Print

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

[smuggler]

Hello, first and foremost, i am still at the very basis of being an "ambitious hobby dominion player". So, if there are any remarks which are absolut nuts, i hope i will be forgiven 

As far as i like all these Qvist-lists etc.pp, i wonder if it's in any way more helpful (for newbies) to rate the cards on its own using a 5 star system. (and with that, deciding which kind of board in "any given kingdom" is). With that in mind, cards may be more comparable irrespective of their actual cost. Sometimes, the limiting factor is not the amount of money, but the number of buys or the number of actions to play etc.pp. Most of the time, i dont need to decide which village is better (as interesting this question may be), but taking this $3 or that $4 card...On the other hand, there are many many factors, which makes it so hard to rank one card against another. So maybe its "enough" to state, this card is roughly equaly good for BM games, than the other one...

Of course, this will and can not happen only in one general approach, but in a slighty detailed analysis:
I can imagine something like this: [for example Chapel - as i would rate it]
EARLY GAME:   ***** [It greatly improves your deck, the earlier, the better]
(MIDGAME):     **      [it may have some use to get rid of early silvers or in other way improving your deck]
ENDGAME:       **      [it may have some use to get rid of incoming curses/ruins]
ENGINE:          ****   [it enables engines in one of the best ways, yet Chapel on its own is terminal and doesnt draw cards]
BM big money: *         [It thrashes estates and ruins, but thats covered in othere sections ...]
SLOG:             ***      [combination of midgame and endgame abilities]

I put midgame in parenthesis because the style of game (engine or bm) dictates your midgame and therefore would be duplicated. (doesnt it?)

Furthermore, i am really interested, which $2, $3 or $4 cards are (always strictly) better than silver or even gold.
Which $5, $6 or $7 cards are better than gold/platinum Which $3-cards are better than $-cards4 better than $5-cards (depending on engine/bm). MAYBE, this rating will help me in understanding this.
Opening with at least 1 silver boosts more village: villages mostly dont enhance your deck and f.i. opening village/silver will be worse than silver/silver (hitting $5 more reliable), or?

In the end, it may also help understanding if a kingdom is a strong ENGINE or a mediocre BM. Adding upp all stars? Maybe thats just plain stupid... maybe it only needs 3 engine cards with 4 stars or 2 with 5...

I hope, you will get the idea.

What do you think?

[schadd]

Of course, this will and can not happen only in one general approach, but in a slighty detailed analysis:
I can imagine something like this: [for example Chapel - as i would rate it]
EARLY GAME:   ***** [It greatly improves your deck, the earlier, the better]
(MIDGAME):     **      [it may have some use to get rid of early silvers or in other way improving your deck]
ENDGAME:       **      [it may have some use to get rid of incoming curses/ruins]
ENGINE:          ****   [it enables engines in one of the best ways, yet Chapel on its own is terminal and doesnt draw cards]
BM big money: *         [It thrashes estates and ruins, but thats covered in othere sections ...]
SLOG:             ***      [combination of midgame and endgame abilities]

i would say this is generally accurate.  obv., early game it's really strong, mid-late game it rarely trashes anything but that's in large part because it makes all but the strongest junkers less appealing.  i think that it should be 5 stars in engine (i mean, it's one of the several best engine cards in the game, even if it doesn't do anything but trash) and maybe 1-2 stars in slog, depending on the slog (many curse/ruin slogs get largely eaten by chapel, but if there isn't an engine i don't know that i would really bother with it anyway, as weird as that might sound.  there's also plenty of voluntary slogs where, for example, buying coppers is worthwhile; it follows that trashing them is a bad idea)

i think that most people do implicitly have this system; after all, it's really common knowledge that you pretty much always open with chapel, for example, and also you don't bother with merchant guilds until you can buy multiple cards while they're in play. insofar as qvist rankings are helpful, it's probably useful to know which cards are good at which parts of the game, but i think you can get this in large part from reading the wiki.

I put midgame in parenthesis because the style of game (engine or bm) dictates your midgame and therefore would be duplicated. (doesnt it?)

i would agree, though i would argue this is true for all parts of the game, really.

Furthermore, i am really interested, which $2, $3 or $4 cards are (always strictly) better than silver or even gold.
Which $5, $6 or $7 cards are better than gold/platinum Which $3-cards are better than $-cards4 better than $5-cards (depending on engine/bm).

i think that it's generally accepted that nothing is strictly better than silver or gold.  fishing village comes close to being better than silver, but not quite.  i would say, as a rule of thumb, most payload action cards (we consider 'payload' to mean a card that reaps continual benefit for playing multiples of them, like merchant guild or merchant ship or wine merchant) will be better than gold and silver if you have the ability to play a lot of them.  platinum is a different case; it's so much more cost-efficient than gold and silver are that it is competitive with most payload action cards.

to sum up, i will typically only buy silver in an engine when opening, or if i'm trashing a lot and hit $3 early on, and i will pretty much never buy gold in an engine (but gain it from playing action cards on occasion).

In the end, it may also help understanding if a kingdom is a strong ENGINE or a mediocre BM. Adding upp all stars? Maybe thats just plain stupid... maybe it only needs 3 engine cards with 4 stars or 2 with 5...

determining whether a kingdom suits an engine or bm is definitely a very important skill in this game.  adding up all stars makes sense, and to some extent what strong players will do (albeit not quantitatively, rather, something like "there are a lot of strong engine cards here").  however, it misses the nuance of having a balanced engine; whereas bridge, butcher, ghost ship and vineyards are all really strong engine cards, the four of them aren't sufficient to form an engine if there isn't a village.  thus, the large determiner of whether a kingdom is an engine board is whether it has a variety of strong engine archetypes (i.e. trashing, village, draw, payload) and then the combined strength of those cards comes next.

So, if there are any remarks which are absolut nuts, i hope i will be forgiven 

nah.  i think you have a pretty solid handle on the strategy of the game

[aku_chi]

It's not exactly the same, but ehunt gave "grades" to each card (up to Guilds) to help less experienced players identify the key cards in a given kingdom.  The comments in that article are occasionally valuable, too (aside from the Sea Hag tangent).  There are some attempts to grade Adventures cards and events, but they deviate pretty strongly from the current consensus.

I don't think a point-system for evaluating which boards support an engine is going to be helpful.  I think it will lead you astray.  The current best practice for evaluating boards is to look for payload first (everything that isn't +cards and +actions), and then look for the enablers that will let you play that payload (the +cards, +actions, and thinning).  The stronger the payload, the more you should be willing to suffer poor enablers.  This is a hard concept to learn except by playing, but dedicateddan's strategy articles on Dominion Fundamentals and Twenty Questions should get you into a helpful mindset.

Concerning kingdom cards being better or worse than basic treasures: it's complicated.  There are very few $2, $3, and $4 cards that are always going to be better than Silver.  Silver is often a good purchase in the first few turns, because it helps you reach $5; and there are a lot of great $5 cards.  There are some terminal $2, $3, and $4 cards that are usually worth opening over Silver, but you rarely want two of them (exceptions exist).  The only cards I can recommend over Silver without hesitation are non-terminal peddler variants: Tournament, Ironmonger, and Poacher.  The only exception there is if you're playing terminal draw BM (which you probably aren't if those cards are in the kingdom).  If you're playing an engine, you usually don't want (many) Silvers, so you should try to get by with the bare minimum (again, exceptions exist).

Gold is a pretty poor card.  You should have a good reason before you buy a Gold.  That reason might be: I'm playing a terminal draw BM or slog and I have enough terminals.  It might be: I'm playing an engine and am drawing my deck, and Gold is the best payload available.  Don't autobuy Gold on $6; that is a big beginner mistake.

Platinum is a pretty good card, but it isn't always the best payload.  Alt VP (especially Goons) can be stronger.  The cost reducers (especially Bridge) can make money payload irrelevant.  Strong gainers can circumvent the need for Platinum.