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[Skandrino]

I've been thinking and I don't really get the point of Expand. At cost 7, it can be used as a worse version of a 5-cost card: Mine (but not getting the card into your hand), Graverobber (but not having the option to gain from the trash) or Rebuild (but not being nonterminal and having to expand from your hand rather than by digging through your deck). The only advantage seems to be its flexibility but this seems rather a jack-of-all-trades/master of none situation (no pun intended). Aren't the games where you want to expand multiple types of cards a lot pretty rare?

Then there are two things it can uniquely do: turn curses into 3-costs and turn 5-cost treasures into provinces. In the former case I would think it is a rather slow strategy and the latter case only applies to Stash,Counterfeit and Venture.

This doesn't seem to justify the cost of 7, or am I wrong?

[A Drowned Kernel]

Expand is generally considered to be the worst of the $7 cost cards, basically for the reasons you laid out. That said, sometimes Expand is the card that's on the board and its effect is what you need and you're willing to pay $7 for it. They can't all be the best etc.

[Titandrake]

You're missing Estate -> $5 cost action, which is the big one. Okay, Altar can do that too, but I still believe Expand at $7 is a fair cost. It's not the strongest card, and you could potentially argue it could cost $6, but I think that's pushing it. Flexibility is actually worth that much.

[Awaclus]

It can also turn Estates into $5 Actions. It's weaker than some other cards, but it doesn't mean it's entirely useless, because usually those other cards won't be in the kingdom anyway, and the flexibility of being able to turn Estates into $5 Actions in the early game and $5 Actions into Provinces in the late game is actually really good.

[werothegreat]

Sure, it's a worse version of Mine, Graverobber and Rebuild for Treasures, Actions and Victories, respectively, but it is all three of those cards at once.  Expand is expensive, and often can seem not worth going for, but in a longer game (i.e. no Cultist, Rebuild, Gear, etc), the player who grabs Expand (or Forge) is probably the player who is going to win.

[Awaclus]

Expand is expensive

It can also be expansive.

[2.71828.....]

Definitely not superflous. The following game is an example of a game where expand was the key to victory in the recent league match game between AHoppy and DG

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160410/log.0.1460319650780.txt

[Seprix]

Expand is great, what are you talking about? If it's too slow to Remodel to victory, it's probably too slow to get Expand, but a gain is a gain.

[Dingan]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

- Turn Coppers/Curses/Ruins into $3's
- Turn $5's into Provinces in the end game
- Mil Provinces
- Etc.

Of course, these things are sometimes worth Expand's opportunity cost and sometimes not.

I almost never use Expand on Treasures.  In fact, I can't think of a time I ever have.

I think Expand is correctly priced at $7.  $6 would be a stretch.

Expand is generally considered to be the worst of the $7 cost cards

I think Forge is worse, but that's just my opinion.

[Awaclus]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

- Turn Coppers/Curses/Ruins into $3's
- Turn $5's into Provinces in the end game
- Mil Provinces
- Etc.

Of course, these things are sometimes worth Expand's opportunity cost and sometimes not.

I almost never use Expand on Treasures.  In fact, I can't think of a time I ever have.

I think Expand is correctly priced at $7.  $6 would be a stretch.

Expand is generally considered to be the worst of the $7 cost cards

I think Forge is worse, but that's just my opinion.

But Forge is incredibly good. Its effect is almost as good as Chapel's and it only costs $7.

[Seprix]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

[pacovf]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Tactician!

[Awaclus]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

No, really, it is incredibly good. Trashing is that important.

[JW]

Here is some useful data compiled by TheExpressicist from about 1-1.5 years ago on gain rates of cards based on the top 20 players on Iso (as of one snapshot).

Forge has a 37.5% gain rate. Expand has a 42% gain rate.

[Marcory]

Most trashers fall into the category of 1) brute-force trashing (Chapel, Steward, Count, even Remake), which burn lots of cards but normally give you nothing in return, or 2) Remodeling, which turns a single card into something better.

Forge is the only trasher that can do both. It can trash lots of junk at once, like the brute-force trashers, but it can also turn some of your early buys (Silver, Steward, Moneylender, Sea Hag, Familiar, etc) into either stronger mid-game engine parts, or late game VP, while getting rid of junk in the process. And of course, it can also be Upgraded into a Province.

[Kirian]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

[werothegreat]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

[DG]

I've been thinking and I don't really get the point of Expand. At cost 7, it can be used as a worse version of a 5-cost card: Mine (but not getting the card into your hand), Graverobber (but not having the option to gain from the trash) or Rebuild (but not being nonterminal and having to expand from your hand rather than by digging through your deck). The only advantage seems to be its flexibility but this seems rather a jack-of-all-trades/master of none situation (no pun intended). Aren't the games where you want to expand multiple types of cards a lot pretty rare?

Expand is fairly priced as a 7 cost card, just as remodel is fairly priced as a 4 cost card. When they're good they are genuinely good but if they are not good then you just don't need them. The main advantage of expand is the gaining of cards along the 2-5-8-11 path. Two cost estates are good to trash, the 5 cost cards in a kingdom are usually important, 8 cost and 11 cost are vp.

Generally, when looking at a kingdom you have to work out what those 10 cards do together rather than worry about other cards doing better things. In that sense it isn't important that mine is a better mine than expand is. The versatility is important however although I wouldn't say it was a feature unique to expand. To reshape your deck, rather than just improve your deck, you often do want to remove types of cards that don't fit your deck and gain types of card that do fit your deck. Trashing an estate (or silver, or chapel) to gain a laboratory can really speed up the cycling of your deck and will help you draw your good cards more often. Removing curses is usually good. Trashing any type of high cost card to get end game vp is usually excellent.

[LastFootnote]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

[Accatitippi]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

Yet sometimes I feel the right move is to get Forge asap and then finish building. It might be wrong, though.

[LastFootnote]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

Yet sometimes I feel the right move is to get Forge asap and then finish building. It might be wrong, though.

Hey, I'm not saying I agree with common wisdom. It's just what I've heard several top players say in the past.

[Awaclus]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

Silver isn't payload, it's economy. You need economy to get to the point where you're drawing your deck. Payload is what you need to take advantage of the fact that you're drawing your deck.

[LastFootnote]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

Silver isn't payload, it's economy. You need economy to get to the point where you're drawing your deck. Payload is what you need to take advantage of the fact that you're drawing your deck.

Last I checked, economy was a kind of payload. And pretty much any payload card provides economy, with very few exceptions (e.g. Sea Hag and Saboteur).

[AdrianHealey]

Expand is great: it can turn anything into anything that costs $3 more.

[Awaclus]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

It is ridiculously easy to spike in the first few turns given the right kingdom.

UNLESS you hew to common wisdom and buy no payload until you're already drawing your deck.

Just sayin'.

Silver isn't payload, it's economy. You need economy to get to the point where you're drawing your deck. Payload is what you need to take advantage of the fact that you're drawing your deck.

Last I checked, economy was a kind of payload. And pretty much any payload card provides economy, with very few exceptions (e.g. Sea Hag and Saboteur).

It is tremendously useful to think of them as separate things. Silver is not strong enough payload to justify playing an engine strategy, and buying a Merchant Guild with your first $5 is awful.

[ehunt]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

I am surprised to hear a good player say that! I think Graverobber is a great card where the main difficulty is figuring out when to pick it up, whereas Expand the question is much more often if you'll pick it up at all. Am I in the minority?

[brokoli]

Expand and Forge also seems to get a little boost from later expansions ; just like most trash-for-benefit. I'm looking at Hinterlands and Dark Ages in particular (border village, IGG, Haggler, Develop, Cultist, Catacombs, Rats…). They are still weaker than most $6+ category, but sometimes there are really cool tricks to do with them.

[Awaclus]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

I am surprised to hear a good player say that! I think Graverobber is a great card where the main difficulty is figuring out when to pick it up, whereas Expand the question is much more often if you'll pick it up at all. Am I in the minority?

Graverobber is not a great card. Sometimes, it's usable.

[JW]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

I am surprised to hear a good player say that! I think Graverobber is a great card where the main difficulty is figuring out when to pick it up, whereas Expand the question is much more often if you'll pick it up at all. Am I in the minority?

Here is some useful data compiled by TheExpressicist from about 1-1.5 years ago on gain rates of cards based on the top 20 players on Iso (as of one snapshot).

Expand has a 42% gain rate. Graverobber has a 30% gain rate.

[Dingan]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

I am surprised to hear a good player say that! I think Graverobber is a great card where the main difficulty is figuring out when to pick it up, whereas Expand the question is much more often if you'll pick it up at all. Am I in the minority?

I am surprised to hear that somebody thinks I'm a good player   Graverobber is a very complicated card imo.  Anything that moves cards to or from the trash is hard for me to wrap my brain around; cards that do both, fahgetaboutit.  I do however think GR and Expand are both correctly priced, and therefore Expand is (generally) more valuable.  I think I find myself using Expand to mil Provinces far more often than GR.  I think that is all I meant by that statement.

[Seprix]

Forge is garbage. By the time you get to $7, you're already humming along. It's rare where you really want one.

Your ideas are bad, and you should feel bad.

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

Graverobber is one of my favorite cards ever. I just love it so much.

[ehunt]

Ya, Expand is good.  Yes, it's often ignorable, but it's certainly much better than Mine or Graverobber.

I am surprised to hear a good player say that! I think Graverobber is a great card where the main difficulty is figuring out when to pick it up, whereas Expand the question is much more often if you'll pick it up at all. Am I in the minority?

I am surprised to hear that somebody thinks I'm a good player   Graverobber is a very complicated card imo.  Anything that moves cards to or from the trash is hard for me to wrap my brain around; cards that do both, fahgetaboutit.  I do however think GR and Expand are both correctly priced, and therefore Expand is (generally) more valuable.  I think I find myself using Expand to mil Provinces far more often than GR.  I think that is all I meant by that statement.

I'm sure I use GR more but not as much for its gain-from-the-trash function so much as for its convert-your-engine-into-provinces function (gain-from-the-trash being nice occasionally but not really the point of the card except in combo decks with Rebuild/Knights/probably-others).

(I bet the problem is that I'm not using Expand enough for the milling, I maintain that GR is quite good. Its only drawback over expand is that it only trashes actions, but most of your 5s are actions anyway.)

[Titandrake]

While $5 action -> Province is powerful, the tricky part is that your engine needs to support an extra terminal which turns the $5+ actions that make your engine run into stop cards (Provinces). So, it's very good in end game, but it's hard to justify picking it up any earlier than endgame.

If you have another reason to justify Graverobber early, then it becomes more enticing.

Edit: as DG pointed out, this is another reason why Expand is better. In midgame, Expand turns your spare Estates and Silvers into actions. In endgame, it turns your spare actions into VP. Graverobber needs other cards (i.e. Rats, Pillage) to do this sort of double-duty.

[jomini]

As noted $0 -> $3 is pretty huge. You have a lot of villages at $3, a few draw cards (e.g. Oracle), and a few nice attacks (Swindler, Fortune teller, etc.). While Altar can manage this, Altar cannot go $5 to province or $8 to Colony as well. Flexibility is worth a good bit on its own - say I expand a Pot into a Bv & gain a duchy, being able to move either of those two cards next shuffle into a province is a pretty nice option.

Likewise, Graverobber cannot mill provinces which is one of the most clutch options for the Remodel family; yes you can gain a $5 back and then retrash it into a province next turn, but that requires either running double trashers (which is hard on actions and draw) or waiting a turn, a turn you often do not have. This can become extremely imbalanced with cards like Tr or Kc - Expand can target anything green for more VP/faster end game; Grave robber rarely is in position for solid Kc gains.

Colonies also tend to be a hard push for Expand, you can gain 4 VP with a play of Prov -> Col - more points with the same space efficiency.

Rebuild does seem to be more powerful than Expand, but that lies mostly in the digging/non-terminal part. In an actual engine (e.g. you got both from the Bm deck), Expand can be better because it works on cards already in hand (e.g. you have Quarry/Bm in play and buy a card, draw it and play it). If you have limited targets, Expand is much better if you draw it after your target (which happens around 1/n % of the time when you have n targets). Only because mass Rebuild is a thing does Rebuild make a whole lot of sense to buy instead of Expand.

[Davio]

I would pay $8 for Expand if I had the money and needed/wanted a card like that.

Meaning: Don't be too partial about a card's cost, but look at its usability on a given board.

[singletee]

Expand does have its niche, and I think it's underrated in general. It likes King's Court as you can generate a lot of value (or turn it into VP) really fast, and it's also a good way to gain more KCs. If anything obsoletes Expand (it doesn't), it's not Mine, Rebuild, or Graverobber, but Butcher. It's not quite as powerful but even more flexible! I would totally pay $7 for Butcher a lot of the time.

[ackmondual]

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

While having fun is important, winning is what makes it fun for some.

[timchen]

While having fun is important, winning whining is what makes it fun for some.

FTFY

[Kirian]

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

While having fun is important, winning is what makes it fun for some.

Reiner Knizia — 'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.'

[ackmondual]

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

While having fun is important, winning is what makes it fun for some.

Reiner Knizia — 'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.'

Problem is, I've played with some Dom players who found it less fun when folks just go for Gold rather than "something fancy".  Well... the goal of Dom. is to have the most points.  If you want a game where folks experiment with combos, then you'd need to make your parameters known ahead of time.

[ackmondual]

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

While having fun is important, winning is what makes it fun for some.

Reiner Knizia — 'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.'

Not to be outdone by his other quote...

Go for the monopolies

[eHalcyon]

I stand by what I said. Not saying you don't want Forge if you have to go and get it, but man, it's just never fun.

While having fun is important, winning is what makes it fun for some.

Reiner Knizia — 'When playing a game, the goal is to win, but it is the goal that is important, not the winning.'

Problem is, I've played with some Dom players who found it less fun when folks just go for Gold rather than "something fancy".  Well... the goal of Dom. is to have the most points.  If you want a game where folks experiment with combos, then you'd need to make your parameters known ahead of time.

Do they find it less fun because they win less due to other folks' basic "go for Gold" strategy?  If so, the solution is to play better, because "something fancy" will usually beat Big Money.  The problem is that the fancy deck is harder to play well while Big Money is easy, and may sometimes still come out ahead by sheer luck.

Do they find it less fun because it's too easy and boring to beat down all the folks that just "go for Gold"?  If so, the solution is to find opponents who are also trying to improve their game.

I don't know if this topic flows from the earlier discussion though.  Seprix doesn't think Forge is fun to play.  Well, we all have our preferences.

[Seprix]

Do they find it less fun because they win less due to other folks' basic "go for Gold" strategy?  If so, the solution is to play better, because "something fancy" will usually beat Big Money.  The problem is that the fancy deck is harder to play well while Big Money is easy, and may sometimes still come out ahead by sheer luck.

Do they find it less fun because it's too easy and boring to beat down all the folks that just "go for Gold"?  If so, the solution is to find opponents who are also trying to improve their game.

I don't know if this topic flows from the earlier discussion though.  Seprix doesn't think Forge is fun to play.  Well, we all have our preferences.

Nah, Forge is alright. Having played more games recently with Forge, I can now say I was wrong.