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[chwhite]

I'm imagining the argument that it is a low-variance card is going to go something like "ignoring it optimally like you often should, you'll prevail substantially more often against worse players who don't know better."

This is exactly what I mean when I claim it's low-variance.  It's likely quite a bit more constrained than what WW means, though.

I don't think Possession is no-variance, not at all!  Just less than many other cards.

[jonts26]

I'm imagining the argument that it is a low-variance card is going to go something like "ignoring it optimally like you often should, you'll prevail substantially more often against worse players who don't know better."

This is exactly what I mean when I claim it's low-variance.  It's likely quite a bit more constrained than what WW means, though.

I don't think Possession is no-variance, not at all!  Just less than many other cards.

I use variance in the statistical sense that it measures the spread of expected values. Low vs. high variance does not mean good vs bad strategy. In terms of dominion, a low variance strategy is one which gives fairly consistent results over many games. If I run a smithy/BM strategy, I expect fairly consistent results game to game, which is to say I can get a 4th province by turn 14. It might be 12 or 16. but the spread isnt too far. If I run an unsupported treasure map strategy, the spread is much greater, since there is a lot of luck associated with when/if the maps collide.

[rod-]

The variance on possession seems to me to be far higher than most cards, if only because it's not terribly unlikely that you will be able to first cast the card 3-4 shuffles later than your opponent because they had the good fortune of possessing you every time you'd drawn the card, even if you'd bought it on the exact same turn they bought it.

Alternatively, your opponent may possess you every time you draw a 'do nothing' turn and you can laugh your way to victory. 

The EV of a possession, in terms of coins or vp, is equal to the EV of your opponent's 5card hand, which can vary from anywhere from 0 to dozens, and even if the avg of that 5 card hand is 8+, the deviation on it can be rather absurd.  The card can be either low or high variance, depending on deck composition, but when compared to other similarly-costed cards (between expand and platinum?  More or less +4-4.5coin would be the proper power level) it's almost always going to be swingier. 

[rrenaud]

Alternatively, your opponent may possess you every time you draw a 'do nothing' turn and you can laugh your way to victory. 

The EV of a possession, in terms of coins or vp, is equal to the EV of your opponent's 5card hand

To a first approximation, maybe.  But cards like witch, goons, monument, etc, push the EV of one of their turns for them higher than the EV of one of their turns for you.  Cards like apprentice, remodel, masquerade, etc do the opposite.

An interesting part of possession for me is deciding when those risky +EV for them cards are worth going for early, because they speed up my deck enough to be worth the risk.

[ackack]

I use variance in the statistical sense that it measures the spread of expected values. Low vs. high variance does not mean good vs bad strategy.

Right, it needn't. But what it is that we're measuring the spread of expected values in is likely not universally agreed on. With the discussion of strategies, one way you could measure it is to argue that TrueSkill predicts a mean chance for player A to win the game. Let's say player A is better and so is favored substantially. Cards that introduce enough luck in the game to push the result closer to 50/50 likely introduce variance around that expected mean. (I'm pretty sure that's correct, but I'm not expert enough to know for sure off the top of my head and I'm too lazy to prove it right now.) Cards that have the effect of making the better player more likely to lose are often colloquially referred to as "high-variance." So I could see that sort of argument being reasonable and not totally at odds with the actual technical definition.

The sort of thing rod- is talking about is what I think a lot of people mean when they say Possession is high-variance - there's a lot of turn to turn swinginess in its inherent value. That fits well with another card that I think is generally considered high-variance, King's Court. What I'm a bit curious about is that I feel that sort of thing is also what makes Swindler, WW's example of the pinnacle of variance, a high-variance card. Again, anticipating the argument, presumably you say that you can't really avoid Swindler, and because you're locked into that with no way around it that's just that.

I feel on both of these sorts of accounts that Possession is pretty high variance. Yes, there are things you can do to make yourself more Possession resistant, or to make your deck a better Possession playing deck. It doesn't completely remove skill from the game by any means. But I do think that in games where both players have it, the sampling from both decks really does equalize things a lot.

[ftl]

What makes Swindler high-variance, it seems, would be

1) Based on shuffle luck, it can have a huge effect. If I swindle your first five-cost card into a duchy (or swindle away your potion in a game with critical potion-cost cards, etc), whereas your swinder hits my estate (discarding it from the top of my deck and replacing it with an estate, helping me instead of hurting me), that can make or break a game.
2) It comes out immediately. You can't try to "be better" than the other guy by getting to Swindler first, and you can't really try to prepare your deck to be hit by a swindler, because it's an opening card. Comes out too early for you to really do anything about it besides hope that your swindler hits better cards than theirs.
 

The way variance seems to be typically used here is on a whole-game level. In a game, usually the better player is going to win. However, cards that make the game more random will tend to make the worse player win more often - hence, increasing the variance in the result. That's not necessarily the same as cards that have a very different expected value from turn to turn. (KC, for example, can facilitate *very* different turns - you might use a KC->KC start to have a 100-point mega-turn, or you might draw it dead. But typically, since setting up the KC->KC mega-turn takes a lot of setup, it's the better player that will get their KC-KC->support set up first, making the variance in the game result due to the presence of KC pretty low. )

I'm definitely looking forward to that article WW mentioned, or to playing some Possession games with people... it feels to me like Possession is high-variance in all those respects; you might get a province turn or you might discard a 2-coin hand for them (and vice versa), but apparently better players than I disagree, so there's something I'm missing.

[Fangz]

The variance on possession seems to me to be far higher than most cards, if only because it's not terribly unlikely that you will be able to first cast the card 3-4 shuffles later than your opponent because they had the good fortune of possessing you every time you'd drawn the card, even if you'd bought it on the exact same turn they bought it.

Alternatively, your opponent may possess you every time you draw a 'do nothing' turn and you can laugh your way to victory. 

The EV of a possession, in terms of coins or vp, is equal to the EV of your opponent's 5card hand, which can vary from anywhere from 0 to dozens, and even if the avg of that 5 card hand is 8+, the deviation on it can be rather absurd.  The card can be either low or high variance, depending on deck composition, but when compared to other similarly-costed cards (between expand and platinum?  More or less +4-4.5coin would be the proper power level) it's almost always going to be swingier.

IMHO, the real variance of possession is that it breaks the fundamental probabilistics of a card based game. This being - in normal play, you'd expect dominion hands to even out. If you draw a bad hand of provinces, this means these provinces are out of the way for the next hand, so you will have one or more good hands to compensate. However, if some of your turns get stolen, then you won't see that compensatory hand. Some of the time, the possession will steal your good hands, and leave you with junk. Some of the time, the possession will steal your bad hands and give you a good hand to play. This greatly increases variance.

Or maybe I'm just bitter because this happened to me.

The real reason I hate possession though is how slow it is to play, and how it's psychologically painful in that you draw a really good hand and think about all the great things you will be doing with it during the opponent's turn and then at the last minute the arsehole opponent plays possession and instead of having a nice turn making progress you have to endure watching that bastard for the next few minutes. And that's just no fun at all. Minion is almost as bad.

[ftl]

Yeah, I've definitely had some of those.

1) I draw a hand with three green cards in it. I do nothing useful with it.
2) I draw a great hand with all my good stuff! It gets possessed.
3) I draw a hand with three green cards in it. I do nothing useful with it.

Really annoying.

[Fangz]

You know, maybe a good nerf to possession would be to allow the victim to choose to discard his hand before being possessed?

[Thisisnotasmile]

You know, maybe a good nerf to possession would be to allow the victim to choose to discard his hand before being possessed?

A choice of "let my opponent play a 5 card hand" no matter how bad it may be will never be chosen when the other option is "let my opponent play a 0 card hand".

[Deadlock39]

I assume he means discard and redraw...

[ftl]

You know, maybe a good nerf to possession would be to allow the victim to choose to discard his hand before being possessed?

A choice of "let my opponent play a 5 card hand" no matter how bad it may be will never be chosen when the other option is "let my opponent play a 0 card hand".

I think the intent was "Discard your hand and draw a hand of 5 new cards". Still, it would change around a *lot* of the interaction with things like Council Room, top-deck attacks, and so on.

It would be a pretty fundamental change to Possession, not a minor one. As it is, you're getting what is, on average, and average hand of your opponent. If there was a "discard-and-redraw" step before the Possession, you'd be getting a below-average hand, since they have the chance to discard a good one. 

[Thisisnotasmile]

I understood the intent of the comment. I just took it literally to create a stupid reply to what was, in all honesty, a stupid suggestion. Why on earth would the most expensive (non-VP although you could argue $6P is worth more than $11) card in the game need nerfing when it's really not that powerful to begin with? Yeah, Possession's painful to be hit with if you've built a deck of trash-for-benefit cards or Ambassadors. Build a deck to defend against it properly and your opponent will be getting very little value out of the card he's spent 3 deck-cycles getting in play and even bought a dead card for. "I don't like this card so therefore we should do this to it" is such a stupid argument.

I don't like Ambassador games. Maybe a good nerf of Ambassador would be to make the person who played Ambassador gain 3 curses (on their Island mat, of course, so they can't Ambassador them to their opponent later).

[Fangz]

I understood the intent of the comment. I just took it literally to create a stupid reply to what was, in all honesty, a stupid suggestion. Why on earth would the most expensive (non-VP although you could argue $6P is worth more than $11) card in the game need nerfing when it's really not that powerful to begin with? Yeah, Possession's painful to be hit with if you've built a deck of trash-for-benefit cards or Ambassadors. Build a deck to defend against it properly and your opponent will be getting very little value out of the card he's spent 3 deck-cycles getting in play and even bought a dead card for. "I don't like this card so therefore we should do this to it" is such a stupid argument.

I don't like Ambassador games. Maybe a good nerf of Ambassador would be to make the person who played Ambassador gain 3 curses (on their Island mat, of course, so they can't Ambassador them to their opponent later).

Heh, okay, this is a derail, but certainly such a nerfing would come with a reduction to the cost of possession. The redraw ability would reduce the average value of a possession hand (assuming it's used appropriately, of course. Many players don't know what the 'average' value of their hand is), but it would also reduce the variance of possession and the psychological pain of it. Another possibility is to compensate the discard by drawing a 6 card hand for the redraw.

But yeah this belongs elsewhere. As it is, I'll continue vetoing possession every chance I get.

[Kahryl]

People have always rejected playing with Possession and they always will until we get a "Play match with these opponents with a board which is unknown until we have all agreed to play the game" function.

If this mode existed I would use it every time