This combo from Menagerie works well on all boards and leads to a superfast game. Way of The Butterfly lets you turn 7$-actions into provinces, and Animal Fair is a very easy to get $7-action card. The combo resolves around buying any actions, trashing them to get Animal Fairs and turning those into provinces.
Strategy:There's no setup phase needed, you start from the get-go following these simple rules:
- If you have no action in hand, you buy any action you can afford
- If you have one action other than Animal Fair in hand, you use it in your buy phase as the price for Animal Fair
- If you have multiple actions without Animal Fair in hand, you may play as many as you like, as long as you keep one in hand to buy Animal Fair with it
- If you have an Animal Fair in hand, you play it as the Butterfly to turn it into a province
With this you have a sure way to very fast provinces. The only pitfall may be in your Animal Fairs colliding, so that you have to discard one unused and only see it again in your next shuffle.
Example game: Turn 1&2: buy two action cards
Turn 3&4: Assume they don't collide, you can trash both of them on turn 3 resp. 4 for 2 Animal Fairs
Turn 5: probably no action in hand, so you buy a new action
Turn 6: maybe you draw an Animal Fair here, play it as the butterfly to turn it into a province, and buy another action
Turn 7-xx: rinse and repeat, always turning Animal Fairs into provinces during your play phase, and using the other actions to buy new Animal Fairs in your buy phase. If you are lucky, you may get the 4th province as early as turn 9 or something.
Most of the time, this combo is completely independent of the rest of the board, cause in most cases you do not care what your actions do, you just use them to buy Animal Fairs. There are, however, some action cards that work better than others:
- Most important: cards with on-gain- or on-trash-effects: First one that comes to mind should be Fortress - You can use one Fortress to buy Animals Fairs again and again. This works even better with sources of +Buy, as you get the Fortress back into your hand after trashing for Animal Fair, so you can use it again for a second one. Another card that works well is Lackeys, as it's on-gain-effect provides you with villagers, that can help with situation in which your Animal Fairs collide
After that, there are some actions that work well if you get to play them (i.e. only when they collide with other actions):
- Trashers: Chapel, Steward, ...: You can play the trasher to thin your deck, hoping to draw your Action Fairs more frequently later on.
- Cheap sources of +Buy: Pawn, Candlestick Maker, Market Square, ...:. They may set up a turn where you can get multiple Animal Fairs at once, if you happen to still have multiple actions in your hand after playing the cheap +Buy. (Travelling Fair would work super well, as it gives you +Buy without needing to play an action. But it's highly unlikely for a kingdom to include both Travelling Fair and Way of The Butterfly, let alone Animal Fair ...)
- Action card gainers: Workshop, Ironworks, ...: These are great to play as they give you further fuel for Animal Fairs.
- 4$-actions: If both players go for this combo, provinces are likely to be split 4-4, so it might be useful to have a $4-card that can be butterflied into a Duchy
- Villages: These might help out with collision of Animal Fairs (If you haven't trashed them until that point)
Most of the time though, you are not even going to play your actions, as they are all gonna be trashed for Animal Fairs.
Counters:It's tough to think of any hard counters.
Trasher attacks could work if they find your Animal Fairs, but even then they'll have a hard time putting in good use (e.g. Swindler would need another &7-card on the board, which is higly unlikely; Knights or Giant only trash $3-$6 cards).
Handsize-Attacks don't do much, because you only need one action in hand to get an Animal Fair, and only one Animal Fair in hand to get a province.
Junkers only delay the process marginally.
Deck order attacks might be the worst when they discard your Animal Fairs, delaying their turning-into-province until the next shuffle.
That's it for this combo. One last thought I want to mention is that the theme is just great: You're going to all the Animal Fairs, seeing all the big and strong Animals - but their strongest power only comes to light when you turn them into Butterflies