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151

Game Reports / Mountebank ignored with no counters.

« on: April 24, 2012, 07:02:55 pm »

Both me, and my opponent, AVeryHappyFish, ignore mountebank do to the sheer speed on the engines involved Tactician/conspirator/ironworks/blackmarket/throneroom being the most important components. My engine charges slightly quicker than his so I win, but it was fascinating seeing a game where mountebank was ignored without any sort of counter.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120418-193409-d3bf1887.html

152

Game Reports / Win despite 8/2 curse split

« on: April 24, 2012, 06:52:28 pm »

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/24/game-20120424-154458-27953dd8.html
A large dollop of luck/governor and secret chamber suffice to let me squeak a win by.

153

Dominion Articles / Re: Throne Room

« on: April 24, 2012, 06:48:01 pm »

Fair, heavy trashing can also suffice, BM filled with cantrips though, does imply there are cantrips.

154

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Discussion on non-random game selection and TrueSkill ranking

« on: April 24, 2012, 02:18:58 pm »

Certain players find certain Kingdom's unfun though. I personally would rather not play a kingdom which will devolve into a possession/destroy your deck game. Even games which I often will play, I am occasionally not in the mood for, Sea Hag/BM slogs can be frustrating and if I only have a limited amount of time to play I'd rather play a kingdom which looks interesting. I understand that being excessively choosy about kingdoms often keeps people from seeing certain aspects of the game, but I suspect the majority of top players here are uninterested in playing Warehouse/TM games, and it's not obvious to me why games which feel (and, to be fair, are) swingy to us can be derided, while games which feel swingy to newer players (i.e. possession, tournament, sea hag) should be suffered through.

155

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Throne Room

« on: April 24, 2012, 02:12:22 pm »

just posted an article on it.

156

Dominion Articles / Throne Room

« on: April 24, 2012, 02:11:45 pm »

Throne Room, like Treasure map and Fool's gold, is a card which works exceptionally well when it combo's and quite mediocrely when it doesn't. Unlike treasure map and fool's gold, however, what throne-room can combine with varies from board to board and is, in general quite a broad range of cards. Also unlike Treasure map and fool's gold, throne room is invariably a bad opening card.

Throne-room is essentially a very weird village with a bonus (or, if you prefer, an of inverse shanty-town with a bonus), if it doesn't hit you are frustrated, if it does hit (it was worth the price.
   
Note that throne-room applied to even a worthless pearl diver, effectively acts like a village with a moderate bonus (probably one of the stronger 4 cost ones if it was a card) (look at the bottom card of your deck, draw either it or the top 1 + 2 actions). When throne-room hits pawn, you can get a peddler benefit (by choosing +1 action +2 cards, + 1 coin), or use a whole bunch of added flexibility. When throne-room hits a stackable attack (cursers/rabble/noble-brigand/torturer/etc) the end result is stupidly powerful, when throneroom hits a terminal drawer, you can draw an absurd amount of cards. When throneroom hits a good cantrip, you get a village with some very nice extras (for lab you get a level 2 city, for tournament/treasury you get a bazaar). With scheme on the board you can even get a permanent village with endgame explosion potential by constantly top decking throneroom/scheme.

Suffice it to say that if your throneroom hits it is worth it, this implies that if you are going for an engine already, throne room is a good buy once you have a few components ( 3/4 non-throne-room actions is sufficient. ). Now throne-room, like all villages, acts as an engine enabler, if you were already marginal about going for an engine, throne-room makes it worth going for one, village/draw engines gain extra viability when thronerooom is on the board (though they still want either a strong attack or +buy). If there is a stackable attack you can make an engine out of, it is almost certainly worth buying throne-rooms and add them to your engine. A throne roomed witch/mountebank is one of the harshest things in dominion and even the ordinarily maligned noble brigand/saboteur can prove deadly when stacked.

Certain specific cards should immediately make you consider throne room, bridge, which becomes much more potent when stacked, is naturally enhanced by throne room. Scheme can be throne roomed in order to create a permanent extra village per hand or a guaranteed throne room in the endgame. though all attacks benefit from throne room, rabble and torturer, which both offer big draws and are better when stacked are exceptionally fond of it.

Throne-room can be so powerful that certain card are specifically immune from throne-rooms benefits. Haggler, princess, highway, and goons, while all still giving some benefit when throne roomed, all have in play clauses that negate there most potent effects (extra cards, lower prices, extra vp per buy) from being doubled. These cards anti-synergize with throne-room and in general, are not it's best targets (though throne-room can still thrive when used on there support cards)

So when should you not go for throne room? Well, when engine potential is not there. If there are no can-trips present, throne room is nearly always a mistake (very heavy trashing can make it viable). If there is no +buy /strong attack, you should stick to big money X. Throne-room acts as a powerful engine enabler, if there's no reasonable engine to be enabled   the high frequency with which you will draw throne-room dead make it not worth your while.

Works with
Stackable attacks
Scheme
Bridge
Minion
Monument
Hunting Party
Talisman (gain extra cheap actions
Engines in general

Conflicts with
Goons

Tournament (a parried tournament is no good when throne-roomed, you are unlikely to have two provinces in hand at a time, and princess/followers are worse when throned)
Haggler
Highway
Fool's gold
Hoard
Militia
Treasure map
Ghost Ship (though being ghost-shipped allows you to move an unusable Throne Room)
Big money games in general

157

Dominion Isotropic / Re: Discussion on non-random game selection and TrueSkill ranking

« on: April 24, 2012, 01:23:22 pm »

I think people are forgetting that the primary purpose of the ranking system is to give a rough approximation of skill in order for similarly skilled players to play each other. The ranking system, as is, has larger imperfections when used as a metric to judge true ability. (note that for people who are active and have played 1000+ games, the current subtraction of 3 times the standard deviation is not useful as a measure of skill).

Beyond this, my impression is that people don't (or, perhaps more accurately ,shouldn't) judge the skill of top players solely by ranking but rather by their skill, judgement, and general ability to win. WW is a better player than me because he's more likely to beat me.  (we have an 8/11 record which granted isn't that bad, but still I feel like he outplays me more than the record implies). Rankings have enough inherent flaws that other means (for example, tournaments) are a far better way to determine skill at top levels.

158

Dominion Articles / Re: Counter Vault-Ambassador

« on: April 18, 2012, 02:32:23 pm »

In a 4/3 opening it's unclear whether you will buy an ambassador on your second hand after the first round.

159

Game Reports / Re: fishing village, councilroom, quarry, bridge, ghost ship game

« on: April 18, 2012, 02:30:24 pm »

mis-think, thanks for that.

160

Game Reports / fishing village, councilroom, quarry, bridge, ghost ship game

« on: April 18, 2012, 02:13:33 pm »

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/18/game-20120418-110626-bca911ff.html
when 5/10 cards are game changers and 3/10 are viable major helpers... the game gets ridiculous.
I'm fairly sure we both misplayed here, given how quick this set should be and given that the game lasted 16 turns, there has to be some ridiculous mega-turn potential going on here. The game consisted (fairly clearly) of us creating dueling engines based on the above core. I'm seriously confused, when I run into this type of engine I just have no idea how to fully milk it's power, how do you go about determing buy order and quantities in this kind of game? 

161

Dominion Articles / Counter Vault-Ambassador

« on: April 18, 2012, 12:23:22 pm »

Ambassador has two uses. It effectively trashes your deck while simultaneously junking your opponents decks. The power of the card is in getting both of these uses to activate simultaneously. The trashing offered by ambassador is too slow to be effective, and the attack, in general is much weaker than cursers or hard discarders (torturer/militia/ghost ship), being bloated with extra copper's and estates is nowhere near as bad as being stuffed with curses. Thus in order to fight ambassador it suffices to counter one of the aspects. Vault does this very effectively by turning a deck filled with junk into one filled with provinces and duchies. A single gold (or 2 silvers) is all that is necessary for vault to get a province. This means that estates (and, if your opponent uses the ambassador/curse combo, late curses) instead of destroying your buying power, are merely a minor inconvenience. Vault's downside of allowing your opponent to cycle through there own junk with a 2 for 1 discard becomes much more insignifigant when your opponent has gotten rid of the mediocre cards in there deck of there own accord.

This combo, is, however, not sufficient reason in and of itself to ignore ambassador. If a strong counter to Vault (i.e., a discard attack) is present ambassador can lead to that's counter being played (almost) every turn, turning your vault deck dead. Similarly if a sufficiently strong engine is  present (+buy is a necessity) ambassador's pseudo-trashing effecting may be worthwhile despite the weakened strength of the attack. However if neither a strong engine nor discard attacks are available Vault is sufficient reason to ignore ambassador.

When playing this combo, green significantly earlier than you otherwise would. With your deck filled with junk from your opponents ambassador, as well as Vault to mitigate the damage of the junk, greening hard becomes far less detrimental.

Sample game: in this game against WanderingWinder, we both ignore sea-hag (do to the presence of ambassador) and I ignore ambassador because of the presence of Vault, despite using ambassador/curse to get me 9 curses, my early VP lead proves insurmountable.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/18/game-20120418-072033-c9d06f03.html

162

Game Reports / Re: Noble Brigand Brigade

« on: April 17, 2012, 11:51:55 am »

I definitely did not see this coming and, as a result, think I didn't green quite as hard as I should have. Courtyard is possibly marginally better than smithy here (though, if so, really quite marginally). I think, if anything, I should have greened harder than I did. While reviewing the game log, I noticed there were several turns where I bought gold after WW's noble brigand assault was beginning to take place, those gold might have been better served as duchies, The main take away however has to be that Noble-brigand is absurdly powerful against relatively pure BM strategies especially (like most attacks) when stacked. In BM losing a silver hurts signifigantly, and losing a Gold hurts a ton and the fact that this happens with high frequency instantaneously (and your deck gains the benefits relatively quickly) seems to make noble-brigand actually successful in what thief attempted to be, a hard counter to BM.

163

Dominion General Discussion / Re: Possession

« on: April 16, 2012, 06:30:22 am »

so possession games essentially falls into 3 cases.
1. Too slow
    In the majority of games possession is simply too slow to have an effect on game play, in these types of games, aside from serving as a trap, possession is a card spot wasted (though, to be fair, no worse than, say, transmute or thief, or Forge, and being a trap does lead to the interesting problem of determiinng WHEN possession is a trap)
2. fast enough to be worth buying but not completely game warping
    These games possession is psychologically frustrating (in that people dislike the feeling of a good hand being stolen even more than they dislike the feeling of a good hand being discarded (i.e. I personally can still get irritated when my opponents minion hits my dream hand and gives me 2 coppers and 2 estates). Aside from the psychological frustration is the inevitable swinginess, on both sides, of how valuable the card is (it can range, from gaining a colony and you opponent losing that hand, too essentially helpful).
    Beyond that it is game warping in an interesting, and difficult to play manner, Green too hard and your opponent(s) will crush you, Green too soft and your opponent will reap the benefit of your deck AS well as that of ones own. In these games Posession leads to frustrations involving swinginess but, at least in my opinion, leads to enough game benefit to be a worthwhile card.
3. games where possession is completely and utterly dominant
       In any game where you can ramp up to >1 possession per turn relatively early the card changes the game beyond recognition, having a deck which can buy green becomes a BAD thing. People attempt to trash there economy to the point where they can no longer buy even estates, the game becomes silly. Worse, with good play on both sides, the game devolves into the behind player daring to buy enough coppers to gain an estate, and getting further behind for it. While some people may find this game play enjoyable, these types of games are, for the vast majority of players, degenerate in an unsatisfying way, these games also are as close as dominion gets to stalemates, where neither player wants to buy any cards.
The amount of games of type 3 (which are in some sense, analogous to KC/goons/masq pins but MUCH easier to pull off) compared to type 2 as well as the irritatingness of the increased swinginess in type 2 games is the primary issue that Possession suffers.

164

Help! / 8 provinces in 21 turns with mountebank and jack

« on: April 14, 2012, 12:26:10 am »

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201204/13/game-20120413-211658-099b3202.html
So I just lost a colony game with mountebank against a province rush. I would have thought mountebank is a sufficient counter to stop a province rush from being viable but I got crushed with my opponent getting 8(!) provinces in 21 turns. Is there something deep going on here?  Does jack so utterly fight single mountebank (aided by a single counting house and upgrade) that it is necessary to ignore colonies on this board? (my opponent claimed that farmland acted as an accelerant but this doesn't make much sense to me because whenever he got a farmland he could have bought a gold which should lead to more province buying power than farmland (which, in essence, acts like a silver).

165

Game Reports / Black Market deck

« on: April 12, 2012, 05:13:47 am »

So I've read the forums for a long time but haven't had a game worthy of posting.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120412-020107-873bd5ac.html

When given the choice between a hard to pull off engine and a BM strategy I ordinarily play Big money. When evaluating the game the lack of anything exceptionally powerful on the board (besides haggler) and the attack filled big money deck made some sort of haggler/black market/ some attack out of the market, seem the most viable. I do get to 3 provinces by turn 14 and did steal the Goons from the black market so I feel like I probably should win this. Thus my opponent creates an absolutely ridiculous (and desperately wanting fairgrounds) deck with over a dozen cards from the black market based on the synergy of menagerie, nobles, walled village, and a deck filled with single copies. Needless to say I get absolutely crushed.