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« on: August 22, 2018, 09:11:30 am »
Groundskeeper
Groundskeeper is a difficult card to evaluate and an essential one to understand. It has very high scoring potential, and the pile is often hotly contested. Boards which play to its strengths often see it deplete, and winning the split can be game-decisive.
To avoid burying the lede for anyone who has the question “should I go for Groundskeeper,” It’s a very strong card. You need a compelling reason to ignore it.
Yet, while Groundskeeper helps you win the game with your deck, it does not help you build it.
Let’s start by talking about two Dominion basics Groundskeeper challenges:
One: Taking longer to build your deck risks an opponent getting a points lead, and making that up usually means depleting key piles (like Province) yourself, further hastening the game end. Groundskeeper scores points disproportionate to how much it lowers piles.
Two: Points usually make your deck worse.
Groundskeeper doesn’t change this directly, but your Groundskeepers will eventually score points, so gaining them is tantamount to scoring points that don’t hurt your deck.
Groundskeepers are Delayed Scoring
The key to timing Groundskeeper gains is looking at the card as alt VP. A deck that has/plays more of them has a higher point ceiling, so around when you would start buying VP cards, pretend Groundskeeper is green.
Essentially, it’s a cantrip worth VP equal to the number of VP cards you expect to buy (with it out) by the end of the game. On boards where you can gain only one of those per turn, you can usually expect that to be 2-6 VP, depending how your draws go.
Reading Groundskeeper Kingdoms- Does the Split Matter?
It’s important to acknowledge how skill-rewarding Groundskeeper is. Everything about the card is contextual, so we can’t give you much in the way of hard-and-fast prescriptive advice that won’t be wrong as often as it’s right. Above all, the presence of Groundskeeper rewards good game sense and an accurate read on your win condition.
That said, there are certainly some things that are helpful to keep in mind.
Groundskeeper’s greatest synergies are multiple gains and reliability (by which I mean being able to play Groundskeepers consistently).
Obviously, multiple VP gains per turn scores more points, but being able to gain multiple Groundskeepers per turn also makes them more important (as they are likely to score more points before Provinces empty).
If multiple VP cards or Groundskeepers are gainable per turn, or the decks are reliable enough to play all/most of their Groundskeepers every turn, the split will probably play a huge role in the outcome of the game and should be prioritized accordingly.
While Groundskeeper increases point ceiling without decreasing deck capability, it doesn’t do anything to increase capability. You should usually build your deck to be as good as it’s ever going to be (other than points you’ll score) before you start buying Groundskeepers.
At the same time, mind the split. On boards good for Groundskeeper, they will often pile out, and sometimes it’s worth delaying other deckbuilding to make sure you get enough of them. Whether or not the split matters, and how much you can afford to lose it by are very game-specific, but usually come down to how impactful each copy will be (which comes back to number of gains and deck reliability).
Playing Groundskeeper Games: A Field Guide to Aggressive Gardening
Keeping Groundskeeper in Check With Pressure:
When deciding how to play around Goundskeeper and how to interpret your win condition at any given point, consider the following.
Firstly, given enough time, having/playing more Groundskeepers pretty much always wins because of how they raise your point ceiling. Secondly, Groundskeeper’s greatest practical advantage is scoring (delayed) points without making your average turn worse.
It should come as no surprise then that a Groundskeeper deck’s greatest threat is endgame pressure. In other words, Groundskeeper doesn’t have its usual advantages if the game is over (or close to it) by the time you have to put VP in the deck, or at least have it there for very long.
In the rare situation it’s possible to empty Provinces over the course of a couple of turns (a la a “megaturn” like with Bridge Trolls or Horn of Plentys), Groundskeepers might not have time to pay off. That’s an extreme example to illustrate the point that Groundskeeper gets worse the less time it has to build up and score points.
Understand though, that ignoring Groundskeeper to pressure piles is an “all-in” proposition-- if you can’t make good on that threat and end the game before someone gaining Groundskeepers has time to catch up, they will likely outscore you.
How Many Groundskeepers do I want? Mirror Versus Non-Mirror:
In a vacuum, you want all of them, as many as you can get. But as with every other aspect of the card, there are some considerations.
The earlier advice of playing with and against pile pressure applies to Groundskeeper mirror matches as well. If both players are going for Groundskeeper, the pile usually empties and always gets low. Even when the split is important, a three-pile ending is something to watch out for before you gain the last one.
It’s also important to have an accurate read on how your opponent intends to win. Even when Groundskeepers are the best strategy, focusing on them in the wrong way can lose you games. Namely, if you play to them the same way you would in a mirror.
Outside of a mirror, it’s not necessarily a good idea to get all ten Groundskeepers when fewer could outscore whatever the opponent is doing. There’s the obvious limitation of how much time it takes to empty them by yourself, but it can also be unwise because emptying the pile potentially hastens the game end, which Groundskeeper usually doesn’t want to do against non-Groundskeeper decks.
To further explain the card and its nuances, we’re going to give some concrete tips using gameplay examples for context.
The more reliable the decks are, the more the split matters:
If both players play all their Groundskeepers every turn and Josephine gets 6 of them to Martin’s 4, her estates are worth as much as his Duchies and double-Duchy turns are worth almost as many points to her as double-Province turns are to him. She is in a much stronger endgame position.
When Choosing between 1 or more Groundskeeper(s) and Province (or something to get you a Province), weigh points gain against reliability:
Anna has no Groundskeepers, but bought the first Province last turn. Her opponent Destry hits $15 with three buys and considers his options.
If Destry only gets 3 Provinces to Anna’s 5 because he goes for Groundskeepers and she doesn’t, he needs 13 additional points to win. He probably needs at least 4 VP cards to win anyway, so he must have on average 2 or 3 (2.5) Groundskeepers in play across all his VP gains to win with a Duchy (instead of the Province), or an average of at least 4 in play per VP card to win with an Estate.
So what should he do? I have no idea, and neither do you.
Because it depends on a lot of context I haven’t given you-- how likely either deck is to stall, which/how many VP cards he expects to gain before Provinces empty, could she 3-pile if he lets her start her turn with a points lead.
Again, the minimum number of VP cards he’ll probably need to gain is 4, so if he can play all of his Groundskeepers every turn and still do that, buying 3 Groundskeepers will maximize his score, effectively gaining 12 points versus Province-Groundskeeper for 9 points.
If he will miss out on playing one of his Groundskeepers once or twice, it’s closer, but still slightly in favor of triple Groundskeeper to maximize score, and we get closer to Province-Duchy being best the less reliable/more “sloggy” his deck is (how unlikely he is to play the Groundskeepers).
With multiple VP card gains per turn, the Groundskeepers obviously look a lot better. We do some more Groundskeeper-favorable math, but again, weigh the possible points against how much harder the extra VP cards make it to keep playing our Groundskeepers.
Signs not to Go for Groundskeeper:
No single condition makes Groundskeeper ignorable. Rather, these are factors that make the card weaker and steer you away from it.
In an unreliable/”sloggy” deck with single VP gains per turn, or in the face of a viable rush to the game end, buying Groundskeepers is often a waste of time.
Single-gain games usually reward speed over point ceiling, playing away from Groundskeeper’s strengths.
Similarly, as mentioned before, a “megaturn” deck that empties provinces over the course of one or two turns can often outpace Groundskeeper’s potentially higher but more gradual scoring. Note that adding Groundskeepers doesn’t hurt that deck, but it doesn’t help build it faster.
Junking attacks. No deck likes being junked, but Groundskeeper strategies can suffer more, needing both reliability and multiple VP cards to maximize value. I would say Swamp Hag is particularly brutal, but honestly they all kinda put the screws to yioux about the same without strong trashing.
If you take nothing else from this, understand that we’re talking about specific situations where Groundskeeper is weak, and you need to look for reasons not to buy it-- most of the time it plays a pivotal role in the game’s outcome and shouldn’t be ignored.
