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Author Topic: Scrying Pool and Apothecary  (Read 2804 times)

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yuma

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Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« on: February 21, 2012, 11:12:43 pm »
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Can anyone direct me to some commentary on how to play both of these cards, together or independently. Any game logs of ideal play or an article of some sort would be great. I've searched in here and couldn't quite find what I was looking for in way of advice. These are two cards I struggle a lot in playing correctly. They both look like fun, powerful cards, but I consistently misplay them.

Thanks
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jonts26

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #1 on: February 21, 2012, 11:44:43 pm »
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Quick synopses:

Scrying Pool: Really great for engines, but you need a lot of ingredients to make it viable, otherwise it's really, really slow. First and foremost you need good action density (either through lots of actions or good trashing). Getting high action density usually means +buy somewhere (or at least virtual buy from Ironworks, Haggler, or something). Money producing actions are usually necessary. Your best friends are cards which give buys and money like markets and festivals. Villages may or may not be required depending on if you want to play more than 1 terminal per turn. You are hampering early game economy so cheap spammable actions are your friends as well. I'm a huge fan of woodcutter in these decks (as long as you have a village). I'd say you usually want to open potion and get 5-6 pools quickly. You will fall behind most big money strategies, but hopefully you can catch up with no problem.

Apothecary: Probably my favorite potion card. It really has two main functions. One as a primary strategy and one as some engine grease. The engine strategy should be obvious. Eat up the coppers so your other cards can draw good things, but perhaps more importantly, rearranging your draw pile to suit whatever plan you have. As you can imagine, both of these abilities combo very well with scrying pool. Apothecary grabs the coppers and lets you rearrange for maximum card draw from the pool.

As a primary strategy, apothecary is really the best copper wanting card out there. It's not going to be the fastest in big money by itself but it needs only a little support. The biggest drawback of apothecary is that when played en mass, it can really screw up your next turn by leaving green on top. Warehouse, Native Village or similar cards are your friends here. Also you really want coppers but for obvious reasons, you don't want to waste entire turns buying copper. So +buy comes in very handy. Apothecary is rarely lightning fast but it makes up for it in consistency most of the time.
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Epoch

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #2 on: March 01, 2012, 11:33:58 am »
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Scrying Pool: Really great for engines, but you need a lot of ingredients to make it viable, otherwise it's really, really slow. First and foremost you need good action density (either through lots of actions or good trashing). Getting high action density usually means +buy somewhere (or at least virtual buy from Ironworks, Haggler, or something). Money producing actions are usually necessary. Your best friends are cards which give buys and money like markets and festivals. Villages may or may not be required depending on if you want to play more than 1 terminal per turn. You are hampering early game economy so cheap spammable actions are your friends as well. I'm a huge fan of woodcutter in these decks (as long as you have a village). I'd say you usually want to open potion and get 5-6 pools quickly. You will fall behind most big money strategies, but hopefully you can catch up with no problem.

Scrying Pool also really, really likes Cantrips, making Hamlet one of the best complements to SP (+buy, low-cost action, village when necessary).  Pure no-op Cantrips like Great Hall (or to a slightly lesser extent Pearl Diver, or Village if there's no use for the other +actions) are, obviously still no-ops, but if you draw two cantrips with SP, you play the cantrips, get whatever their bonuses are, and dig further down for more SPs to cycle your deck, which keeps you going.  Makes it a lot quicker to get to the point where you're turning your deck every turn.
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DStu

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #3 on: March 01, 2012, 11:55:05 am »
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Apothecary and Pool also work together quite well. Usually the Pool is not so strong in the beginning, when all these Coppers and no actions are in the deck. Apotecary is strong in the beginning, and supports the Pool afterwards.

In a Scrying Pool deck, you can start with 1-2 Apothecarys, then go for Pools. This way you cycle quite fast and play the Potion often, as the Apothecary puts it in your hand. You really would like a buy already at these state, because often you have hands like 5P, which can be something like Village+Pool if you have a +buy.
When you have Apothecary and Scrying Pool in your hand, play the Apothecary first. This way you
a) get rid of Coppers and Potions that stop the drawing of the Pool
b) can place Victorycards at the first position to discard it with the pool, than a bunch of actions and at the last positions the treasure to draw.
c) after you played the Pool, another potential Apothecary can dig into fresh Coppers.
d) if you already have all the cards you can use this turn in hand, you can also place a treasure/victory in front of a say other Scrying Pool, to prepare your next turn.
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RisingJaguar

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #4 on: March 01, 2012, 11:57:38 am »
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Just to add to scrying pool (all above points are great).  There's a tipping point with trashing that's a fine line imo.  It definitely loves early trashing for obvious reasons.  However with something like chapel at times, the extra time to trash AND buy scrying pool is too slow and the benefit is too little (I mean you trashed everything already, an engine without scrying pool can likely be built). 

Also, it helps to have a strong attack (non-cursing, because it'll likely be gone by then), lets say militia or ghost ship.  Having a strong attack will make your scrying pool engine a better investment. 

Again the point of scrying pool is to have a superior method to drawing your deck out.  So for decks built around wharf or torturer, its usually not worth the investment.  Also, its best friend is vineyard.
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ehunt

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #5 on: March 01, 2012, 01:24:05 pm »
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0. Perhaps everyone knows this, but I'll just say it in case it wasn't clear: these are both cards that you want to pick up early. If you're buying your potion on turn 8 or 9 for a scrying pool or apothecary, you're going to lose (contrast golem and possession).

1/2. Apothecary counters jester very well, although nothing hurts more than a stolen alchemy card when the opponent didn't buy a potion. In theory, it counters mountebank for the same reason, but in practice the early potion investment likely prevents you from buying an early mountebank, so it's not worth it (for this reason, I might consider going for familiar over mountebank on a board with apothecary, although I've never thought about it).

1. apothecary is an A+ counter to ambassador. open ambassador/potion, get rid of one estate instead of two coppers; win.  (n.b. i lost to amb/amb doing this yesterday! but i didn't get my ambassador till turn 5, so i blame fate instead of myself, which is actually the best strategy for getting better at dominion.)

2. scrying pool loves a mid to late game saboteur if there's extra actions around. scrying pool's spy ability can guarantee the saboteur will hurt, and saboteur makes up for scrying pool's slowness by effectively buying you a duchy that doesn't crowd up your deck each time you play it.

3. i'm going to disagree that potion opening is mandatory for scrying pool. scrying pool wants some trashing, so a moneylender or remake is sometimes a better opening (but definitely get a potion before you shuffle again). if there's pawn or especially hamlet on the board, i might even open remodel! still, usually potion.

4. one other possible scenario for delaying the scrying pool purchase a shuffle is university. Sometimes it's a horrible trap, but if there's, say, market or highway, it might be worth losing the pool split 6-4 to have a much more action-dense deck.
« Last Edit: March 01, 2012, 01:29:00 pm by ehunt »
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DStu

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #6 on: March 01, 2012, 04:32:02 pm »
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4. one other possible scenario for delaying the scrying pool purchase a shuffle is university. Sometimes it's a horrible trap, but if there's, say, market or highway, it might be worth losing the pool split 6-4 to have a much more action-dense deck.

On many good Pool boards you don't really need 5 Pools. If you want to get it going with weak trashing you might need it, but if most of your card are actions anyway, and some of them also draw (and if it's just one card); and you don't want to do something like Pool-Village-Vault-Pool-Village-Vault-Megaturn, me feeling is the you are also fine with 4 Pools.
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Ozle

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Re: Scrying Pool and Apothecary
« Reply #7 on: March 01, 2012, 06:41:24 pm »
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I always like to have as many pools as non-action cards you have, that way you are pretty much guarenteed to draw your whole deck.

However it rarely works this way in practice. I also I feel it works well with University, +2 Actions so you can have more teminals, and of course the Uni feeds the engine
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