Dominion > Dominion Articles

Silk Road

(1/8) > >>

WanderingWinder:
Silk Road is my favourite card, and, I think, terribly underrated.

The first card you to compare Silk Road to is Gardens (okay, vineyard might be the first thing that comes to mind, but they play COMPLETELY differently). And Gardens is a pretty good comparison. You can, for the most part, play the same rushes for silk road that you can for gardens. And the rushes with Silk Road are going to tend to be a little bit stronger than the gardens versions - it's generally much easier to rush to 12 green cards than 30 cards overall, and easier to get to 16 green cards than 40 cards overall.

Now there are some cases where gardens works really well and and silk road won't. So gardens work with cards like talisman, goons, trader, cursing attacks, and ill-gotten-gains especially, in ways that don't really go for silk road. Cards like Bureaucrat and copper are good with both, but much better with gardens. In short, it's the mid-range and long-term strategies where these two cards really diverge.

Which brings us to the second comparison - Duke. Duke is a long-term card where you need a lot of other victory cards (in Duke's case, they have to be duchies) in order to make it powerful. But in a duke deck, your main victory points eventually come from the Dukes themselves. The same is true with long-range Silk Road decks. Think about this: 1 Duchy, 8 Silk Road, 8 Estates, plus your three starting estates, that's 20 victory cards. And that's 54 victory points - enough to match against someone who's gotten a duchy and all the provinces. So apart from just rush strategies, using Silk Road as your primary victory strategy in longer games is perfectly viable. Of course, you need a little bit of support for this, but it's definitely doable.
The biggest support for Silk Road are your dual victory cards - harem, nobles, and island are huge boons (as is gardens, actually). Great Hall and tunnel are pretty good, too. With these cards, and I want to stress especially island, you can very often ignore cards that are outlandish and exorbitant, like province, and even gold. Here's a game I played where I used an Island/Silk Road rush (just buying them!) to totally overwhelm my BM/Masquerade opponent: http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201201/01/game-20120101-131237-6c191900.html

Even with just the basic victory cards, it's possible to use silk road to power an alternate strategy, especially since most decks going for provinces are built for 4 or 5 much more than all 8. But you have to be a bit careful about this; your VP engine has to be put together in the proper order - it's a bit fragile. You're going to probably want your 20 victory cards and at least 7 copies of Silk Road. That leaves you with a dilemma: do you go for the duchies first, or do you go for Silk Road? The issue is, the Silk Road are more important to get, but the duchies are harder to get. So you basically want to get the silk roads first, then go back for the duchies - if you can. Either way, you want to have enough of an economy built up beforehand not to stall out hard.

Here's a game where theory tired to do this against me, but by going too hard for duchies early, and, more importantly, not building his economy quite enough before taking the plunge, allowed me to get enough of the silk roads myself to effectively block him and have a fairly secure path to the victory: http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20111209-091227-a49d3a4d.html

Finally, Silk Roads don't necessarily lose their bite in colony games quite as much as most other alternate VP strategies do (though they are substantially weaker). It's not super rare that, if you start greening a bit sooner, going a little sooner and stronger for provinces, maybe only one colony, and supplement with silk roads, that you can have 4 point silk road + 6 point province to fight that 10 point Colony. Now, this is not terribly common, but with the right support, it's something you want to watch out for. Here's a game where I start with a bit of a fiery blitz, then, having spent much of my fuel and with my opponent's deck hitting it's stride while mine whimpered, I switched to province + silk road to close things out:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120102-121441-95cda622.html

Works With:
Other Victory Cards, especially dual types, especially island
Farmland
Gainers like Workshop and Ironworks
Woodcutter variants - particularly bridge and Horse traders
Baron
Hoard
Scout, Crossroads, etc.
Sifters like warehouse, and especially oasis

Conflicts with:
Fast engines
Trashing
Savvy opponents who also have the time to stop to buy a couple cards to block you. Bishop is a poster child here.

WanderingWinder:
First off, the card is Silk Road, not Silk Roads. For those of you that are a little OCD about language.
Second, I'm aware that in my service to those people who are OCD about language, I used a sentence fragment. Yeah, I'm weird.

rrenaud:
Either I am very confused or you are very wrong about this ;P

"The issue is, the Silk Road are more important to get, but the duchies are easier to get."

But otherwise, nice article.

WanderingWinder:

--- Quote from: rrenaud on January 03, 2012, 12:12:48 pm ---Either I am very confused or you are very wrong about this ;P

"The issue is, the Silk Road are more important to get, but the duchies are easier to get."

But otherwise, nice article.

--- End quote ---
Should be harder, yup.

brokoli:
Excellent article, I think silk road is terribly underrated, too. I love this card, because I love victory cards in general (especially island !). Baron is also a nice card with silk road. Like horse traders, but when you can't discard an estate, gain it !
Trade route is sometimes good, when there are many victory cards in the setup. (trash a copper for $5, buy a duchy/silk road and another copper).

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page