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Gherald:
(Discussion split from Preview #1 thread.)

Saying Ghost Town and Guide are synergistic is like saying Village and Smithy are synergistic.

Both cards do good things for you but the benefits are merely additive, not synergistic.

crj:
Village and Smithy are synergistic! You can build an engine out of the combo, but can't build an engine out of either on its own.

Gherald:
You do need some way of getting multiple +draw plays for an engine, yes; that is simply what an engine is by definition. But I reserve the word 'synergy' for two things that interact in a way that is greater than the sum of their parts. Village and Smithy (or Ghost Town and Guide) are not that. They simply do what their respective parts do in an additive way.

Some might claim an engine's components, working together, give a net effect that is bigger than the sum of its parts. That's actually false I would say: for an engine to matter you also need a payload; a dominion engine without a payload accomplishes little of value on its own, and can be seen as purely additive, the way a deck full of Labs is additive (and not self-synergizing somehow. Oh look, my lab lets me play more labs!)

To make this even clearer just set the whole engine thing aside, and replace Smithy with generic terminal actions. Do village-type cards synergize with terminal actions? Obviously you want both, a village idiot deck and a deck of colliding terminals are not grand things. But is this a synergy? As I understand the word, no.

JThorne:
Even by the Village/Smithy yardstick, I'm not sure Guide and Ghost Town synergize. They're both cards that improve the hand quality of future hands, but by themselves add little to nothing, and used together, one actually slightly diminishes the other (Guide either fails to account for the Ghost Town extra card, or throws it away.)

So I would actually call them more redundant than synergistic; I would rarely buy them in the same kingdom unless I had so many extra gains/buys I didn't know what to do with them. A deck-drawing engine that starts every turn with six cards and two actions is very unlikely to need to call Guide, ever, and it would likely end up sitting on the mat the whole game, having wasted the opportunity cost of gaining it.

I might even go as far as to say that they anti-synergize, much like Awaclus' assertion that Village and Silver are an anti-synergy. You probably don't want to buy them both in the same kingdom unless you really have to. (I know Awaclus' analyses generate a lot of consternation, but they often resonate with me. His analogy that trashing a single dead card is basically equivalent to gaining a free Laboratory is one that I repeat when teaching strategy IRL, and that helps hammer home the point. It's like watching someone play a Steward for coin and four Coppers and buying a Gold. I point out that they just bought a Cache for $6.)

Awaclus:

--- Quote from: Gherald on November 08, 2017, 09:00:40 pm ---You do need some way of getting multiple +draw plays for an engine, yes; that is simply what an engine is by definition. But I reserve the word 'synergy' for two things that interact in a way that is greater than the sum of their parts. Village and Smithy (or Ghost Town and Guide) are not that. They simply do what their respective parts do in an additive way.

Some might claim an engine's components, working together, give a net effect that is bigger than the sum of its parts. That's actually false I would say: for an engine to matter you also need a payload; a dominion engine without a payload accomplishes little of value on its own, and can be seen as purely additive, the way a deck full of Labs is additive (and not self-synergizing somehow. Oh look, my lab lets me play more labs!)

To make this even clearer just set the whole engine thing aside, and replace Smithy with generic terminal actions. Do village-type cards synergize with terminal actions? Obviously you want both, a village idiot deck and a deck of colliding terminals are not grand things. But is this a synergy? As I understand the word, no.

--- End quote ---

Village specifically requires you to play two more terminal Actions or otherwise it doesn't do anything. Therefore terminals synergize with it, and drawing terminals more so than others because they increase the likelihood of having a second terminal in your hand afterwards. You could say that this is just Village doing what it does, but the fact is that what is does is synergizing with terminals.

Village and Smithy also have negative synergy because you can play Smithy and draw a Village you can't play.

Ghost Town and Guide also have synergy for the exact same reason: Ghost Town's +action has to connect with two terminals for its effect to do everything it does, and Guide lets you have some control over what cards are in your hand by the time you get that +action, increasing the likelihood that you have two terminals. They also have antisynergy because they both help achieve a similar goal (more reliability in an engine) so they're somewhat redundant.

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