This is where I pretty strongly disagree. I think there's an overwhelming amount of evidence that the prevailing common wisdom of "how to learn Dominion strategy" isn't working. There are too many mediocre players. The median skill on Iso is Level 12. That should not be the case if the prevailing teaching methods were effective. I consider myself a "very slightly above average" Dominion player. But according to the leaderboards, I am a somewhere around a "Top 10% player". And back when I was playing more regularly, I was a "Top 5% player".
It just doesn't make sense to me that after two months of playing, and using fairly simplistic heuristics, that I could somehow be THAT good. I highly doubt that I am some kind of prodigy or savant. My initial conclusion was simply that Dominion was a broken, solved game. But after playing several matches against elite, top-tier players, it became clear that this was not the case. So the only other reasonable conclusion I could think of was that the way people are learning Dominion skills right now is flawed and highly ineffective.
My method might not be the best one, but I think its a decent start at improving upon something that clearly isn't working.
It's just a thing people have to do inside their own heads. You have to pay attention to the games, identify what leads to wins and what leads to losses. Avoid the losing things and do the winning things. It's as dumb as that. This is what I did while levelling up (and still do today):
- Deride myself when I made obviously dumb play errors or missed auto-wins
- Learn the power cards/strategies and learn the roles that the different cards play in various decks
- Think about games after they're over (mock yourself if you played stupid). Consider decision points where you were unsure, if you had gone a different direction how would the outcome have been different?
- Honestly evaluate the probabilities of the outcomes in the game (Were my shuffles super lucky?)
- Practice extrapolating from past games to new boards. You can be both conservative and experimental! If everything on the board points to a particular engine, I would give it a try confident that it could beat BM, even if I hadn't played this particular engine.
- Actually read the logs from game reports (or your own logs). Turn by turn. Construct both players decks in your head and consider what each one is capable of at different points in the game. Always look for mistakes in their play.
- Watch WW play on Youtube, do all the stuff you do for your own games. Identify mistakes, think about the likelihood of outcomes. Think about how you would open on the boards. If he says something is terrible but he loses to it, think about whether it's actually terrible. Maybe you'll learn something that even a pro isn't seeing.
- Go for Duke. When I started on isotropic, going for Duke was often an auto-win in the upper 20s/low 30s levels. It was really weird. Like playing the bots today.
All those people who suck at Dominion don't suck because "common wisdom" about how to improve is bad. They suck because they aren't trying to get better at Dominion. Winning isn't their focus. They don't change how they are playing. They continue to pick strategies and build their decks in pseudo random fashion, either based on the cards they like or who knows what (maybe the weather?). Many of those vast masses probably aren't exposed to "conventional" Domininion strategy tips (or Dominion Strategy) at all. You can read hilarious posts by some of these people on Reddit, BGG, and occasionally on these very forums. They are stubborn about what strategies are good, but they haven't got a clue, and they won't change.
These people aren't committed to winning, and that's perfectly okay, they should play in whatever way gives them enjoyment. But it's not right to hold them up as evidence of some failed teaching by Dominion Strategy. Some people are not willing to do the mental work necessary to improve.
Your heuristics are a mixed bag of good and bad advice, but someone who starts out with them can of course get better if they pay attention and learn the cases where they work or don't work. Which is exactly what you've done I'm sure. There's no other way to improve. When I started playing on iso I more or less instantly reached upper 20s level. But I wasn't magic either, I just tried to win! It took a lot more games to reach the top. Plenty of people have reached high levels of play without using your heuristics at all (some faster than you and some slower). It's way more likely that the important factor is yourself! You aren't unique, but if you're willing to change how you play
at all you can expect to reach iso levels 20-30.
TL;DR: what Awaclus said.
