Print

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

[vandergus]

Following my first post in which Theory graciously tells me to be more humble if I really want to get better at Dominion, I submit a beating.

Game log

Kingdom

2$ Hamlet	3$ Familiar
4$ Bishop Gardens Scout Tournament	5$ Embassy Ill-Gotten Gains Tactician Haggler

Opening: I'm a little overwhelmed by all of the options in this kingdom. There are a lot of strong cards. I've been reading some bits about Ill-Gotten Gains recently so I look for strategies surrounding that. Bishop looks like it could solve one of the problems with Ill-Gotten Gains, in that it's not a card that you really want in your deck. With the Bishop, I can trash it for some decent VP. I plan on ending the game on piles, Ill-Gotten Gains, Curses, and ... something else. My opponent (mathguy) opens with Silver/Tournament.

Turns 4-6: I get to buy Ill-Gotten Gains for three straight turns, which I feel is a better than average start. Mathguy buys a Tactician and has a Province for his Tournament by Turn 6. Uh oh.

Turn 14: The Curse pile is emptied when I buy an Ill-Gotten Gains, but there are still 3 left to buy. My opponent got a Followers out of the prize pile and managed to give me a few Curses of my own.

Turn 15: Here's where I start to fall apart. I'm still not too far behind on VP but I'm really not sure what piles to empty to finish the game. My hand this turn is Copper, Copper, Ill-Gotten Gains (discarded down to 3 due to Followers). I buy an Estate. At the end of the game, mathguy asks why I didn't go after Gardens and this seems like the obvious place to start doing that. I could have played Ill-Gotten Gains for the extra copper and started rushing Gardens. This would have kept me much closer in VP than going after a pile like Hamlet, which is what I ended up doing.

Turn 21:
mathguy (38 points): 4 Province, 2 Duchy, 2 Tactician, 1 Bishop, 1 Tournament, 3 Silver, 6 Estate, 7 Hamlet, 6 Copper, 2 Curse, 1 Followers, 1 Princess
vandergus (25 points): 1 Province, 3 Ill-Gotten Gains, 2 Bishop, 3 Silver, 5 Estate, 3 Hamlet, 10 Copper, 2 Curse

Looking at our final decks, I notice that mathguy was able to trash a few curses using my Bishop, which may be a problem with the Bishop + Ill-Gotten Gains combo.

So did Bishop + Ill-Gotten Gains have a chance with better play on my part? Or is it bound to get dominated by Tournament + Tactician? How do you go about choosing the best piles to drain when you're not going after Provinces?

[hobo386]

Honestly, bishop+IGG seems like a bad idea to me, especially if the other guy is going for something like tournament where having a trimmed deck helps.
IGG is only good because you can spam curses really quickly, then fill up on Duchies while your opponent is trying to recover.  Bishop slows you down (if only by a few turns), and it speeds up cleaning the opponent's deck.  I don't see it working.

Personally, I would probably pick up a haggler, then buy IGG, getting tournaments and maybe one hamlet with any extra gains from Haggler ($8 = Province + IGG) (And I'm not sure if Gold+IGG is better than IGG + something else...).  If you can, grab princess (You're gonna have tons of cash, might as well use it) or followers (mostly for the handsize reduce).

On the other hand, an Embassy strategy is probably pretty strong on this board, but I haven't gotten a good enough sense on embassy to know whether or not it would be useful.

[kn1tt3r]

The thing is, Bishop sort of anti-synergises with cursing "attacks", because you let the opponent trash the gained curses again... However, trash for benefit cards are really good with IGG, I'd only prefer others over Bishop (like Salvager for example)...

[DG]

This is probably a reactive set where you have to play to your opponent's strategy and deck size. If you expand too fast looking  for gardens then perhaps your opponent can shrink with a bishop and punish you with familiars. If you use a use a bishop to shrink then perhaps your opponent will use that to accelerate their deck massively faster. If you prepare for duchies you could lose on provinces, and visa versa. In that respect I can't give much advice other than to look to the tactician as it maximises your hamlets, familiars, hagglers, bishops, and tournaments.

[WanderingWinder]

I expect IGG+Gardens is pretty darn strong here. Yeah, you'll have a few IGGs to buy that aren't dishing curses, but you end up with a massive deck relatively fast, and those gardens get super-powered.

[philosophyguy]

Familiar makes IGG less of a clear winner because it's likely that there will be IGGs left when the curses run out (which is exactly what happened). Bishop is a great counter to Gardens (your opponent can't use the Bishop's trashing bonus without harming his Gardens efforts, and you can buy Gardens and convert them into 3VPs with Bishop to block his Gardens rush). So, my guess is that neither Gardens nor IGG is going to be the dominant strategy, but it's a very tough set to evaluate.

[vandergus]

Hmm. A lot of different feedback here. There doesn't seem to be one consensus strategy for a kingdom like this. I went back a played a few solitaire games with the Gardens + Ill-Gotten Gains strategy and I typically emptied three piles by ~turn 22. Is that fast enough? That's still with a Bishop/Silver opening, a Silver/Silver opening might speed it up a little while reducing the total VP score. Of course, that's with no interaction, which this board has a lot of. Familiar would weaken IGG but they still help power up Gardens even after the curses are empty.

[jonts26]

If you want to go IGG/Gardens, you do not want a bishop. First off, you get less benefit from the bishop points because you are weakening your gardens. Second, you are allowing your opponent to trash (assuming he isnt going gardens as well) which only speeds up the game for him. I suspect with that help to your opponent, 22 turns is too slow.

[hobo386]

Hmm. A lot of different feedback here. There doesn't seem to be one consensus strategy for a kingdom like this. I went back a played a few solitaire games with the Gardens + Ill-Gotten Gains strategy and I typically emptied three piles by ~turn 22. Is that fast enough? That's still with a Bishop/Silver opening, a Silver/Silver opening might speed it up a little while reducing the total VP score. Of course, that's with no interaction, which this board has a lot of. Familiar would weaken IGG but they still help power up Gardens even after the curses are empty.

It definitely isn't the simplest kingdom out there.  There's tons of strategies that here that would clearly dominate on other boards.

There's the obvious IGG rush, that you can augment with hagglers, gardens, and the like.  Familiars can put a dent in it, but if they waste time on cursing, you can just beef up your deck with more cards while they try to catch up on points.

One one hand, Embassy + Big Money is an incredibly quick deck, and is fairly resilient to cursing.

As DG pointed out, Tactician combos well with a bunch of other cards in the deck.  Using hamlet, haggler, tournament, bishop and familiar, you can have some amazing turns (I'm still gonna say throwing in an embassy might make this run even smoother, depending on your opponent's strategy).

Looking back at it, I'd say knowing the proper strategy is a bit luck based, and a bit based on your opponents strategy.  I'm gonna test out Haggler + IGG vs Embassy + BM now, just to see how that turns out.

[hobo386]

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201112/04/game-20111204-134520-d56a571e.html
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201112/04/game-20111204-135553-87bba26e.html

Here's two logs Of me trying to play the game out with myself (just try to ignore the platinums and colonies in the supply).

I played "poopoo" just trying to get a huge deck and piledrive IGG and gardens, picking up a province along the way.

In the first game, I tried to counter it with an embassy deck, but that petered out after picking up a few provinces.
The second game, I tried to build a complex engine, but it collapsed under it's own weight.  I played it rather poorly, and I'm sure someone could do it much better, but I'd probably do just as bad trying that in a real match.  (Winning probably involves picking up a few IGG or familiars yourself).

One thing I realized is that with my extra gains from haggler, hamlet is probably much better than tournament for the IGG player.  Chances are the IGG player doesn't want too many provinces since they normally want to end the game quickly, and Hamlets let you clutter up your deck with coppers.  Even better, if your opponents send curses your way, you have an easy third pile to empty.

[jimjam]

I tried a couple games against myself and it looks like if you open Potion your opponent can counter with IGG and Gardens pretty well before you can use Bishop to much effect.

[hobo386]

Another thought:  If your opponent does an IGG rush, with the intention of winning off of gardens, you could always do a bishop + gardens deck.

Pros
- Since you'll still have trouble trashing all the curses + gardens, any leftovers will still be worth 2-3 points.
- It limits the scoring options of the IGG player.
- If the IGG player slows down his strategy, you might end up with a reasonably clean deck.
Cons
- If the IGG player is smart, they could probably counter it by getting 5-8 IGG, getting a healthy lead in points, then finishing off the IGG pile
- All the curses from IGG might make even getting to $4 difficult
- If the IGG player notices it ahead of time, they can stop before they clog their deck, and then pursue a strong province-based strategy.

(I tried this out, and the Bishop player got 6 gardens by the time the other player emptied IGG, so an IGG player DOES have to watch out for this).

[Fabian]

It seems to me that just buying Gardens is a decent counter to an IGG rush. What's the IGG player going to do, finish emptying the IGG/Curse piles and lose instantly? It seems reasonably likely to me that what would happen is the IGG player would stop the "rush" and start competing for the Gardens, and when that pile is bought out, competition for the IGG pile would continue, and whoever won the Gardens war probably has a pretty big edge. I dunno if this seems reasonable, probably need to think about it some more.

[hobo386]

It seems to me that just buying Gardens is a decent counter to an IGG rush. What's the IGG player going to do, finish emptying the IGG/Curse piles and lose instantly? It seems reasonably likely to me that what would happen is the IGG player would stop the "rush" and start competing for the Gardens, and when that pile is bought out, competition for the IGG pile would continue, and whoever won the Gardens war probably has a pretty big edge. I dunno if this seems reasonable, probably need to think about it some more.

As my bishop+gardens example pointed out, you're right that attacking the gardens pile seems to be the best viable counter to IGG on this board.  Going straight for the garden pile without any trashing or cursing will leave you with a deck that can barely buy copper though.  Using a strategy involving tactician or embassy might work, but I think the real best bet is to mirror the Haggler+IGG+Hamlet Strategy, but to start picking up gardens before your opponent (dropping haggler could potentially be better if you're both rushing IGG, but my gut says to keep it in).