Possession Revisited
*DISCLAIMER*
I am not trying to convince anyone that Possession is a good card. To be brutally honest, it is a bad card. I have only used it in 25% of my games and although it was a key card in those games, it was ignorable for the most part in all other 75% of the games.
There are many opinions on Possession. These opinions range from the "Noob" thinking Possession is one of the most powerful cards to the "Veteran" thinking that it is underpowered. So why is there such a dichotomy when evaluating the strength of Possession?
I'll tell you why. Possession is a card that has the ability to cause a complete paradigm shift in both how a given kingdom is analyzed and how in practice it is played. The reason for players judging its strengths differently are based on a lack of understanding of how correctly utilize it in their deck and how to properly play against an opponent going for Possession.
Consider the following kingdom:
Pawn, Armory, Quarry, Golem, Bandit Camp, Haggler, Hunting Party, Border Village, Grand Market, King's CourtThat kingdom has the most savvy engine builders salivating as they start to think of how awesome it is going to be to play that game. You have +Action, +Draw, King's Court, Grand Market, Haggler etc... There is everything present for this deck to snowball and become a massive engine behemoth. Let's look at the next kingdom.
Pawn, Armory, Quarry, Golem, Bandit Camp, Haggler, Hunting Party, Border Village, Grand Market, Possession Oh great, look at all of those engine cards, this is gonna be a sweet deck, right? Well, there is Possession. Hmmmmm, Possession. Well, I can still build the engine, right? Possession is slow to get because you need $6P, so the engine should outpace it. Wrong, the Possession deck will build to the point of playing 2-3 Possession per turn. Your sexy engine that runs through the deck every turn doesn't look so good anymore as your opponent mooches VP after VP from your deck into his.
The previous kingdoms are quite a dramatic example of how the single card of Possession affects the analysis of an entire kingdom but the point still stands. Traditional rules no longer apply when playing games with Possession.
Before moving on I want to focus on the 75% of games when Possession is not a good purchase. In a vacuum, Possession does very poorly against standard big money. The reason is the opportunity costs associated with the Potion. By the time the Possession player is able to obtain a Possession and play said Possession a BM player will already have been greening. This makes future hands less likely to be Province and the lead that the BM player has already obtained will be hard to beat. Their deck will have an extra Potion and a Possession which in themselves are dead cards for purchasing Provinces also tend to lead to less Gold. Possession is poor in slog games where your opponents will have poor hands. This speaks for itself. Using Possession results in a large loss of tempo. You need to buy a Potion and then you need to buy the Possession. Depending on the strength of the engine going for Possession could be the difference between having a functional engine and not having a functional engine. As I'll get into more later, Possession and engine games have a very strange juxtaposition associated with them.
So when is Possession good? The following statements serve as a brief highlight which I'll go into more depth.
1.) There is little opportunity cost to obtaining Possession
2.) You can Possess your opponent multiple times per turn or at a minimum once per turn.
3.) Your have the ability to disrupt your opponents deck
4.) You opponent is using TfB like Apprentice, Remodel, etc.
5.) You can move things from your opponent deck to your own vis Ambassador or Masquerade
1.) Opportunity costs is related to the act of getting Possession. In order to obtain Possession you need a Potion and then you need a hand of $6P. Possession improves when you have other Alchemy cards to gain or you can purchase your Potion such that you are almost guaranteed to hit $6P the first time it is in your hand. If you ever purchase a Potion solely for Possession and don't get $6P, that is probably an indication either (a) your deck was not ready for the Potion or (b) you should have ignored Possession altogether.
2.) Being able to play multiple Possessions per turn requires a couple of different things. First, you need a village or pseudo village. Second, you usually need some sort of trashing or good sifting. Obtaining a deck of this nature inherently puts you in a good position as your opponent gets 1 turn off of his own deck for every 2-3 turns that you mooch. Simple math tells us that you will be better off than your opponent.
3.) Disruption comes in the form of messing up what your opponent planned to do or thwarting future hands from being good. Planning comes in the form of things like Tactician. Nothing is worse than discarding your last hand only to have your opponent steal your next. Other disruptions often come from discard based actions. Things like Minion, Cartographer and Warehouse leave a lot of cards in the discard pile. Being able to cycle through the deck and then force a reshuffle can give your opponent 1-2 hands of worthless Copper/Estates. Taking coin tokens or not putting Alchemists back on top are also small ways of disruption.
4.) Trash for benefit is so much better for the Possessor due to having no repercussions. These cards are balanced on them being removed from your deck. The fact that they are not gives them all a huge power spike when you are using them via Possession.
5.) Ambassador and Masquerade are huge liabilities in Possession games. Passing and gifting from the supply mean that a single play can result in a 12 or 18 VP swing if Provinces were the card involved. Engine cards can also be passed.
In most kingdoms, Possession can be successfully ignored due to not of the above being viable options. You will be correctly playing a vast majority of boards (75% on my count) by simply ignoring Possession. However, on the boards correctly suited for Possession you must be ready to either play Possession or counter-play Possession.
Opponent Goes Possession Without Strong (1) or (2) SupportSo your opponent gets a questionable Potion and decides to go for Possession. You don't think it's right but you fear that he'll get lucky and poach your Province hands. In this situation you are right in ignoring Possession but that does not mean that your play will stay the same. In these circumstances you want to green a bit earlier and harder. A rough rule of thumb for this is to green hard (i.e. Province/Duchy whenever possible) the shuffle before he Possesses you for the first time. You can judge when that will be based on the state of his deck and when he first gets Possession.
The MirrorPossession mirror matches are one of the most strange things in all of Dominion. Conventional wisdom is thrown out of the window. In fact, I think most people have the following knowledge of mirror Possession matches.
So why are people clueless about Possession mirror matches. I'll tell you why. Instead of building up your deck you need to build down your deck. That's the big catch 22, you need to build up your deck to get to Possession but at the same time you don't want your opponent to be able to utilize the greater efficiency of your deck. The consequence of this is insanely early greening with subsequent hard stalling. In order to prevent your opponent from mooching VP using your deck you green before they can with the knowledge that if they continue to build you will just Possess them to get points. Games like this often stall out with Duchies and Estates being grabbed left and right. Assuming that your opponent does build more and you are greening like a Mad Man, you need to ensure that your cycling is still present. Because your opponent will win if you green so hard that you are consistently missing Possession turns.
Sample KingdomsChapel, Pawn, Pearl Diver, Secret Chamber, Fortune Teller, Village, Watchtower, Cutpurse, Spice Merchant, PossessionThere is Chapel and Possession. Both my opponent and myself go for trashing via Spice Merchant and Chapel followed by Possession. My opponent builds for one more turn than myself allowing me to mooch a Province, we both get multiple Possession in our decks and then start hitting Duchies and Estates. My slim lead from the Provinces forces my opponent to build more as Pawns are emptied for the 3rd pile.
Below is another strange kingdom involving Possession. It has Goons, but there are also no villages so you just get a single terminal each turn.
Herbalist, Scrying Pool, Forager, Masterpiece, Caravan, Mine, Mint, Goons, Hoard, PossessionMy opponents deck gets better than mine, but a combination of enough Scrying Pools and Caravan allow me win despite my "worse" deck. This was perhaps one of the most confusing games I've played in a long time. My first terminal was actually not Possession but Goons. After picking up a few points from Goons I realized that my opponent was going to have a better deck than mine. I switch from a Goons being my terminal to Possession being my terminal. When he mistakenly picks up 4 Foragers I am able to use them more efficiently and end the game in a 3-pile.
Chancellor, Village, Farming Village, Silk Road, Spice Merchant, Trader, Hunting Party, Mystic, Fairgrounds, PossessionWith no plus buy other than Spice Merchant my deck gets to multi-Possession turns by turn 12 and overcomes a HP/Chancellor BM strategy.
SummaryPossession is still not a good card. It is also a card that you will probably ignore most of the time. Despite that fact when Possession is viable it changes the game unlike any other card. To correctly play Possession in those situations you must first know when it is viable and second, know how to approach the mirror assuming your opponent also knows Possession is viable. Doing so will give you the best chance of winning those few games where Possession is available and actually viable.
Comments, questions and critiques welcome.
