Print

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

[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.