So the Neat and potentially useful card interactions thread is great, but one thing I often find myself asking is how good various combos are relative to each other. For instance, we know that warehouse/treasure map and hermit/market square are both “potentially useful” combos, but is one of them significantly better than the other? A lot of times, the answer to such a question is “depends on the board”, but I’m interested in what happens when it doesn’t. I’d like to ask the question “If you have two combos (A and B) and neither has any board support, which wins the majority of the time when pitted against each other?”
I’m not sure if something like this has been done before. If it has, I’d be interested to see the results. If not, here is my attempt to do so. Feel free to skip to the bottom where I actually start listing combos.
To formalize the game I want to play, I’m going to start with a list of 2 card (or possibly “uh, card-shaped thing”) combos and attempt to rank them. Here are my rules:
Say we want to compare combo A and combo B. Construct a board with only the base cards (no colonies/shelters or anything) and the components of these two combos.
- Play a 2 player game where one player plays combo A and the other player plays combo B.
- The combo A player can only buy base cards or components from combo A.
- The combo B player can only buy base cards or components from combo B.
- Both players are attempting to play optimally subject to these constraints (i.e. maximizing their probability of winning).
- Randomize starting player.
Combo A beats combo B iff combo A wins the majority of the time.
Some qualifiers to note:
1. Determining the winner of a matchup seems like it could be pretty difficult to do. “Playing optimally” might be hard for more difficult combos (e.g. upgrade/rats), and determining who wins the majority of the time with confidence might also be hard for two closely matched combos.
2. There is no guarantee that the results are transitive. It would be nice to still have a ranking that at least closely conforms to the results, maybe with notes as to which relations are violated.
3. Due to the constraints of the game, some notoriously good combos will not do well. For example, king’s court/bridge is great, but it would do terribly in this game, since it has no trashing.
4. More generally, the constraint of only getting two kingdom cards seems to be fairly restrictive. I can think of a lot of strong deck paradigms (goons engine, horn megaturn) that wouldn’t work here. I guess that means that dominion is actually a pretty interesting game.
5. Along the same vein, this idea feels somewhat like a generalization of the question “What’s the best big money strategy?” since that question is more or less the one card version of my question.
6. I’m not sure if there are things like Donate that ruin this game. It would be less fun if the top 13 combos were Donate/X or something. If that ends up being the case, I want to veto Donate (or whatever the offending “uh, card-shaped thing” is) for this game. This is obviously subjective.
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With all this setup, I’m going to provide a starting point to build off. I’ll list a bunch of combos and provide a preliminary guess as to how they rank. I make no claims as to the completeness of my list (There are obviously a lot of good combos that I’ve missed/not bothered to include), or the correctness of my ranks (I’m sure a lot of my ranks are off, some are probably way off).
1. Counting House/Travelling Fair
2. Ferry/Rebuild
3. Royal Carriage/Bridge
4. Villa/Jack of all Trades
5. Masterpiece/Feodum
6. Dungeon/Tunnel
7. Ferry/Governor
8. Hermit/Market Square
9. Scavenger/Stash
10. Ferry/Cultist
11. Lurker/Cultist
12. Courtyard/Delve
13. Witch/Delve
14. Mountebank/Delve
15. Cultist/Delve
16. Cultist/Dominate
17. Crossroads/Gear
18. Inheritance/Ironmonger
19. Bonfire/Jack of all Trades
20. Hunting Party/Tournament
21. Apprentice/Market Square
22. Dungeon/Treasure Map
23. Ferry/Mountebank
24. Wharf/Fool's Gold
25. Magpie/Pathfinding
26. Storeroom/Encampment
27. Jack of all Trades/Counterfeit
28. Gear/Treasure Trove
29. Forager/Highway
30. Ranger/Lost Arts
31. Native Village/Bridge
32. Wharf/Coin of the Realm
33. Forager/Minion
34. Fishing Village/Wharf
35. Beggar/Gardens
36. Courtyard/Quest
37. Ironworks/Gardens
38. Gear/Counterfeit
39. Inheritance/Magpie
40. Forum/Fool's Gold
41. Counterfeit/Capital
42. Beggar/Triumph
43. Urchin/Save
44. Masquerade/Lost Arts
45. Artificer/Storyteller
46. Duplicate/Duke
47. Forum/Duke
48. Hermit/Artificer
49. Embassy/Tunnel
50. Upgrade/Rats
51. Gear/Lost Arts
52. Alchemist/Dominate
53. Native Village/Apothecary
54. Treasure Trove/Gardens
55. Horse Traders/Duke
56. Forager/Peddler
57. Loan/Minion
58. Junk Dealer/Graverobber
Please comment if you want to include any combos, or if you find one of the current rankings to be off (or if you have any other questions or comments). If you want to include a combo, it would be helpful to also figure out where it ranks. I can keep this list updated if anyone else besides me actually cares about this at all. Also, I'm not going to include any combo that loses to straight money, even if it is good with other support (e.g. kc/bridge).