, I wonder when you'd ever buy it.

At for , I have a hard time seeing myself taking it over Gold. Maybe when I'm playing big money and hit and I'm confident I won't shuffle again and a Duchy is no good, which is... nearly never?
At for , it feels underwhelming compared to Gold. If you only play it once and you pay for it, you get more money than a Gold would've gotten you, plus the flexibility of coin tokens.
At for , it's a $5 Silver with a coin token. Compared to other $5 Silvers, it seems... reasonable? You'll probably take it for some times, and it'll probably be quite good for in some situations.

At for it competes with Masterpiece. Most of the time, I think you'd rather have Silvers in deck, but it's probably worth picking up one. It seems not too different from for
At or for it seems like it could easily be quite good—it lets you pile up a lot of coin tokens on your penultimate shuffle, which lets you hit Province much more reliably on your last shuffle.

All of this assumes you're playing something moneyish that buys Provinces, preferably one each turn. On most boards, that's not the strongest strategy available. I have a hard time seeing myself buying Savings in an engine: if I can spend all my money I'd rather pick up engine pieces. If I can't, why not? If I'm choked on buys, a large stockpile of coin tokens isn't likely to do me any good.

One exception I can see: if I have a Surplus of buys and I would rather threaten quad province that buy double province, saving up money on a 1-for-1 basis with a minor deduction seems good. One might worry that it amplifies first player advantage in an engine mirror: if both players save up to octuple province turns, it's no good being the second player to have enough money and buys for eight provinces.

One obvious card to compare Savings to is Capital: both of them shift your money across time. Capital gives you benefit when you play it in exchange for a later payment. Savings requires payment first and gives benefits later, but that's in relation to when you buy rather than play it, so in some sense you get the benefits earlier than with Capital.


My first guess would that it would be okay but nothing to write home about at for . It'd be about the same at for , but I should definitely also try out for and for just to find out how bananas broken it is.

81

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Transmute, Revised

« on: April 05, 2018, 04:58:05 pm »

Transmute, Revised
[...]
When you buy this, +1 Buy.
[...]
It still doesn't seem like a strong card, but this version should have a reasonable probability to get bought even on boards where it is the only Potion-cost card.

Making things cost 0 buys is a great combo enabler for Goons/Trader => infinite VP (currently uses Highway and Forum to go infinite). Nothing makes cards cost fewer potions, though, so I don't think this enables any new infinite combos

Power-level-wise: it looks like a weird hybrid between Moneylender and Workshop. If there was a decent engine on the board and Fixed Transmute was the only trasher, I'd most likely take it. If "First Game" had this but no Workshop or Remodel, I'd probably open Potion/Silver. I agree that it's still on the unimpressive side of things, but... it's still a lot better than the real Transmute — so well done!

82

Dominion Articles / Re: Fortress Big Money

« on: April 05, 2018, 04:08:50 pm »

I was a little skeptical first, but then I looked at the Nakagami density function and that persuaded me to give Fortress/BM a try. I think it most closely captures the development of your money density.

How does Fortress/BM compare to big money with Coin of the Realm?

83

Game Reports / Re: Shortest games around

« on: April 05, 2018, 10:39:20 am »

Turn 6 win from the World Cup semifinals: [...]

The link in the URL is to 1:07:23. I think turn 1 happens at around 1:07:05—but what's 18 seconds between friends?

When I hit play on the embedded video it starts at 0:00:00. Does anyone experience anything different?

84

Game Reports / Re: Seaside-only DoublecTac/Navigator/NV with Merchant and Ghost ships: Much fun! :)

« on: April 05, 2018, 10:23:38 am »

It’s always hard for me to spot boards like this where you can actually keep your NV mat under control for most of the game.

I didn't predict perfectly how it would work before game 1, but I got the basics right: Navigator lets you peek and steer, which makes it possible to set aside only junk with NV, and it's possible to play Navigator first followed by NV thanks to +1 action from either Tactician (most of the game) or Bazaar (early and only if you're very lucky).

The heuristic I used in deciding to go for it was "it is possible to know the top card of your deck somehow, and then play Native Village". That's probably a good first guess, but with room for refinement—connecting Native Village and Province has a high probability of working because the deck is relatively thin compared to the number of Navigators. If I had one Navigator in a 30-card deck it probably wouldn't work.

I would have traded two Navigators for two Merchant Ships, but I suppose it’s not that important.

I did some test plays of this. The two decks take somewhat different routes to the same destination, and it feels very potayto-potarto to me which one you take.

Let's state the obvious: due to the duration effect, Merchant Ship is one less card to draw and one less terminal to play.

With Navigators you're under-terminaled by 1, but you can't really cut any villages because they provide money and thinning. The effect of being under-terminaled by 2 is that you're a little more likely to have more villages than terminals in hand than otherwise, but if you start your turn with Navigator you're likely to be fine in any case.

The deck draws 16 cards: clean-up 5, Tactician 5, Bazaar 4, Ghost Ship 2, independent of Navigator vs. Merchant Ship. It wants to draw 13 or 14: Tactician 1, Native Village 2, Bazaar 4, Ghost Ship 1, junk 1, Navigator 2 or 4, Merchant Ship 2 or 1. It also wants to set aside 2 with Native Village, although it's okay to miss once or twice.

This suggests that if you get Ghost Ship played on you, the more Merchant Ship heavy build is more resilient; it can have 4 Provinces (1 junk discard, two set aside, overdraw by 1) and still draw itself just fine, where the Navigator build might stall.

I think this suggests that Pearl Diver is more helpful in the Navigator-heavy build: if it has 4 provinces in deck, it can use Navigator (with 6 cards in deck) and Pearl Diver to select which card to underdraw. The surplus of Navigators can help you push junks towards the bottom. Also, switching from using Pearl Diver (or any cantrip) to Province as Tactician junk effectively lets you absorb one junk card for free.

But if you ever have 4 Provinces on deck, it's because you missed matting some for several turns in a row, so most likely you have 4 in deck and a couple on the mat, in which case you have already won ;-)

So... potayto-potarto.

In favor of more Navigators: only having 2 makes it a little more likely that you won't have any in your starting hand; also, against Ghost Ship you have to get through an 8-card deck with the aid of "only" 2 Navigators. Most of the time you want to not discard to the first (because you'd be either drawing or matting an unknown card with Bazaar or Native Village), but if the second navigator is in the bottom 3 cards you might have to draw some blindly. It's not the worst thing in the world, but it might cause you to miss matting a Province more often than if you have more Navigators. On the flip side, your thinner deck can afford more of this.

So... potarto-potayto.

I'm sure someone could run simulations or do some heavy-duty math and calculate that one build has a 0.1% higher risk of dudding, but... man, I have better things to do with my time

Also, I hadn't even considered what to do on dud turns. I guess Province plus some combination of one extra Native Village and an alternation between Ghost Ship and Bazaar. That is, increase your thinning rate to get back in control of your deck, and add more draw and enough villages to support the extra draw. But the deck never duds, so this is purely academic

85

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Playing the new Guilds & Cornucopia!

« on: April 02, 2018, 05:13:28 am »

[I updated the wiki]
Contrary to popular belief, I do not run the wiki all on my own.

Liar!

86

Game Reports / Seaside-only DoublecTac/Navigator/NV with Merchant and Ghost ships: Much fun! :)

« on: April 01, 2018, 04:00:37 pm »

I recently played on this kingdom:

Code: [Select]

Bazaar, Ghost Ship, Merchant Ship, Tactician, Treasury, Embargo, Native Village, Pearl Diver,
 Treasure Map, Navigator
The missus and I (typically) play 3 games on each kingdom, this not being an exception. In the first two games, I built a DoubleTac deck with roughly this composition:

2 Tactician
2 Merchant Ship
1 Ghost Ship
4 Navigator
4 Bazaar
2 Native Village
1 junk card to discard to Tactician

Your starting deck, your provinces and maybe that one Silver you got early on should be on your Native Village mat.  Maybe you leave one in your deck to have a Tactician discard, unless you picked up a Pearl Diver on a spare buy, with an exception to the exception if you start double-provincing before you're completely thin.

It takes a while to get going: without the draw of Tactician you can't reliably steer your Native Village thinning, and early on you don't have enough money to play DoubleTac profitably.  Once you're up, though, you'll reliably double Province and play Ghost Ship, even if you get Ghost Ship played on you.

And when I say reliably, I mean super reliably: starting your turn with Navigator and having several more to play means you can not only draw your deck, you can draw it in almost any order you like, and you can mat your provinces with perfect precision.  Navigator is considered a weak card and I agree, but playing it on this board felt really good.  And besides, with DoubleTac you need virtual money which Navigator delivers.  Also, you're going to hit $4 a few times, and what else are you going to buy?


In the third game, I used Tactician to buy and then connect two Treasure Maps, then played SingleTac/money with two tacticians.  It felt fairly fast but not super dominant against what my gf was doing (which was moneyish).


What would you do on this board?

87

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Homage to the Best Card

« on: March 30, 2018, 07:27:22 pm »

Donald already turned an offer for Star Wars Dominion down, by the way. So no joining Lord Vaders Hunting Party or trashing Yoda's filthy swamp Hovel after buying a VP card.

Don't speak so soon



[et cetera for the rest of base game, and more expansions in subsequent posts]

Wow, impressive, much thumbs up.

Magic: The Gathering card frame (from some particular expansion), colorless mana symbol, Star Wars pictures, yes? Or is there a Star Wars-themed game made by Wizards of the Coast that I'm not aware of, that uses a very Magic-like card frame? 

Although the pictures and card frames are all pretty, I'd never want to play that game. Something about it is... not right.

If I wasn't such a lazy git I might do some myself, but they'd go like this:

Smugglers
[normal dominion frame, same text, same layout, only change the artwork to a picture of Han Solo]

Princess
[picture of Leia]

Throne Room
[award ceremony on Yavin IV at the end of A New Hope—the music in that scene is named 'Throne Room']

Hermit
[picture of Yoda on Dagobah]

Madman
[Yoda whacking R2-D2 with a stick]

Hovel
[Yoda's dwelling]

Disciple
[picture of Luke Skywalker]

Teacher
[Obi-wan Kenobi]

Haggler
[Mos Eisley cantina, Luke and Obi-wan haggling with Han Solo]

Farmland
[the moisture farm]

Urchin
[Luke returning to the ravaged moisture farm]

Chancellor
[Palpatine]

Vassal
[Tarkin]

Bureaucrat
["It's an older code... but correct"]

Ambassador
[Vader, "if this is the consular ship, where is the ambassador  ?"]

Militia
[Stormtroopers]

Fortress
[Death Star]

Rebuild
[second Death Star]

Workshop
[Scene where Luke "repairs" R2-D2 and sees Leia for the first time]

Secret Passage
[Scene where Luke and Obi-Wan pop out of the floor storage rooms aboard the Millenium Falcon]

Ghost Ship
[Scene where the Millenium Falcon returns out of the blue in RotJ]

Treasure Hunter
[Boba Fett]

Hero
[aboard X-wing in ANH, "Use the force, Luke"]

Torturer
["Now we will discuss the location of the hidden rebel base"]

Harem
[Leia at Jabba the Hutt's palace]

Native Village
[Ewok camp]

Secret Chamber
[Trash compactor]

Treasure Map
["Many Bothans died to bring us this information", map of the Death Star]

Golem
[C3PO]

Fortune Teller
["You... will be."]

Masquerade
[Luke unmasking himself in the cave on Dagobah]

Upgrade
["I've made some special modifications"]

Hunting Party
[Darth Vader's TIE fighter with two wing men during the attack run in ANH]

Nomad Camp
[The rebel base on Hoth]

Navigator
["who's gonna' fly it kid—you!?"]

Inn
[Mos Eisley cantina]

Mercenary
["Take care of yourself, Han. I guess that's what you're best at."]

Junk Dealer
[Owen and Luke buying R2-D2 and C-3PO]

Distant Lands
[Dantooine being blown up]

Sacrifice
[Burning of the dead Darth Vader / Anakin Skywalker]

Bandit Fort
[Jabba the Hutt's palace]

... you get the idea.

88

Dominion Articles / Re: A mathematical theory of finite processes, loops and pins

« on: March 29, 2018, 12:46:46 pm »

Infinite if the piles are infinite: [...]

I think this is a good definition of "bounded loop"—the one inherently finite quantity I can think of in Dominion is the number of cards. The vanilla bonuses and tokens can all be had in infinite quantity (though it's hard to rack up debt), and I'm hard pressed to find another quantitative aspect of a game state. (Maybe number of actions played for Conspirator and Peddler, and number of Crossroads played for Crossroads, but meh, they're dull and have nice limiting behavior.)

Also, this highlights very clearly why termination functions don't help us analyze bounded loops, or at least not the function I proposed: the number of cards neither in play nor on the tavern mat starts out infinite and stays infinite after each play.

My best idea for an almost-correct termination function in the case of infinite piles would be something that counts cards in your hand, draw pile and discard pile, perhaps with actions thrown in somewhere. The obvious thing that strikes me is that some cards draw more cards, so maybe you divide cards-in-hand into draw-in-hand and other cards in hand, and hope that relatively few cards can gain draw to convenient places.

But... well, here's an exercise: find a loop that's infinite if piles are infinite. Measure how much time you took. Spend an equal amount of time trying to find a loop that's infinite if piles are finite. Here's my solution to the first part:

Cost-reduce King's Court enough (with e.g. Highway), then KC a KC, KC'ing an Ironworks to gain KC, Ironworks and Lurker to your deck (thanks to Watchtower or Travelling Fair), then KC a Lurker trashing 3xCultist to draw 9 cards, then KC the newly drawn KC and repeat the loop.

If some of the cards drawn after the gained 3 were KC and Ironworks, you could also sneak in a KC'd Ironworks to gain KC, Ironworks and something else, so with a bit more setup this loop not only draws infinitely but gains infinitely. (For example, more Highways to cost-reduce everything into Ironworks range, more Lurkers to gain potion- or debt-costing actions and Stonemason to gain Philosopher's Stone and Vineyard off of e.g. Possession.)

I thought this up almost as fast as I could type it. I have found two infinite loops (with finite piles), and both took a lot longer to find. One was a variation on work done by others, so I had a lot of ideas given to me.

Based on this, I think it might be difficult to find a termination function that only has very few exceptions.

89

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Win with an all-blue deck

« on: March 29, 2018, 08:35:31 am »

I promised to post my inspiration for this puzzle "in a while". Approximately 2.4 whiles have passed.



The blue card challenge is mentioned at 3:25 and 4:07 and 5:26 and 13:30, each time for ~10s.

My solution is posted in a comment on youtube.

This video is also where I got the idea for the Poor House challenge, which I went on to post. (It's mentioned before 3:23. I'm not sure whether I credited Adam or not in that thread.)

90

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Surplus

« on: March 29, 2018, 08:06:53 am »

[If you draw with Werewolf] you can effectively add attacks to your deck later by buying e.g. Patrol Smithy.

[... I]f you add another card which just does mode A [...], you have effectively added a mode-B card to your deck.

[your generalized point is not the most strategically important thing in one of the particular examples you used to illustrate your general point]

*facepalm tableflip*

Have I expressed my dissatisfaction with the way the conversation is going in a sufficiently passive-aggressive fashion?

91

Variants and Fan Cards / Re: Really bad card ideas

« on: March 29, 2018, 07:48:53 am »

Complexly Bad Card Idea
... [sqrt(n) where n < 0] ...

...

Neeeeeeeerd!

(... he said on the board game strategy forum)

92

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

« on: March 29, 2018, 07:40:52 am »

I recently got Seaside. One of the recommended kingdoms is the following:
 



I've played it twice; in the early game I would get Ghost Ship, Sea Hag, Warehouse and a Native Village or two. The sifting of Warehouse, the knowledge that I have a Curse on top thanks to Sea Hag, and a bit of luck means my NVs would set aside more or less only junk while I was busy attacking my opponent and buying the odd Silver.

Around the time the curses were out, I'd pick up Salvager, Treasury and Gold in some mix, trashing Sea Hag and using Salvager to turn my deck into Provinces.

The neat part is trashing NV with Salvager.

I figure that "If you trash your NVs, you have effectively trashed the cards on your mat" is not a novel idea.

The fact that you want to transition from a deck with a village or two to a deck with a bunch of money and a few Salvagers, right around the time where NV becomes less attractive to play (in either mode), is what makes the Salvager/NV interaction neat, and that feature is quite kingdom-specific.

I find it particularly neat that NV will happily "trash" cards that Salvager is sad to trash and vice versa—and NV will succeed at it with good probability. Also, Salvager is terminal which is fine in the end-game while NV is anti-terminal which is great in the early game.

The complementarity is strong with these ones.

(I think I opened 5/2 in both my games, which makes getting Ghost Ship rather easy; it probably plays out differently if I open Silver/Sea Hag.)

93

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Empty the Supply in 1 Turn

« on: March 29, 2018, 07:04:10 am »

You are right Forest Gift doesn't work, I missed that part. But Mountain+Earth Gift works and should easily solve this issue.

Yes, although it changes the payload from "infinite money and buys" into "gain and draw all cards which have neither potion nor debt in their costs (and only those)".

It's a very small difference, and it's definitely not a problem, because some of the cards you can gain are King's Court and Lurker which gain some copies of the only not-merely-coin-costing card (Overlord), and some of the others cards are treasures which help you pay for the Overlords. (Travelling Fair gets you the buys you need.)

There's one bit either missing or implicit in what you said: since The Earth's Gift decreases your hand size, you also need something to increase it, such as The Sea's Gift, and that something needs to be repeatable, which it is in the case of The Sea's Gift.

Using The Swamp's Gift to gain Will-o'-Wisps and The Wind's Gift to sift them into hand and the Will-o'-Wisps to draw (KC'd Bridges help) would work if there was enough Will-o'-Wisps to gain; infinite would be great, but a mere billion—or just a thousand or so, I think—would surely be enough. Alas, there are not enough Will-o'-Wisps, so this is not (sufficiently) repeatable.

TL;DR: you are right, given that a particular true assumption is true.

94

Dominion Articles / Re: A mathematical theory of finite processes, loops and pins

« on: March 24, 2018, 07:59:10 am »

Also, you can empty the supply with a finite loop doing most but not all of the work, provided you are either an extraterrestrial supercomputer or Celestial Chameleon:

Beyond the Impossible - Empty the Supply by Turn 5.

Empty the Supply in 4 Turns.

Check the dates, and contemplate how the cards available were merely moderately b0rken...

95

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Surplus

« on: March 24, 2018, 05:52:25 am »

But... if there's a better way to draw than Werewolf, you don't care if you lose the Werewolf split.

More generally: if Werewolf is the best draw on the board, you probably want to be buying Werewolf and also probably want to be making sure you can play those Werewolves for draw. If Werewolf isn't the best draw on the board, buy the thing that's better instead.

What you're saying is unrelated to the point I was trying to make. You do understand this, right?

I'm happy to discuss the things you're saying. Let me first generalize them, probably too much:

If there's a better way than card X to do Y, you don't care if you lose the X split.

More generally: if card X is the best way to do Y on the board, you probably want to be buying X and also probably want to be making sure you can play those Xs for Y. If X isn't the best Y on the board, buy the thing that's better instead.

If Minion isn't the best virtual money, you don't care if you lose the Minion split. If Bridge isn't the best source of +buy, you don't care if you lose the Bridge split. If Mint isn't the best treasure gainer, buy Bandit instead. If Count is the best virtual money, you want to be buying Count and playing it for money. If Minion isn't the best virtual money, buy Mandarin instead. If there's a better way to gain Estates than Wild Hunt, you don't care if you lose the Wild Hunt split.

If Jack of all Trades is neither the best topdeck inspection, the best Silver gainer, the best draw nor the best non-treasure trasher, you should buy what's better at each of those things. So on a 5-card board with Moat, Hermit, Cartographer, Explorer and Jack, I shouldn't buy Jack, I should buy the other cards instead.

If you're evaluating a multi-faceted card in terms of only one of its facets, you're very likely to be evaluating less accurately than if you consider all its facets. In particular, there's value to the modality of modal cards, even if they're not best at any one thing they do.

For example, on a board with Village, Smithy, Bazaar, Patrol, Woodcutter, Festival, Band of Misfits and Donate, the BoM is not best at anything it can do, but it's not obvious that it's always optimal to get zero BoMs. In fact, I would be surprised if it was.

Maybe my examples are bad because Y=draw is special. If so, why—why is your mode of analysis appropriate when comparing cards that draw but not other cards? And if draw is special, I should definitely buy Moat over—or at least in addition to—Jack, and play it for draw, because it's better at drawing, right? Or are there other specific characteristics of Werewolf that are relevant to your general point?

The way I read your comment, and maybe I misread it, is that Werewolf should only be evaluated in terms of its ability to draw cards. I think that's a bad approach, as I have just argued.

I have observed that there's disagreement about the strength of hexing your opponent. If you belong to the camp that says "hexes are so ultra-weak that you can ignore them", an analysis of Werewolf that's limited to its ability to draw cards is fine. But that's because you evaluated the other facet of the card!

96

Dominion Articles / Re: Donate + Windfall

« on: March 23, 2018, 04:09:30 pm »

This is my first time writing something like this so tell me how to make it less terrible please!

Brevity is the soul of Wit.  –Willy Shake

Your article is short, to the point, and easy to follow. You lead with the key idea, which I think is great, and you put it in some perspective by discussing its limitations. What more could one want?

When I write, I often waffle way more, going on and on about incidental minor points to the detriment of my sentence structure, than a Belgian stereotype. I could learn something from you.

97

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Surplus

« on: March 23, 2018, 02:41:29 pm »

If your early-game focus is trashing, why buy Werewolf when you can have Patrol?

(a) to not lose the Werewolf split; and (b) Patrol was the first not-too-disruptive $5 Smithy I thought of. Strategically it probably isn't the best example, but I think it illustrates the generic point about substitution and modality just fine.

98

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Dominion Confessions

« on: March 23, 2018, 02:34:46 pm »

I like playing Big Money.

99

Dominion Articles / Re: A mathematical theory of finite processes, loops and pins

« on: March 23, 2018, 02:05:01 pm »

A survey of known infinite loops

I think the first widely popularized loop is the following, by Majiponi in this post:

Code: [Select]

Overlord, Crown, Raze, Lurker, Mandarin, Watchtower

Once the setup is done, you play 5xOverlord first as 4xCrown then a self-trasher (Raze), then Lurker to gain a Mandarin from the trash, reveal Watchtower to put Mandarin back in the trash. Since Mandarin has taken your Overlords out of play, you can play them as something other than Crown on the second play; play them as Lurker to gain back the trashed Overlord, a payload card of your choice, then Watchtower to draw back your Overlords. (Mandarin is a fine payload if all you want is money. Farmers' Market gives you money, buys and VP for just one kingdom slot.)

Qvist has shown how you can set this combo off in turn 5, with the right support, in the following video:



The second loop I want to highlight is by me:

Code: [Select]

Lurker, Scrying Pool, Ambassador, Masquerade, Cutpurse, Thief, Pirate Ship, Villa, King's Court, Bonfire, Travelling Fair

Bonfire takes your cards out of play, Villa gets you back to your action phase, Ambassador puts Villa back in the supply, Cutpurse/Masquerade/Thief takes Villa back from your opponent, King's Court on Lurker gains your cards back from the trash, Scrying Pool draws the cards you have gained and Pirate Ship (or Miser if you prefer) pays for it all. The details are all in the post where I first presented the loop, in the same thread as Majiponi's loop.

There are several other loops which exploit Villa in that thread; some of them only work in solo mode or with cooperative opponents. I'm not aware of anything of them being on video.

The third infinite loop I want to present is also by me, posted about in its own thread.

Code: [Select]

King's Court, Overlord, Mining Village, Lurker

You play a KC'd Overlord as (1) a self-trasher (Mining Village) which draws a second Overlord; (2) Lurker to gain itself back; and (3) a King's Court, cost-reduced somehow, to begin repeating the next iteration of the loop.

Qvist has illustrated how to set this off in turn 1(!) and empty the supply in the following video, which uses Pixie instead of Mining Village as the self-trasher.



This is based on the work of Mith.

The last infinite combo I want to highlight is this:

Code: [Select]

Goons, Forum, Trader

Reduce the cost of Forum to $0 (3xQuarry, 5xHighway, ...), then repeatedly buy a Forum and reveal Trader to leave the Forum in the supply, while still gaining 1 VP. If you have Merchant Guild you can get any amount of coin tokens; with Villa you can spend them the same turn and with Travelling Fair you can turn them into buys.

The loop has been described in the Infinite Combos thread.


A short mini-survey of known finite loops

Beyond infinite loops, there are also what I call finite loops (or sometimes bounded loops), which can be quite powerful. I have not thought super-carefully about it, but I'm fairly confident that in the following videos you can find one or more sequences of moves which you can repeat up to k times, where k is the number of cards left in some pile.

The first is a turn 6 win by Dan Brooks:



The second is a turn 1 win by Qvist:



These are not infinite loops, but they illustrate very well that loops do not need to be infinite to be extremely powerful. I notice that Procession is featured in both videos. Both throning and taking cards out of play are useful effects, and Procession does both.

100

Puzzles and Challenges / Re: Win with an all-blue deck

« on: March 22, 2018, 09:18:40 am »

GI>> Advanced mode: You cannot play cards; you can only use their reactions.
Me> Given that your opponents never do anything, this might take an infinite arbitrary amount of time

Probably not! You just have to rule out the “when attack” reactions. Several other things can still be activated through buying events and the things that those do.

Did you mean your proposed restriction in addition to the others or instead of (some of) them? The events you can buy without playing any cards (including treasures) are Alms, Borrow, Quest, and with the help of Borrow you can Save.

With Quest, I think-but-I'm-not-sure that you can discard a 5-card hand, reveal Tunnel and gain Gold. Even if the prohibition on gaining non-reactions is lifted, you're not allowed to play the Gold under your rules, so it doesn't help much. You can also discard the hounds to get a 6-card hand and gain Gold that way.