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[PhallenFoenix]

If there is one card I lose to more often than any other, its boards with Horn of Plenty.  I have no idea what kind of board HoP is a viable strategy on, and how to build it when it is.  Anyone have any intruction on the matter?

[Toskk]

If there is one card I lose to more often than any other, its boards with Horn of Plenty.  I have no idea what kind of board HoP is a viable strategy on, and how to build it when it is.  Anyone have any intruction on the matter?

For me, the big question is whether or not the Kingdom will allow HoP's to be trashed for Provinces. Copper + Silver + Gold + HoP means at least four other (unique) action cards chained together. Typically, chaining together 3 cantrips and a terminal is a really poor bet, but if one (or more) of the four actions is a larger non-terminal draw (e.g. Stables), and there are cheap cantrips or cycling cards to pick up with extra HoP buys, your odds of being able to trade HoP's for Provinces is pretty good.

[jsh357]

In my experience, the most important thing is generally you need a card that's able to give you large hands.  Apprentice, Tactician, Wharf, Governor, Margrave, Crossroads, King's Court + any draw, and so on.  There are lots of enablers.  Menagerie may very well be the best if you can get a Menagerie engine rolling, as it also benefits from variety.  I like to get a horn fairly early too, which will help you gain the needed cards for the combo.

It's easier to get up to 8 different cards when you have lots of nonterminal actions like Pearl Diver, Peddler, and so on, but you still don't want to overdo buying them.  Trashing coppers and Estates is pretty important if you have the option of doing it.  Alternate money cards are nice to get the variety count up, but bear in mind they never draw you more cards so they don't help on their own. 

HoP is not always a good strategy, even with enablers.  If there is another fast combo on the board, you're often better off ignoring it or just using it to gain actions or late Duchies.  I would say it's pretty rare to pull off a HoP deck without competition if your opponent is playing well.

Remember to be patient, too.  Pay close attention to your reshuffle, as the temptation to continue drawing cards on turns where you aren't going to get up to 8 is often there.  Sometimes it's better to stop and gain more Horns/Wharfs/etc than to bank on a Province when it's early enough.

[jonts26]

I think people too often think they need to get HoPs up to 8 for them to be useful. The card is certainly at it's best when you can trash it for a province, but it can work when you're looking to add a few cheap cards as well. In this manner it acts like a workshop but with the huge benefit of being a treasure, not an action. For example, I recently played an embassy/BM game where I grabbed a HoP with my second $5 hand. With embassy, copper, silver, gold, and HoP that's $5. I ended up using it a couple of times to grab an extra silver, a second embassy and finally trashing it for a duchy. It's probably not a huge benefit in this type of deck, but it can be helpful.

[DG]

Here's a link a relevant article from the DominionTheory site  http://dominionstrategy.com/2012/01/20/guest-article-annotated-game-9/. A good way to use the horn of plenty seems to be drawing big hands with a lot of card variety each turn, not necessarily having different cards in your deck. If you can time the first purchase right you can then use the horn of plenty to add more variety, more drawing power, or more horns to the deck. One big advantage of the horn of plenty is that you can largely ignore a conventional economy and use card gaining to acquire cards of any value, even up to provinces and colonies.

[Kirian]

If there is no source of +Buy hanging around, HoP can be amazingly useful; this is especially true if there are powerful $5s available or if you can easily get HoP to $6.  Duration cards are great for HoP, as you can sometimes use the same unique card for two turns in a row.

Note that if you're routinely getting HoP to $5, you probably have $6 or so in play; HoP basically makes that hand worth $11... though you're forced to split the $11.

[ddubois]

Yeah, I don't think you need to be getting a Province to make HoP good.  Getting a a free lab or hunting party is fine by me.  Still, I decline to buy it on most boards.

[Asklepios]

I also think its worth noting that HoP does better if there are strong $2,3,4 cards there, as you can start using HoP sooner. Also, it works well with Vineyards games, as you can use it to add action cards without using up precious buys.

[jomini]

HoP can be used in several fashions:
1. It can be a pseudo +buy. If you need a +buy, but one isn't out, HoP can let you much more efficiently build an engine. This is particularly useful if your engine requires multiple components. E.g. village/torturer/chap benefits greatly from a HoP as you will virtually always be able to get a village and pretty easily hit torturer or gold (copper, silver, village, chap, torturer gets you to 5). Being able to pick up both engine components every turn is pretty big, later in the game you can just start spamming gold and province with a late game conversion of HoP -> duchy to break a tie.
2. It can be used as alternate payout. For instance let's say you want a goons engine on a board with hamlet, chap, and menage. Chap, hamlet, menage, copper, silver, and HoP gives you a goons far quicker than going for multiple silvers or golds. Further it can keep on being used for goons allowing you to use your buys for more hamlets/menages. If you hit 5, HoP is a good buy.
3. It can be used for the province megaturn. Ideally you want a good number of unique, cheap cantrips. Pawn, hamlet, menage, pear diver, haven, and peddler all work quite well here. Also some source of +cards is also good - smithy, lab, golem, hunting party, etc. all work well. Pretty much you simply build a nice engine (trashing & sifting are big helps), load it up with the best of the unique cards that aren't already part of your engine, and then cash out can secure a more points that your opponent can before game end.

[Jack Rudd]

[RisingJaguar]

It's pretty clear that a lot of people do think of it as just a mega-turn type card.  It's only gained on 30% of boards, which has to be too low.  Probably not the 70% I gain it, but 50% has to be a sound number, for all the reasons already stated. 

[GreyICE]

Best combo with HoP in the game is Hunting Party.

HoP needs variety.  Hunting Party gives you variety.  HoP gains more hunting parties.

I LOVE it in HP decks.

[Tables]

Best combo with HoP in the game is Hunting Party.

HoP needs variety.  Hunting Party gives you variety.  HoP gains more hunting parties.

I LOVE it in HP decks.

According to the stats, Menagerie, City and Lab are better for HoP than Hunting Party.
http://councilroom.com/supply_win?&targets=Horn%20of%20Plenty&interaction=Cost%3E%3D0&nested=false&unconditional=true
Then again, I'm not sure correlation implies causation here.

[GreyICE]

Best combo with HoP in the game is Hunting Party.

HoP needs variety.  Hunting Party gives you variety.  HoP gains more hunting parties.

I LOVE it in HP decks.

According to the stats, Menagerie, City and Lab are better for HoP than Hunting Party.
http://councilroom.com/supply_win?&targets=Horn%20of%20Plenty&interaction=Cost%3E%3D0&nested=false&unconditional=true
Then again, I'm not sure correlation implies causation here.

Menagerie I guess I could understand, there's conflict between the $5 Hunting Party and the $5 Horn. 
City I guess I can understand, if you're going city engine you want to empty the cities as fast as possible and frankly it doesn't matter if the horn ever hits 8, as long as you get your cities.
But Lab better than Hunting Party for a card that needs unique cards?

No.

[randomdragoon]

Hunting party isn't good at getting multiple HoPs in your hand, and you can't play HoPs before your actions. For building a megaturn engine (one that aims to convert several HoPs into provinces at once) I would prefer Lab over Hunting Party for this reason. Lab's drawing power is good enough that you can get enough variety, anyway.

[Robz888]

Tactician is a really elite card for Horn of Plenty--it even counts as a card in play for Horn on the turn after you play it.

(Not that I'd know. I'm really, really, really awful with Horn of Plenty.)

[brokoli]

Horn of plenty is one of the most difficult card to understand and to use perfectly. I think it deserves an article in the site. From my experience :
If you prepare a HoP megaturn, trashers are really important. The best are probably : chapel, remake and spice merchant.
Chapel and remake are often very good, spice merchant is nice for the draw abililty.

Cantrips are very good too. Scheme is one of the best option : put a scheme each turn on the top of your deck, and you'll have another card for your HoP megaturn. Spy and Haven are nice, Highway and peddler are excellent.

As mentioned above : Hunting party, menagerie, Tactician are excellent combo cards for HoP.

Often, the best option is to buy an early HoP, gaining two others before your megaturn.

Otherwise, I agree with jonts26 : you don't need to get HoP up to 8...

[Asklepios]

There's a few issues there.

I think (Hunting Party + one gold + a few silver +maybe one terminal) is such a strong and fast deck that sometimes its not actually worth adding too much variety to your deck, but certainly a single Horn of Plenty to add more Hunting Parties isn't a terrible idea if thats all it adds. The problem is when you buy the Horn of Plenty though, as you seriously slow your early pace by not getting Hunting Parties at every opportunity.

In contrast, Laboratories are generally most worthwhile with engine decks, and Horn of Plenty feeds engine decks well.

As for Tactician, the only problem with Horn of Plenty is it means having to play treasure, which might mean you don't get to play another Tactican, barring Black Market. And if you're playing non-consecutive Tacticians with money, then Horn of Plenty might instead have been a $5 attack card, or even an extra $2 treasure that gets you to Province.

Of course, if Black Market is in play, Horn of Plenty gets a lot better, and then the Tactician is definitely a good combo with the Horn.

[dondon151]

I think people too often think they need to get HoPs up to 8 for them to be useful. The card is certainly at it's best when you can trash it for a province, but it can work when you're looking to add a few cheap cards as well. In this manner it acts like a workshop but with the huge benefit of being a treasure, not an action. For example, I recently played an embassy/BM game where I grabbed a HoP with my second $5 hand. With embassy, copper, silver, gold, and HoP that's $5. I ended up using it a couple of times to grab an extra silver, a second embassy and finally trashing it for a duchy. It's probably not a huge benefit in this type of deck, but it can be helpful.

I feel that in the types of decks where HoP is a good card when it doesn't get to $8, it's likely to get to $8 at some point in the game.

The major problem with HoP, in my opinion, is that it's difficult for the player to make its gaining characteristic useful early on. HoP is not a card that you can (or would even want to) typically get before the first shuffle, and it's not likely that you'll be able to reliably get its value up to $5 until after the third shuffle. By then, the cards that you gain via HoP don't get to see as much play. If you use HoP to settle for $4 card gains, then it's basically just a less reliable, expensive Workshop that doesn't take up an action - but you'd seriously would probably never pay that much for a Workshop analog.

EDIT: Just did some quick solitaire testing; adding an HoP to a pure HP + 1 terminal deck is probably a bad idea because there's a pretty good risk of drawing the HoP "dead" (i.e., without enough other cards in hand to increase its value to $5). With good luck you can empty out the HPs and grab 4 Provinces and a Duchy in 13 turns, though.

[jomini]

There's a few issues there.

I think (Hunting Party + one gold + a few silver +maybe one terminal) is such a strong and fast deck that sometimes its not actually worth adding too much variety to your deck, but certainly a single Horn of Plenty to add more Hunting Parties isn't a terrible idea if thats all it adds. The problem is when you buy the Horn of Plenty though, as you seriously slow your early pace by not getting Hunting Parties at every opportunity.

In contrast, Laboratories are generally most worthwhile with engine decks, and Horn of Plenty feeds engine decks well.

As for Tactician, the only problem with Horn of Plenty is it means having to play treasure, which might mean you don't get to play another Tactican, barring Black Market. And if you're playing non-consecutive Tacticians with money, then Horn of Plenty might instead have been a $5 attack card, or even an extra $2 treasure that gets you to Province.

Of course, if Black Market is in play, Horn of Plenty gets a lot better, and then the Tactician is definitely a good combo with the Horn.

Outpost/haven (and a number of other options) allow you to play a tactician before each real turn and still play treasure. This is more rare than BM (being a 2.7ish card combo instead of a 2 card combo), but it is doable. Likewise, playing around with golems can also allow you to play treasures & tac (e.g. the infamous golem/tac/library combo allows you to hit 7 cards and have a tactician hand next turn) - depending on setup you can do this a lot of ways (e.g. KC/golem/NV/tac).

In any event, hitting a mega horn turn off double tac is pretty easy. You will start with the tac out, most likely have a a copper and a silver, and if double tac was viable likely have a few other actions in play as well. Setting up something like university/terminal silvers/tac/hop is not  bad megaturn strategy.

[chwhite]

Native Village is also a great enabler for HoP; I just wrote a short article about this combo here.