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[theory]

I plan on posting an expanded version of this article (incorporating many of the helpful suggestions in the topic, as well as some of my own thoughts) on Friday.  Feel free to chip in before then to add to the article.

[painted_cow]

@Theory: is there a possibility that the articles you post in your blog can be discussed here in the forum? Like placing a link to the forum thread at the end of the blog-article.

[danshep]

I disagree on the conflict with Goons that you noted, though not sure if you meant Goons because you called it spammable.

The curse-negating powers of Having a Hunting Party heavy deck lets you also buy up lots of crap with your goons for VPs. In a game with Hunting Parties, Working Villages and Goons, being able to grab a pile of coppers without fear of them gumming up your deck can give you a great lead.

[WanderingWinder]

Yeah, the Goons thing has already been mentioned. It does help a Goons deck, and better than say Lab does (which is really good!), but not as much as it helps a more standard deck.
Also, you still have to be careful about buying up those coppers to some extent, as gummed up decks can still come to haunt you a) in that the first card you draw is both weaker and less likely to make your second card one of your power cards ('cause it's likely to be ANOTHER copper), and more importantly b) you'll be significantly less likely to get Hunting party OR Goons in any given hand.

[snappy]

Recently isotropic started to show links to uncompressed versions of the log(.html), but you can still access the compressed versions(.html.gz), they are just offered as download per default. If you want to view them directly in the browser you can just remove the .gz from the end of the link. That works also for old links.

!! Heh, it never occurred to me that the .html.gz files weren't meant for browsers — Firefox and Chrome always loaded them quite happily. But I just tried a gzipped link with my iPad, and it no worky …

That seems weird. Wouldn't people want to encourage widespread support for gzipped stuff? It's quick, and it saves on bandwidth; what's to lose?

iirc, web servers are able to send gzipped versions of content automatically if they detect that the client can unzip (and modern browsers can) the gzipped content. in other words, the .gz versions are just a caching mechanism (static content only needs to be zipped once), rather htan a bandwidth saving tool.

[Teproc]

I don't think it helps Goons enough in getting crap away to compensate the fact that it will sometimes prevent you from drawing that essential 2nd, 3rd or Xth Goons that allows the megaturns.

[theory]

As I wrote in the article (that is appearing in ~20 min), and was mentioned earlier in the thread, you gotta compare it to Lab.  I think HP is way better than Lab if you have a mixed HP/Village/Goons deck, because you aren't going to be able to play those extra Goons unless you have +Actions, and if you do, well, why not just play the +Actions and then play the Goons and then the Hunting Party to hunt down your other Goons?

[HiveMindEmulator]

In fact, hunting party is good with ANY action chain, since as long as you have spare +actions, you can play your action cards before hunting for more. In this sense, hunting party is not really a hand size increaser per se, since your "hand" size remains small, but you keep playing actions. It's more effective than increasing hand size in these decks, since it looks for the cards you already have in play (and thus don't have in your hand) rather than the stuff that stays in your hand until the end of your turn.

[Toblakai]

I just played a game where I came up with an interesting HP strategy that I would love to have some feedback on. 

Inspired by this thread, I tried to make a Baron + HP deck in a province game. 

Here is the log http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201106/18/game-20110618-124104-1bab4faf.html

I opened Baron Silver, hoping to Jump to Gold's and HP's quickly.

My plan is to buy 1 baron, one gold, one silver, and as many hunting parties as possible.  As soon as I had my 1 gold I would buy a Prov. every time I had 8$+. There were also Scouts on this board which I felt would synergize very well with this deck so i bought 2 of those with some 4$ hands.  I also planed to buy estates all along when i had only 2 or 3$, and still play baron when it would mean gaining an estate instead of 4$.  I thought this would boost my VP count, and feed my Baron while not clogging my deck too badly with enough HP's. 

As it played out I had a few interesting turns.  I got lucky and hit my gold on turn 3. Then on turn 5, worried my deck would stall out early i bought a second silver rather then an estate.  I think this was a good choice and possibly what allowed me to start getting Hunting Parties on turn 7.

On turn 10, I hit a 10$ hand with 2 buy's rather then get prov + estate I felt getting 2 HP's with still only 2 Prov. gone was a better choice.

By turn 14 I'm in trouble, even though he has purchased 4 terminals in a set with no + action, my opponent already has 4 provinces, and I only have one.  I would say he has gotten lucky with hits Baron, treasures, lining up to score some early provinces. 

But now i have 7 HP's and my deck is about to take off.

Turns 15, and 16 see me buy 2 provinces and my 6th estate, while my opponent only gets a silver and a market.  With one province left my opponent disconnects.

It is his turn and I'm forced to make him resign.  When I check the log I see that at this point in the game we were exactly tied with 27pts. Then I check his hand and see that it was Ironworks, Silver, 2 copper, and and estate.  He could not have bought the last Province, and the most VP he could have gotten with that turn is gain an estate + buy an estate emptying the pile. My final hand was 3 HP's + 3 estates.  With that I'm pretty sure I could have bought the final Province on my 17th turn.  So even if my opponent had of made the smart choice on turn 15 and gotten a Duchie instead of a market and gotten the last 2 estates on turn 17.  The last province + 9 estates would have given me the victory by 1.  I think my only obvious mistake was getting a Prov and a scout on turn 15 rather then a Prov and an estate.  One scout early on can help cycle the deck or pull an estate into a hand with a Baron, but by this time in the game I should have been going all out for the last VP's. 

I'm interested to hear what some of the better players think of the deck that I built, the choices I made on certain pivotal turns, should I have purchased any scouts on this board or just more estates, and also if this strategy would have worked at all if I was playing someone rank 30+ rather then a 0 ranked player, who made mistakes like getting a mine he never uses and buying an extra market when there are only 2 Provinces left.

Cheers 

[rod-]

I think scout was probably an error here:  you want your hunting parties to build you into your ideal hand of estate+treasure+baron(+province, assuming you've already bought 1), and having a scout means that your hp might find a scout , which maybe it'll bypass a lot of green for you, but the hunting party does that already.  If your entire deck consists of copper/hp/silver/gold/baron/estate/province, you only have 6 diff cards & hp will almost always find that hand.

[HiveMindEmulator]

I agree that you don't need scout, and I'm not sure if you even need gold. I just played a baron/silver into hunting parties and provinces (no gold) game today. It seemed to work out just fine (I think I had 5 provinces by turn 15). If you get a hand of baron, estate, silver, and 2 coppers, that's $8. Since you don't trash anything, you end up with a second copper most of the time anyway just from your initial draw or the first +1 card from hunting party, so gold doesn't seem to be necessary. I feel like it might be better to just spend $6 on another hunting party so you can keep hitting that baron, but I'm not sure.

EDIT: I just tried it solitaire and got the 5th province on turn 12 -- probably much better shuffle luck this time, and/or I just remembered the game wrong. I invite you to try it yourself. I didn't play the baron to gain an estate, and if I had ever got $2-$3, I don't think I would buy anything. Buying estates just increases the chance that you draw a hand without hunting party. You only need 1 estate in your hand to make the baron work, and you will draw that with hunting party without having to buy/gain more than your original 3.