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Author Topic: Compare the Single-Card Engines  (Read 18883 times)

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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #50 on: September 15, 2011, 03:07:29 pm »
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Okay, that card selection, replacing scrying pool with menagerie, buying only the cards you bought, plus chapel. One turn slower than you, but I probably bought colonies too early. (I'm one turn ahead of you to 4 colonies, though) I suspect lookout helps scrying pool pretty substantially since it almost guarantees drawing at least two cards.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201109/15/game-20110915-112502-8b958dbc.html
OK, now make that work without the specific combo of Festival and Horse Traders. Also, the words "plus Chapel" are doing an awful lot of work for you there. I will say I'm rather impressed that you did find a specific 3-card combo (plus trashers) where Menagerie is the sole drawing card in an effective engine, but that falls squarely under the "delicate combination that is not usually going to be available" umbrella.

Now, I used Horse Traders because it happened to be randomly generated on that board, and could easily have done without it entirely. Festival would have been equally useful if it only came with +1 Action, and as far as the actual drawing engine functionality of the deck goes, precisely equal card-draw could have been achieved if you replaced every Festival in the deck with literally any other action card, and removing all Festivals from the deck outright gives us precisely the same card-draw of non-Festival cards. Your engine, on the other hand, is highly reliant on both Horse Traders and the extra actions from Festival - they are part of the engine, since the engine cannot achieve good card-draw without them.

Lest you accuse Scrying Pool/Festival plus a trasher of being a delicate combo (though 2 cards are much more likely to find together than 3), note that Pawn will produce similar results even if forbidden from drawing cards. If we add back in +1 Card cantrips (which I never meant to exclude, and which are a part of many successful Scrying Pool decks), Market will serve nicely. Or basically any cantrip whatsoever (even Great Hall or Pearl Diver!) combined with any source of +Buy will make for a cromulent engine.
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #51 on: September 15, 2011, 03:36:40 pm »
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<a href=http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110724-182005-38d86cfa.html>Menagerie Sample Game one</a>

<a href=http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110711-024312-d7aac25d.html>Sample Game two</a>

<a href=http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110814-182830-006f89fc.html>Sample Game three</a>

<a href=http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20110712-040030-023d4093.html>Sample Game four</a>
Game 1: Hamlet and Masquerade are important cogs in the engine.

Game 2: I'll give you this one! There's no super-specific combo that was needed to pull this off either. Outpost should be considered an engine card here, but it's merely icing on the cake of an already good engine. This is the sort of log I was looking for when I asked for logs, so hat's off to you. I will say I do not think this sort of result is achievable on anywhere near the broad selection of boards that can breed effective Scrying Pool engines.

Game 3: Not impressed by the performance of this engine, but sure, you draw a lot of cards with Menagerie (even if they are a bunch of clashing terminals and limited treasure-based buying power). Your opponent's performance is much less impressive, of course. I would expect a deck with little more than a Witch and a Goons + treasure (and an occasional opportunistic Peddler or Menagerie buy) to soundly beat both strategies on offer here.

Game 4: Good usage of Menagerie with other important engine cards. Minion is the most obvious one, but Apprentice and Salvager/Village are used to clean out duplicates to enable Menagerie draws. I will grant that Menagerie is the primary card-draw in this engine (which is what I asked for after all), though it's still not a single-card engine.


edit: It's clear you both love Menagerie, and that's cool. It's a good card and certainly a fun card. I like it too. I mean, easily the most fun deck I've played lately was a Hamlet/Torturer/Menagerie engine. But I'm not sure where you got the idea that just because it's a good card, and it can frequently be a part of a good engine, that you must defend it to the bitter death as a single-card engine in its own right. Like dudes, in the world, a thing can be great without being great in every conceivable way that it is possible to be great. Chocolate doesn't have to go well with garlic to be awesome. If I give you a stack of 10 Scrying Pools, boom, you have an engine. Signed, sealed, delivered. If I give you a stack of 10 Menageries, you have a lot more work to do to incorporate it into an engine.

Based on Game 2 above I'll happily grant that it is possible to build a mono-Menagerie engine. So: put it on the list, sure. I would put it squarely at the bottom though, because I think it's an awfully tall order to build that engine, requiring a rather specific sort of board (if not any specific (N>2)-card combo).
« Last Edit: September 15, 2011, 03:56:27 pm by guided »
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Mean Mr Mustard

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #52 on: September 15, 2011, 03:53:36 pm »
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I didn't look too  hard or long, guided.  I play Menagerie pretty heavily, and it isn't my best win with card, though it is fifth in lowest number of turns, .75 turns faster than Scrying Pool.  The main reason I would rank Menagerie higher is that, unlike Scrying Pool, the general public can't mirror match it as well, because they usually do not lay the proper groundwork for Menagerie to work as an engine card.
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Fangz

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #53 on: September 15, 2011, 03:54:10 pm »
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I would be quite interested how you'd do without festival. Festival contributed $20 of your colony buys. Having to make do without it would require far more treasures than you used and so damage your draw. I can't really see you getting to all colonies anywhere near as fast.

With me, the horse trader was really only important for removing duplicate colonies. Realistically I'd be going for four colonies plus a forge, and so could have done without.

I could have done without the festival horse traders combo. It's not like it's the only cards which will work! Off the top of my head:

Any village + vault, secret chamber or black market
University + remodel type card
Warehouse
Pawn would do in a pinch
Haven
Hamlet
Upgrade

Menagerie isn't fool proof, but you are greatly underestimating how often it's very powerful.
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #54 on: September 15, 2011, 04:07:10 pm »
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Is there any way to get either of you to recognize the distinction between "engine that uses card X (perhaps heavily)" and "engine that relies on nothing except card X to achieve card draw"? I keep trying, but I'm out of ideas at this point.

"Menagerie is good at drawing when combined with discard/trash for benefit cards." - Yes, it is! You know what? Torturer is good at drawing when combined with Villages.

"the horse trader was really only important"... b-b-bt! Stop there! It was an important part of the engine. Indeed it was extremely important for the continued functioning of the deck from turn 13 onward. That's 6 turns! (well, 5 good turns and that one clunker at turn 18)  - Again, pull all those Festivals out of the Scrying Pool deck and it still draws itself every turn.
« Last Edit: September 15, 2011, 04:09:19 pm by guided »
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Mean Mr Mustard

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #55 on: September 15, 2011, 04:14:29 pm »
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/shrug.  I have no use for arguing semantics with you.  I consider Menagerie to be one of five or so elite engine cards, and whether or not it is a <i>one card engine</i>, fine.  You win.  Happy?
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #56 on: September 15, 2011, 04:33:21 pm »
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Oh, I get it now, you accidentally stumbled in here from the "Compare every engine card ever" thread. Sorry, this is the "Compare the Single-Card Engines" thread!
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Dave970

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #57 on: September 15, 2011, 04:38:36 pm »
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Scrying Pool without the Festivals (sub any +coin card, as well), from that example, wasn't doing squat.  Plus, it was a solo game... a real opponent would have to be clueless to not gain some portion of those cards.  Scrying Pool and Treasures (to enable gaining the VPs), would limit the amount of cards drawn by any given Scrying Pool.

I totally get your argument that Menagerie needs another engine component, but so does Scrying Pool, and the example given showed that, as well.

The argument is needs to re-center on the definition of "engine".  If card-drawers are the sole component, let's go back to the "Compare the Smithies" thread.  If card-drawers are the sole component, what wins in the simulator between BMU+Smithy and BMU+Scrying Pool?

As was said earlier in this thread, about the only "self-sufficient" "engine" (note all the quotes) is Minion.  It, by itself, provides both the cycling and the cash to win.  To a lesser extent, a Market variant will accomplish this, as well.  Scrying Pool, plus money, plus green, without outside assistance, will grind to a halt.
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #58 on: September 15, 2011, 05:02:24 pm »
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An engine is something that cycles cards. That's it and that's all. Of course you also need some reason that cycling cards is useful, whether it's provided directly by the engine cards (Minion), or by some "payload" outside the engine (5 Banks and 7 Coppers at the end of a Worker's Village/Envoy chain). It's obvious what is meant by "Single-Card Engine" in the context of this thread - a card that can with no other help provide all the net card draw required to run the engine - and I'm done fighting all the feigned confusion about it. If you want to turn this into a more general discussion about enginey nonterminals, I hereby abdicate all responsibility for hewing the thread to the original topic :P
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chwhite

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #59 on: September 15, 2011, 06:52:23 pm »
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Well… I made lists for the Villages and the Smithies, and I still like making lists.  So here's one for this category.  Sort of.  The category "single-card engine" is nebulous and misleading, as the preceding argument proves all too well.  The fact is, virtually no card in Dominion perhaps save Minion is good enough to be an engine entirely by itself (not even Scrying Pool)- even HP and Lab need Treasure to work, and besides "single-card engine" encompasses a wider variety of mechanisms than are really coherent.  In particular, Minion and Nobles work really differently than most of these cards.

So I'm going to try and redirect this conversation to where it should have been at the beginning: Compare the Labs.  By Labs I mean what the OP was roughly going for: any card that provides +1 Action and *at least* +1 Card with a chance for more, Laboratory being the most basic iteration of this idea.  In other words, non-terminals which have as their function increasing your handsize.  That's a much more coherent category.  It also means some additions and subtractions to the OP's list: welcome, Apothecary and Caravan.  Goodbye, Minion and Nobles.  (You're great cards but you don't really fit here).  Sorry Scout and Shanty Town, you can fizzle; sorry Warehouse and Cellar, cycling is nice but you decrease handsize instead.  I'll let Activated Cities stay in, though the +2 Actions isn't shared by any other cards here.

I'm not going to bother putting them in tiers.  But there are a couple natural gaps: the best Lab is noticeably better than the rest, and the worst is similarly worse than the rest.  Most of these cards are quite good.

1. Hunting Party  I'm not going to rehash in detail all the reasons why Hunting Party is REAL ULTIMATE POWER but suffice to say, it is.  Ninety percent of the time, it's a strictly better Lab: probably a little worse as a 5/2 open and if you buy too many the last one'll just Chancellor you, but it's a better enabler for Big Money and it's better for sifting through junk and it's a better enabler to play your one linchpin attack over and over and it's a better enabler for Conspirators and many other chains and… you get the idea.  Imagine if Village was a top-tier card already, and then Farming Village came along and it also cost $3.  It has a better "win rate with" than any card that isn't a Prize, a curse attack, or Platinum; and its win rate without is nearly as impressive.  We're talking about the best $5 non-attack (better than Wharf and Tactician IMO), and probably the third-best $5 overall.  Hunting Party is cool, and by cool I mean totally sweet.

2. Menagerie  Bet you didn't expect Menagerie to be this high!  Well, it is.  Unlike HP, Menagerie requires support to work well, but that support consists of "any trashing, at all, or maybe just the presence of hand-reduction attacks, or heck, cycling, or disappearing Actions like Festival/FV…" In other words, it's very rare to find a board that doesn't support Menagerie at least a little bit.  And, well, when you can get Menagerie to work, it's *twice as good as a Lab* for *barely half the price* and is even better than that against Goons/Militia/Ghost Ship. Even if it only works a third of the time, that's not just a bargain, it's a bargain that makes Fishing Village look overpriced.  Oh, yeah, Fishing Village, which goes great with Menagerie and is its primary competition for third-best $3 card.   Obviously, it's kind of hard to get it to hit more than twice in a turn, unless maybe you're using it to supplement Minions or something, but it has so many other things going for it, and it's not like extra Menageries hurt.  I buy it 95 percent of the time, and I don't think that's too much at all.

3. Laboratory  The standard.  Unlike Village and Smithy, the basic iteration is one of the best, and I say that as someone who is less a Lab fan than most people here. Most variations on Village and Smithy add bells and whistles, Lab is strong enough that most variations have to make it worse instead.  Other cards on this list can sometimes give you more, or do it for less, but they don't have the versatility or dependability of good old Lab.

4. Scrying Pool In the right environment, Scrying Pool can be absolutely abusive above and beyond common sense, drawing dozens of cards at a time.  And it attacks too!  (Well, Spy is kind of a piddling attack, but still.)  Problem is, the right environment is rarer than you think.  If you can't trash your Coppers and Estates, or you can't get money (and preferably +Buy too) out of your Actions, then Scrying Pool is merely a Spy you had to buy a Potion to get.  And that's no good!

Don't get me wrong, Scrying Pool is an incredibly powerful engine card, the situations where it is at least useful are pretty common, and I do like playing Scrying Pool unlike many here.  But it is situational enough (and inconvenient enough to pick up) that it can't be any higher than fourth.

5. Caravan Pretty simple: a Lab next turn for $1 less.  I think that the Duration effect is more damaging to Caravan than it is to, say, Fishing Village, because the +Card also has the effect of making it more likely to miss a reshuffle, and unlike FV it doesn't give any benefit this turn.  It's a reasonably strong and reasonably cheap card, and it has the kinda-awesome property of making Workshop and Talisman actually worth it, but it's also probably not as strong as its reputation.

6. Activated Cities Talked about these a bit in the Villages thread, basically what I said there holds here too.  One thing worth mentioning is that I think they really don't work without support, because without support a player just going for money and Provinces is probably going to be faster.  Their potential is sort of like Scrying Pool in that way, but the triggers are much different: for example, Curse games are great for Cities, because they drain the pile, whereas they kill Pools dead.  Cities also play much better with Treasure-based decks.

7. Apothecary Apothecary is only this low because all the other cards on this list are so good: I think it's actually quite useful and underrated.  The most salient bit about Apothecary is that it improves both this hand and the next: you get Coppers to spend, and they're cleared out of your next hand.  In the absence of good trashing, I'd even go so far to say it's better than Scrying Pool  (Though of course its ceiling is much lower).  Works great with Coppersmith and Wishing Well, and works even better than that with Ambassador: I've had great success recently opening Amb/Potion with the Potion just for grabbing Apothecaries.  You cycle like a demon, pass back Estates, and have lots of Coppers to buy stuff with quickly.  Requires a slightly different play-style, and is rendered useless by Chapel/Moneylender, but good Apothecary boards are way more frequent than you think.

8. Alchemist  It's a Lab-plus!  Except that it's really hard to get, and you have to really go out of your way to get the extra benefit, doing weird things like buying multiple Potions or Herbalist.  It's great for building up mega-turns, if you've got Colonies and/or +Buy, but it's so slow and also fragile: hurt badly by Masq, Minion, and curse-givers.  If it's just a Province game, chances are it's just not worth going Alchemist.

9. Wishing Well No surprise here.  Its upside is merely a Lab, its downside is… far far more likely.  Menagerie outclasses this card, in virtually ever way, so hard.  I think it's a little better than people normally give it credit for, but it's still last here by a wide margin.  If you can mass buy/gain them, Wishing for Wishing Wells is fun and sometimes profitable, and they work great with Apothecary (the WW/Scout combo is much worse and almost never worth it).  And there's no harm and adding a few to your Goons deck.   I think they're about as mediocre as Shanty Town, which I guess is fitting.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 02:31:07 am by chwhite »
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tlloyd

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #60 on: September 15, 2011, 07:15:03 pm »
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An engine is something that cycles cards. That's it and that's all.

This is, to me, the most interesting part of your otherwise very circular debate (speaking to you collectively). I also think you guys aren't going to get anywhere until you come to an understanding about what you mean by an engine. I for one wonder if it is as simple as "cycles cards". A handful of Warehouses would cycle through a lot of cards, but I doubt we'd think of that as an engine. I can't put my finger on it, but the concept that comes to mind for an engine is "control". An engine strategy doesn't rely on simply increasing the average value of a random five-card hand--it tries to remove the randomness through some combination of drawing, cycling, and trashing. A single-card engine would thus be one that allows you to reliably reach and play your purchase-power cards on nearly every turn. It would work with a LOT of scrying pools, but not so much with any number of menageries alone. So I'm gonna have to go with Guided on this one.
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #61 on: September 15, 2011, 07:26:41 pm »
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I also think you guys aren't going to get anywhere until you come to an understanding about what you mean by an engine.
I probably should have worded that quoted comment differently, just to say "in the context of this thread". There are different meanings for "engine", and one perfectly good meaning would include any non-cycling "payload" cards that your cycling machinery is meant to play. But what defines it as an engine per se (as opposed to just a strong deck that consistently generates VPs) is the cycling machinery. And it's absolutely clear from the OP that the intended topic of this thread was always the cycling machinery itself without regard to the payload (except that it should be readily possible to generate some useful payload using that machinery).

A mono-Warehouse engine is still an engine. But it's probably a bad engine (though I have run them with occasional success on Treasure Map boards - you just need to find 3 Golds within 2 plays of Warehouse, or 2 Golds within 3 plays is hardly a disaster either). The key difference between something just being an engine and it actually being a good engine, is that a good engine can use consistent cycling to generate solid VP gains over time.


chwhite: I agree that "Labs" is probably a more interesting category to talk about. I don't know that I'd change any of your rankings at all, except perhaps to bump up Apothecary.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 07:01:19 am by guided »
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Epoch

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #62 on: September 15, 2011, 07:33:13 pm »
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4. Scrying Pool In the right environment, Scrying Pool can be absolutely abusive above and beyond common sense, drawing dozens of cards at a time.  And it attacks too!  (Well, Spy is kind of a piddling attack, but still.)  Problem is, the right environment is rarer than you think.  If you can't trash your Coppers and Estates, or you can't get money (and preferably +Buy too) out of your Actions, then Scrying Pool is merely a Spy you had to buy a Potion to get.  And that's no good!

Scrying Pool is always better than Spy, because you choose whether or not to cycle your top card BEFORE you get your +1 Card.  That's... a big deal.  Spy would be a much better card if its spying happened before its +card, not after.
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rinkworks

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #63 on: September 15, 2011, 09:57:19 pm »
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An engine is something that cycles cards. That's it and that's all.

This is, to me, the most interesting part of your otherwise very circular debate (speaking to you collectively). I also think you guys aren't going to get anywhere until you come to an understanding about what you mean by an engine.

Agreed here -- I think we use the term rather fluidly.  But I basically agree with guided's definition.  Ultimately all you care about are coins (and sometimes buys) to accumulate victory points with.  So anything that isn't coins (or buys) is a waste, unless it's a piece of a machine you're building to get coins faster (or sabotage the other guy's machine, but never mind).

An analogy that works for me is having a robot that goes out and scours parking lots for pennies people dropped on the ground.  How good a machine is it for finding and bringing back pennies?  Ultimately, all that matters, in terms of how good a robot it is, is how many pennies it's capable of bringing back.  Note that it is not the robot's fault if there aren't any pennies to be found!

What makes Minion cool is that it's a machine that makes its own pennies.  Conspirator, Market, Grand Market, and Festival can be this kind of machine too, although more often you find those cards used as optional accessories in other types of machines.  The others just know how to find pennies, which means you need to make sure there are pennies on hand for them to gather.

So is Menagerie a "single-card engine card"?  I say of course it is.  It fits the criterion of being capable of gathering pennies without outside help.  I don't see a reason to boot it out of the category just because it's not very good at it without help.  Otherwise, I agree with guided's comments here:  most of the time it's used, it's a piece of an engine with other parts to it.  If you supplement a Menagerie engine with Apprentice, it's no longer a single-card engine.  Apprentice is, after all, an engine card of its own (one that requires more fuel than most, to stick with the analogy) and pulls its own weight in the penny-gathering department (though it also, I admit, helps Menagerie do its own job better).  Now, supplement Menagerie with a Woodcutter instead, and I'd probably still be inclined to call it a pure Menagerie engine:  Woodcutter is, ultimately, just a particular kind of penny.

But I hasten to add that my own understanding of what constitutes an "engine" or an "engine card" or "single-card engine" or whatever is by no means clearly the only correct one, and I don't care if other people have some differently nuanced view.

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chwhite

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #64 on: September 16, 2011, 02:38:18 am »
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4. Scrying Pool In the right environment, Scrying Pool can be absolutely abusive above and beyond common sense, drawing dozens of cards at a time.  And it attacks too!  (Well, Spy is kind of a piddling attack, but still.)  Problem is, the right environment is rarer than you think.  If you can't trash your Coppers and Estates, or you can't get money (and preferably +Buy too) out of your Actions, then Scrying Pool is merely a Spy you had to buy a Potion to get.  And that's no good!

Scrying Pool is always better than Spy, because you choose whether or not to cycle your top card BEFORE you get your +1 Card.  That's... a big deal.  Spy would be a much better card if its spying happened before its +card, not after.

Oh, true, it's always better than Spy even when it only draws one card (though also more expensive of course).  The attack function is the same as Spy, though.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 02:14:25 pm by chwhite »
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Epoch

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #65 on: September 16, 2011, 01:39:10 pm »
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You'd think that, but Hunting party+money is actually a pretty darn strong BM-based engine. The thing is that you draw the first card free and then draw into probably another hunting party.

I was just thinking about this and realizing how GOOD this is.

Like, with Lab, what you're basically hoping for is to draw 1 "payload" card (probably a high-value treasure) and 1 Lab each time you play a Lab, right?  That way, your engine continues and you get some of your payload.

In converse to my first intuition (and, I see, the first intuition of many other people, based on their comments on this thread), that suggests that HP is best when you have all your unique cards in your hand already, but there are still HPs in your deck!  That guarantees that you get 1 card (whatever's on top of your deck), and then 1 more HP -- which is the ideal situation!  Only the very final HP results in failure, here: but if I've got, say, 3+ HPs still in my deck once I reach hand saturation with unique cards, I'm happy to trade -1 card (vs Lab) from the last HP for the engine being guaranteed to continue until the last HP.

So, thanks, WW, for that insight.
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ackack

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #66 on: September 16, 2011, 02:37:14 pm »
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It's pretty rare to have enough Hunting Parties that you'll get all of the cards in your deck in hand without also having substantial overkill in terms of how much you're drawing. The most likely scenario for that is a KC/Throne game where your effective number is higher, but then there's not much figuring involved in KCing a Hunting Party.

added: Hunting Party is indeed an all around great card, but it's hunting ability is great partially because you don't necessarily need that many to get consistently good results. I also find more benefit in being able to track down missing cards in engines, on average. If I want to play a bunch of Goons or Grand Markets in a turn, getting one in hand, playing it, and then playing the next Hunting Party strikes me as usually better than trying to pull more Hunting Parties and drawing random things.
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 02:41:31 pm by ackack »
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guided

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #67 on: September 16, 2011, 04:27:12 pm »
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At the cost of exposing my poorly-disguised alt, here's another mono-Menagerie engine. (Well, almost: It gets a slight leg up from Wishing Well.) Bonus: 4 of my 5 Provinces come directly from 2 plays of Remake. (Yes, a straight treasure/Goons deck supplemented with Menageries that exist only to recover from Goons attacks would probably have been more dominant. But this was more fun.)

And in the interest of balance, here's a successful mono-Scrying Pool engine based on Pawn and Great Hall. On this particular board I believe the SP engine to be the best strategy available, even if it is the single fiddliest deck I have ever built: SP + Pawn = infinite clicks. (Passed away an SP for chuckles on the 2nd to last turn because I had miscounted my buys and thought I was ending the game immediately. I survived the mistake.)
« Last Edit: September 16, 2011, 05:41:39 pm by guided »
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Epoch

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Re: Compare the Single-Card Engines
« Reply #68 on: September 16, 2011, 05:35:41 pm »
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It's pretty rare to have enough Hunting Parties that you'll get all of the cards in your deck in hand without also having substantial overkill in terms of how much you're drawing. The most likely scenario for that is a KC/Throne game where your effective number is higher, but then there's not much figuring involved in KCing a Hunting Party.

Well, it's not terribly difficult if you intentionally keep your number of unique cards low.  Let's say mild trashing, so by mid-late game you can get rid of your Estates, and you might conceivably look for a deck consisting of Copper, Silver, Gold, Hunting Party, Province.  EDIT:  Er, plus your trasher, unless you island it or something.

Presuming that you draw at least one of your unique cards in your initial 5 card hand (ie, you don't have 5xHP), then your third and later HP's are just getting HP + top card on deck.  Better in the presumably-not-rare case where your opening hand has 2 of your unique cards in it.
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