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[math]

I played a game recently where I played a combo deck built around Hermit and Storeroom.  It was a megaturn strategy similar to Hermit-Market Square.  On the megaturn I would play a Storeroom, discard half my hand (rounded down), and then play a Madman to draw it again.  I ended up buying five Provinces and two Duchies.

To set it up, I bought/gained six Hermits and three Storerooms.  My opponent trashed some with Knights, so I ended up gaining more than that throughout the course of the game.  I turned all six Hermits into Madmen and counted my deck to make sure I would trigger the megaturn when I had 29 cards (enough to draw with three Madmen).  I bought some Coppers along the way to get to 29 more quickly.  After playing three Madmen I had a 26-card hand, and I got +$12, +$11, and +$10 from my Storerooms, which is enough to buy four Provinces by itself with the buys from Storeroom.  I had extra buys from Candlestick Maker, which let me buy more.  (I forgot to get the log, unfortunately.)

The combo was pretty powerful, but it had amazing support in that particular kingdom.  There was Candlestick Maker for +Buy, and there was also Fishing Village to let me play two Hermits on the same turn sometimes.  I got lucky and drew three Madmen the turn after I bought the 29th card.  Also, my opponent went for Knights, which I'm almost certain was a bad idea.  How well would this deck do without support?  You could get up to four extra Storerooms for more +Buy, but those wouldn't produce any coin.  If you had more time, you could get an extra Hermit/Madman, but that might take too long (just guessing here).  The deck can probably handle a few cards more than 29 by discarding fewer on the first Storeroom.

[E.Honda]

You played that game against me i have to say you played it really well, I didnt expect your megaturn to be that powerful. I was hoping to disrupt you a bit with those three knights and apart from that play a moneyish deck hoping to buy enough vp/end before you would be able to do anything big with your deck, though I didnt see that strong of a turn coming and I also hadnt seen that combo you were going for. I didnt save the log either but i think it should be available tomorrow on gokosalvager

[E.Honda]

Here is the log
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160427/log.0.1461799075591.txt

[jomini]

Without support this is not too bad, 5 Madmen mean you get to 26 cards, discard $11, draw 13, discard $11, draw 13, discard $25. $47 is 6 provinces, but you are buy limited so you almost certainly will want to get two additional Srooms so you can hit $45 and 6 buys. 5 Provinces + duchy is still not an assured win, and if you do this clean you will not be hitting even $5 for the rest of the game.

The troubles this has over Market Square Hermit are:
1. You lack golds after you go off. 36 VP is not enough to assure a victory. At best you can snag two estates per turn unless you have some silver or other efficient money. You can easily lose to a slightly more powerful megaturn (very common for Madmen games) there are 39 VP left in the game without Alt-VP so in a lot of cases you will absolutely need a 6th Hermit.
2. You have a much lower gain potential during your final turn, you need a Madman for each terminal play so getting to 8 gains means you need 7 Madman. This is much harder to manage if you are contested.
3. Srooms, without villages, are slower at letting you get your Madman up. They take up real space in your deck so you will burn a turn, maybe two getting Hermits out of your deck.

On your board, Knights is a pretty decent call and that was about the worst set of knights you could hit (e.g. Vander is the absolute worse without the other guy going knights, Martin is pretty close behind as well), getting Anna, Natalie, or Michael as the second knight would have been much stronger. Killing Hermits & Storerooms is pretty solid if they cannot easily be replaced, so contesting the Hermits -> using Madmen turns to gain knights would likely have been more successful.

What I see, though, is a very strong Fvillage/Sroom/Wt/Hermit setup. You can gain all your components for cheap off Hermits (and of course trash estates) and you can churn a huge amount cards repeatedly. Something live Fv -> Sroom -> Fv -> Wt can easily go look through 8 cards and draw up to 6 to set up another run of search & draw. You can explode your engine pretty quick there. Adding in a knight or two also becomes pretty viable once you have your engine going.

[math]

5 Provinces + duchy is still not an assured win, and if you do this clean you will not be hitting even $5 for the rest of the game.

This is the biggest problem I can see with the combo.  It will probably beat BM consistently since a BM player has to buy Provinces one at a time, so you can just wait until they've bought three and then end the game.  It might have problems against an engine, since an engine will build up first and then buy the Provinces quickly (or win with something else, such as Fairgrounds/Vineyards/Goons).

One possibility might be to trigger the megaturn at a time when you can 3-pile. This requires lots of Storerooms for +Buy, but it might work, especially since you don't need as much money to 3-pile.  One empty pile could be the Hermits, since you're getting 6 anyway.

[Seprix]

5 Provinces + duchy is still not an assured win, and if you do this clean you will not be hitting even $5 for the rest of the game.

This is the biggest problem I can see with the combo.  It will probably beat BM consistently since a BM player has to buy Provinces one at a time, so you can just wait until they've bought three and then end the game.  It might have problems against an engine, since an engine will build up first and then buy the Provinces quickly (or win with something else, such as Fairgrounds/Vineyards/Goons).

Yeah, but that board is pure awfulness. I looked at it long and hard. I'm not sure there's a better way to go than what he was doing. There's no real engine here besides Hermit+Storeroom. Knights could be bought, but that's generally a losing strategy.

Hermit/Madman-Storeroom is an okay combo. It's not really fantastic by any means, but it works here.

If I were playing this board, I'd try to get Dame Anna and build some sort of Treasury/Storeroom BM game.

[jomini]

5 Provinces + duchy is still not an assured win, and if you do this clean you will not be hitting even $5 for the rest of the game.

This is the biggest problem I can see with the combo.  It will probably beat BM consistently since a BM player has to buy Provinces one at a time, so you can just wait until they've bought three and then end the game.  It might have problems against an engine, since an engine will build up first and then buy the Provinces quickly (or win with something else, such as Fairgrounds/Vineyards/Goons).

Yeah, but that board is pure awfulness. I looked at it long and hard. I'm not sure there's a better way to go than what he was doing. There's no real engine here besides Hermit+Storeroom. Knights could be bought, but that's generally a losing strategy.

Hermit/Madman-Storeroom is an okay combo. It's not really fantastic by any means, but it works here.

If I were playing this board, I'd try to get Dame Anna and build some sort of Treasury/Storeroom BM game.

Nah the board is fine. Hermit kills off 3 Estates. Now you have 7 dross cards. Say you can have a left over Fishv, that means that a Sroom in hand lets you search 8 cards to find another Fv and a Wt. With those two you can then safely discard 2 cards for $2, play Fishv, and then play Wt. On net you end up with 1 action, 6 cards, and $4. Then you can keep doing it all again. Each subsequent round nets you six cards, and $5 cash. With an even split on Fishv, you can $10 which another Sroom will bump up to $16 as you go out (and let you sift to the end of a shuffle).

Now sure this sort of thing is pretty terrible with worse components, but Fishv is perhaps the absolute best village for this, Hermit is a very good trasher/gainer. Very quickly you will be gaining two or three components per turn and that makes for a very fast game.

Math: The bigger question is will Hermits be contested and can you rebuild if they are. Uncontested Hermits means you can build just a bit more to get larger payouts. Another Hermit means we can easily add in another $9 and +1 buy. If you fall short on Madmen you have no chance to pile out and you have no way to get over the hump, uncontested hermits or recoverable Hermits make this much stronger.

[math]

The bigger question is will Hermits be contested and can you rebuild if they are. Uncontested Hermits means you can build just a bit more to get larger payouts. Another Hermit means we can easily add in another $9 and +1 buy. If you fall short on Madmen you have no chance to pile out and you have no way to get over the hump, uncontested hermits or recoverable Hermits make this much stronger.

So if you're playing against this, you should contest Hermits?  That would make it pretty similar to Hermit-Market Square, where both players race the Hermits, the player who wins the split can go for the combo, and the other player doesn't have much (6 Hermits is enough to make the deck work).  What strategies can beat Hermit-Storeroom without contesting Hermits?  A discard attack can definitely slow it down, which could give an engine enough time to build.

[jsh357]

Marin beat me with this combo recently. I think it's the real deal.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160305/log.0.1457197461272.txt

[Deadlock39]

(Edit: I guess this one wasn't really Hermit/Storeroom... he was relying on Coppersmith for the payload, so probably ignore me...)


It was used by Dingan here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyM9IShvz1M

He didn't quite pull it off, but when I watched it, I was pretty sure he missed an opportunity to cycle with a storeroom to get to the Madman he needed. I've been meaning to go back and verify for a long time.

[jomini]

The bigger question is will Hermits be contested and can you rebuild if they are. Uncontested Hermits means you can build just a bit more to get larger payouts. Another Hermit means we can easily add in another $9 and +1 buy. If you fall short on Madmen you have no chance to pile out and you have no way to get over the hump, uncontested hermits or recoverable Hermits make this much stronger.

So if you're playing against this, you should contest Hermits?  That would make it pretty similar to Hermit-Market Square, where both players race the Hermits, the player who wins the split can go for the combo, and the other player doesn't have much (6 Hermits is enough to make the deck work).  What strategies can beat Hermit-Storeroom without contesting Hermits?  A discard attack can definitely slow it down, which could give an engine enough time to build.

Against Herm/Sroom, I would indeed contest the Hermits. You can either turn them into Madmen -> Golds/Provs or just set up something else if you do not like the combo. Madmen are almost Tac plays so just draining them is not too bad at slowing you down.

Discarding attacks up the Madman count needed by one, but more importantly mean you need a slightly higher Madman density. Trashing attacks - like Knights & Giant can be good if you can kill enough of the Hermits to stop them from hitting 6, this is a lot easier if you poach two with a Herm/Herm opening. Swindler is far better as you can trash Madmen and unlike with Msqr you do not give out gold. Sab can be extremely strong, if the other guy is aggressively going Herm (gain Herm) -> gain Madman each Sab play removes one Madman from the game.

Top decking attacks can also buy a little time, but without nicking at least 5 Madmen you are going to have trouble with just base points. Most any alt-VP can let you compete with the combo using Madmen or Hermits. Any VP chip engine also goes a long way. Possession, like with all megaturns is a showstopper.

There are very few boards where Hermit should not be considered for contestation.

[gamesou]

I feel bad since I just lost a match (6th League match against ADK, where I needed a tie to stay in A division) by misplaying the combo. Two remarks: 1) With Scheme on board there is no risk to lose the Hermit split, 2) To be good at Dominion it is important to count right, 3) This combo is actually quite strong.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160509/log.0.1462824591936.txt

[Aleimon Thimble]

I tried Hermit/Market Square/Storeroom in a 3-player game with two people who didn't know the Hermit/MS combo, but did buy a ton of Market Squares, leaving me with the short end of the MS stick. The fact that I could gain Storerooms instead helped to mitigate losing the split.