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[WanderingWinder]

Take a look at the following kingdom:
cards in supply: Council Room, Duchess, Jack of All Trades, Nobles, Potion, Remake, Saboteur, Scrying Pool, Talisman, Throne Room, and Warehouse

Okay, think about it for a second, try to figure out what you would do.
Alright, let’s break it down together.
I hope it’s fairly clear that there’s no potential for a slog, rush, or combo deck.
How about Big Money – this is always possible, so what are the best few big money variations, and how good are they?
The first thing I would notice is pure jack of all trades. This gets to 4 provinces pretty fast, around 14 turns in a vacuum or a mirror, and has pretty good longevity after that. This is pretty much always reasonably possible.
There’s Big Money/Council Room and or BM/Nobles. The former of these is fairly decent but not great, the latter pretty mediocre.
There’s also some mixed strategy – probably Jack into council room, maybe some nobles at some point. This should be pretty darn strong on average.
Which of the Big Money options is the strongest?
In a vacuum, none of them. You have to adapt to what your opponent does (more on this later). Almost surely, though, you won’t want to get just BM/Council Room or BM/Nobles. If you’re going BM, jack should be part of the plan.
Putting it another way, if you're against most engines, you'll want more jack power, for the longevity, but in a mirror, you want to pick up council room sooner - there's a bit of adaptability you should have.
How about engines – are they possible? What are the viable engine options here?
Sure, they’re possible. The first engine you can look at is Remake into warehouses, throne rooms, and some of the draw cards – probably you will want +buy at some point, so at least one council room, but generally you will want nobles, as they don’t draw for your opponent and also give you points, which will be useful at the end of the game. This engine is good, but it is slow, and it speeds the opponent up, which means it’s prone to not getting up in time. This definitely can't beat the money strategies we've already seen.
You can also build the same engine with Jack, possibly omitting remake (but probably not) This engine is reliant on treasures for its income, so the silver gaining of jack is really not that bad – you are going to otherwise have to buy some cash at some point anyway. This is still slow though, and more prone to not coming together to get rolling in a timely manner, though if you can, it has a bigger payoff. The Jack also goes with warehouse pretty well. This still can't beat the money strategies we've seen.
Finally, there’s a scrying pool engine. Remake for trashing, along with warehouse for sifting. This deck wants to be pretty pure actions, for the scrying pools, but it’s going to need some money – this is where duchess comes in. Of course, this well help your opponent fix the top of their deck, but you also slow that down off the scrying pool. This is a much more potent engine, drawing-wise, but it really needs a big payoff at the end, as it’s also slow to set up. This might be able to beat the money strategies we've seen, and it certainly kills the other engines, effectively making them non-viable on the board. Whether it beats money for sure will take some extra thought, beyond this quick look.
Any of these engines want lots of throne rooms, and they can all benefit from saboteur in many cases, provided there are enough actions to spare.

Okay, so what’s the decision?
The decision, at first, is just what opening you want to take. You should, in many cases, maintain some flexibility.
There are a few options as to what you can do, and on each you want to have contingency plans to play it slightly different depending on what your opponent does.
Option one: Jack/Silver. If you do it for money (which, here, you should), you can later decide if and when you want your other actions – council room, second jack, nobles – but this should depend on what your opponent does. The more they go money, the more you want to go council room for your second action; it is faster than jack, and that jack is a draw-to-X is going to mitigate the drawback somewhat if your opponent is going heavily jack. The more they go engine, though, the more you probably want a second jack – it gives more longevity, and it pumps you full of cards to deal with potential saboteur plays. Incidentally, in none of the money decks do you want a remake – it is too slow, and jack already gets rid of estates for you.
Option two: Jack/Warehouse. This is probably still a money deck, though it *can* go more engine-y. The idea for this is to play the jack more often; this doesn't go as well with council room as with double-jack, but it goes pretty well with double-jack against an engine, if you somehow know your opponent is going for that right up front. If they go for money though, you're in a bit worse shape, though it's not huge.
Option three: Remake/warehouse. Remake is definitely an engine card, so you want the cycling up faster to get the trashing up faster, and to trash what you want, and you aren’t so keen on getting 5-6 super fast, so you shouldn’t go for silver. You can build this into any of the engines, depending on what you like and what your opponent does; this is extremely flexible between engines, but what your opponent does will probably not affect which direction you want to go SO much.
Option four: Potion/warehouse. Here, you are going straight for the scrying pools, and you want to get them up as fast as possible. The warehouse gives you good opportunity to do this, as it helps cycle you fast. This is the fastest way to start drawing your deck every turn. You want to get a remake asap (but not over scrying pool, or you should have opened remake), and then see what’s happening. You might remake into some silvers, but generally you want to buy duchesses over them, as the pools will draw better. And throne room quickly. This is not a flexible opening.
Okay, so what’s best?
Honestly, I don’t know. I would play potion/warehouse here. Or if I get 3/4, particularly as player 2, I might open warehouse and just go the opposite of what my opponent does in terms of potion/jack - playing contrarion at least makes things more fun, if not necessarily objectively better. Though here, if they go for the engine, I do like jack/warehouse anyway, and if they go for money, I do kind of like the engine.
What actually happened in the game?
My opponent went pretty squarely for the jack plan into double jack. I had a 2/5 and went duchess/potion. Maybe remake first was better, I don’t know. And maybe on 4/3 I would have gone jack and this game would have been long forgotten as ‘another jack game’. Anyway, he gets out to a pretty good lead, and I build build build up the engine. LOTS of throne rooms. Unfortunately, the only source of by is the council room (I don’t need the draw), but I feel compelled to get it, because I need that buy. He gets the second jack, which is the correct response against my strong engine – so good on him there. Eventually I get a few more duchesses, and some nobles, and a couple saboteurs, and I start going to town. The spy of the scrying pool is really important for me. On turn 14, I make a big mistake of trashing throne room off of a remake, rather than warehouse which I wanted. Anyway, I use my scrying pools after a while to hunt for provinces. He has so much other stuff that it’s hard, but I hit some. And I’m stocking up on nobles. At the end of the game, he starts to have serious threats of three piling me – with duchesses, not incidentally. On my last turn, I get very close to being able to turbo remake some of the excess throne rooms for the last duchies and then go out for the last province and end it, but it’s not quite there for me, and he wins (his deck never slows down all that much; it’s a jack deck). The next turn, it would have been very important for me to remake superfluous throne rooms into duchies BEFORE saboteuring him, as this lets me stop him from replacing Provinces with duchies. Well, anyway, there wasn’t a next turn, as he was able to end it. But a very interesting game – I can only wonder what would have happened, if anything different, if I hadn’t misclicked on that remake play, or if I had a 4/3 opening, or whatever.
I am also not totally sure whether I should have gone after his Jacks more, and sooner, with my saboteurs. Same question on the golds. Well, at any rate, it was an interesting one.
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20130110-143954-ae76da64.html
The final analysis:
I really don’t know what is best here, to be honest. On a 5/2 I’m very inclined to go for the engine, because duchess does very little for you money-wise, and you don’t really want to open one of the fives. I’m actually pretty inclined to go for it anyway, I think, off the potion/warehouse. But again, I’m not sure – jacks into money is really strong and resilient as well.


Let me know what you guys think of the format, and as always, comments, questions, thoughts, suggestions, are all very much appreciated.

[dondon151]

Hmm, I think if you want to go engine, you'd want a Talisman to double up on TR buys, since those are important and extra buys come at a substantial cost with CR. The Talisman can also help you amass $4 cost cards to Remake into Duchies, which you'll have to do often in order to deny your opponent Province -> Duchy on Sab hits. SP can mitigate the benefit of CR if you leave a Victory card on top of his deck and force your opponent to draw it (or at least, let him draw a Copper).

With Sab, I would just want to play it as often as possible, hitting whatever I can. I actually think that hitting Silvers is probably a good choice because it just removes them entirely from his deck and he can't gain anything to replace them with other than Copper. Reducing his money density also slightly mitigates the benefit that you give to him with your CRs and makes it less likely for him to get Provinces of his own. After that I'd target Jacks and Golds. I don't want to target Provinces until I absolutely have to because Province -> Gold, Nobles, or Duchy don't help the engine that much.

Oh, also, no need to buy Duchess here. If you're trying to drain Duchies early, pick up ~3 Duchesses along the way for economy and then let the pile sit there.

[jonts26]

Very interesting set. If there was a way to buy extra cards other than council room, I'd say the engine wins hands down. Probably not all that close. BM definitely wants a jack and probably at least two, maybe even three after a while to combat sab plays. And if you go engine, you have to plan on sabbing at least 3-4 or more times per turn once you get going. But the big issue is that the engine player wants to play CR for the buy and a heavy silver based deck is going to benefit immensely from 6 card hands. And jack is already pretty resilient to greening so it's not like you can force him to stall while you destroy his point lead. And of course the other big issue for an engine player is going to be the threat of 3 piling. So I think its going to be close between engine and BM.

I would still probably go engine here. The question is what type of engine. And most probably I'd want scrying pool. I want a ton of actions and scrying pool will be by far the best option because it helps me negate the council room benefit to my opponent. If I can find a dead card to put on top, the CR doesnt matter. And in fact it actually hurts because jack can no longer replace itself. I'd probably open remake/silver on a 3/4 hoping to buy a potion on turn 3/4. 5/2 is a much worse opening. Remake/duchess? Potion/duchess? Not sure which is better. Anyway, this game is going to require a lot of responding to the game state.


And looking over your comments now, I see we are mostly in tune.

And now that I think about it, perhaps the engine player should start spiking duchies very early. If you can drain them, you really kill your oppontents provinces, and they come with a free action. So you'd expect duchies and then probably nobles to run fairly easily. Just be super careful about that third pile, probably duchesses.

[ehunt]

saboteur makes the scrying pool engine have a much higher payoff than normal, since in the endgame you can guarantee you'll burn a province every turn. it still might take too long.

[Bron]

maybe one trivial note: if there is somene like me who has a problem with recognizing cards only by names, you can copy-paste them into isotropic's "required cards" and start a solitare game, I think it helps.

[brokoli]

I would go for BM Jack-Nobles. Even if Scying pool and throne room are among the best partners for sab and engine, Jack is a very strong counter.

[-Stef-]

I like the format. It reminds me of an article I read somewhere quite recently . But more seriously... I haven't figured out what "Dominion Academy" will be about next time. Episode #1 was mostly about kingdom analysis and deck interactions, but the next one might be different.

On the style of your article... maybe you should choose a bit more between 'something instructive' or more like 'puzzle along with me'. If you go for the first, I think you should state the obvious more clearly in your analysis. I'm also a bit in doubt what to play here, but two things very much stand out to me: it's either a deck around Jack, or a deck around the Scrying Pools. Sure, there may be some variations, maybe add a Councilroom to the Jack deck later on, how to open in the engine, but those are all secondary questions. Explicitly stating the obvious (for an experienced player) can be very helpful / instructive to someone relatively new to the game. From your analysis I get the impression that I can choose between 6 different archetypes. Really, I can't. An engine without pools doesn't stand a chance against Jack here. Bigmoney without at least two Jacks gets destroyed by the engine.

On flexible openings... that can be nice. However, it's the exception, not the rule. Most of the games it actually *is* best to choose your plan before you buy your first card. Especially if the different plans want totally different cards, like... Jack decks vs Pool decks.

The reason to play engine here is that you may or may not make it into playing 4+ saboteurs a turn in time, thus completely tearing down your opponents deck. Maybe 4 isn't even enough and you need to aim for 6 or 8. And then just prey you can sneak out enough points before the three-piling happens. No way you can beat Jack to scoring half the points on the board, there aren't that many points available. Selecting your targets for Saboteur won't work, that rarely ever works. You just need to hit them a lot, I agree with jonts on that point.

If I play the engine, Councilroom isn't the only option for adding more then one card/turn to my deck. I really want to play with a Jack of my own at some point. Gain free Silvers, remake into more Throne Rooms. Duchy comes with a free Duchess but that's not so hot. Do not buy the Jack before you can handle the Silvers though, so only after you remade about 8 of your starting 10.

If you play engine, you really need to fire every turn. Fortunately you only need about 2 Pools to draw your deck. So put the others (3?) back on top for next turn! After drawing your deck, doing your remake magic, and drawing the rewards, play a Warehouse. Discard three pools, or at least two. Then force a reshuffle with either Jack or a Duchess.

On targeting with Saboteur... you really don't want to hit those Provinces. Well, you do want to hit them, but not for a long time. Your top priority is hitting Jack, or maybe Gold, or Councilroom if they have it. Anything to stop them from buying more Provinces.

After giving it some thought, I really want to play engine here. Just too much fun. Even though solitaire doesn't make that much sense on this board I tried the engine anyway. It does contain the 'Jack for free cards' and 'put back the pools' tricks. It works quite ok, I play my first 2 Saboteurs on turn 12, 2 on t13, 5 on t14 and then I could play at least 6 a turn while buying either a Nobles or a Province. No Councilrooms involved to help my opponent, although I do play some Duchesses.

I agree with your opening Potion over a Remake, and would want to do that on 4/3 as well. Probably Potion/Warehouse. Remaking is important, but if I start remaking from a five card hand I can't do anything else and I really need some Pools. If I start with some Pools/Warehouses, I can Remake extra-fast after that, on turns where I both play remake and buy a Scrying Pool.

[WanderingWinder]

I like the format. It reminds me of an article I read somewhere quite recently . But more seriously... I haven't figured out what "Dominion Academy" will be about next time. Episode #1 was mostly about kingdom analysis and deck interactions, but the next one might be different.

Yeah, I thought I made it pretty explicit, but maybe I didn't - this is absolutely and totally inspired by your article. It's not quite the same (as you note below), but it's my take on it. Well, if you make later ones about other things, then that's fine, though my series is going to be relatively similar to this one down the line. Anyway, yeah, your article was the best thing I've ever read about dominion, so, yeah...

On the style of your article... maybe you should choose a bit more between 'something instructive' or more like 'puzzle along with me'. If you go for the first, I think you should state the obvious more clearly in your analysis.

At first, I didn't understand what the difference here was. Now I think you are saying there is a distinction because at the end, I am not sure what to do. I don't think this is necessarily a true dichotomy - I can be somewhat instructive without giving the final answer. I mean, the goal is instructive, but I am acknowledging that I am not certain of what to do precisely - as is usually the case on these interesting complicated boards - as I think you know

From your analysis I get the impression that I can choose between 6 different archetypes. Really, I can't. An engine without pools doesn't stand a chance against Jack here. Bigmoney without at least two Jacks gets destroyed by the engine.

Really, you can - you just aren't going to win. I am trying to point out all the options that are viable, where the limit of viability is that they're going to be good, say, 10% of the time they're available. That might make them terrible on this board (e.g. I would point out Embassy/Big Money on a board with Native Village/Bridge, even though it has next to 0 chance of actually being good on that board). But I think that it's useful to identify all of these strategies, even if they are dominated by some other strategy. The reason being, you need to know what is possible and how to react to what your opponent is doing, which means you need to be able to identify what they're doing, and reasonably often adjust your strategy. 

Anyway, re-reading what I have, I should probably make this more explicit - there are really only 2-3 (depending on how different stuff needs to be to be considered different) different strategies that have good chances to win, though you can and definitely should modify at least one of them (the money strategy) based on what your opponent does (against an engine, more jacks; against money, only one and council rooms)

On flexible openings... that can be nice. However, it's the exception, not the rule. Most of the games it actually *is* best to choose your plan before you buy your first card. Especially if the different plans want totally different cards, like... Jack decks vs Pool decks.

Of course, most boards are put-your-head-down and do one thing, because it's dominant - i.e. it wins head-to-head against every other strategy. Even in these cases, you usually want to adjust slightly (or sometimes heavily) what you are doing based on the opponent, but this is of course out of the opening and into the midgame. But there are quite a reasonable number of boards where you want to maintain flexibility, because there are multiple different things that have complicated interactions between strategies. They're not in most games, but enough, IMO, to be noteworthy. I will re-read to see if I am implying this is something that's always important or not, and if necessary re-word to clarify.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.

[dghunter79]

Oh, yay, this fun one.  I didn't think through everything W outlined above.  I boiled it down to Jacks vs. Scrying Pools and Saboteurs.  They both seemed strong, but I worried that all the Jack-Silvers would counter the Saboteurs.  So I basically just played it safe.  And it was pretty tense throughout.  I had completely forgotten how much the Spy-power of Pools enhances Saboteurs.

Anyway, here are some things I noticed playing against the engine W built, which, when it kicked in, was very strong and intimidating, but still a bit tricky to play.

1. The only village is Nobles, which is costly and doesn't draw.  So, at first, the + Actions come from Throne Rooms on Pools or on Warehouses.  The money all comes from Duchesses.  The buy all comes from Council Room.  You need a Remake to trash.  You need a Potion.  And you need Saboteurs at some point to compete with Jacks.  With all these cards in your deck, there's the potential for semi-dead hands.  I got away with a few free turns because a couple times W didn't have a Pool in his hand.

2. Council Room and Duchess both helped me out.  There were definitely at least two hands for me that only bought Provinces because of extra coin from Council Rooms.  Saboteur felt like it had the potential to help me out also, since it can help drain piles.  Especially with Duchesses out there.  But I didn't see how to take advantage of this until too late.

3. 5-2 is an unlucky opening.  I got the best-case scenario out of Double-Jack.

4. The Scry-Spying helps Saboteur, but it doesn't double-help Throne Roomed Saboteurs.  So, you're not as much in the driver seat as you'd like to be.  Especially if you're forced to play these tricky Throne Room chains, as opposed to just playing all your villages and then playing your attacks in the order that you'd like.

5. Would a Talisman have helped?  I dunno.

6.  Stef is right; playing the engine is more fun.  I was basically just a bot.

Anyway, even though Jacks won this time, it's still inconclusive to me which is better.  Thanks for posting this, W!  Now I am famous.

[HiveMindEmulator]

Saboteur felt like it had the potential to help me out also, since it can help drain piles.

This is a really big thing. I always try to build Sab engines (usually losing) because of this. Every Sab you pay is a gain for them. If the engine you build requires too many parts, you have to be really careful about piles. It's not like some other attacks that can buy you buy you like an infinite amount of time.

[ConMan]

On a board like this, I'd love to see something like "Buy Duchy, get Duchess; Remake Duchy into Nobles" work, but it's extremely hard to get them to collide by the time you have both of them.

[WanderingWinder]

Made a couple modifications, mostly addressing Stef's concerns and correcting a couple typos (when I talked about 5/2, I said that warehouse doesn't do anything for you money-wise, which is true but irrelevant; should have said duchess), as well as a little bit extra on jack/warehouse.

[Polk5440]

If I play the engine, Councilroom isn't the only option for adding more then one card/turn to my deck. I really want to play with a Jack of my own at some point. Gain free Silvers, remake into more Throne Rooms. Duchy comes with a free Duchess but that's not so hot. Do not buy the Jack before you can handle the Silvers though, so only after you remade about 8 of your starting 10.

What a good idea. Playing solitaire I thought Scrying Pool engine should win, but in a couple of attempts, I couldn't get it going faster than Double Jack with Warehouses because of the buy constraint. This has got to be the key.

If you play engine, you really need to fire every turn. Fortunately you only need about 2 Pools to draw your deck. So put the others (3?) back on top for next turn! After drawing your deck, doing your remake magic, and drawing the rewards, play a Warehouse. Discard three pools, or at least two. Then force a reshuffle with either Jack or a Duchess.

This blew my mind!! I have never thought about a tactical play like this -- setting up a next hand without something like Scheme in play.

[krs]

For a post entitled Academy, a Kingdom link (http://www.dominiondeck.com/games/academy) would for sure help...

[Schneau]

One thing I don't see mentioned anywhere here: Since Jack is a Draw-to-X card, does that make it any easier for an engine player to have a Council Room in their deck, since if the opponent plays Jack following CR they don't get Jack's draw? Or does double Jack hit no Jacks enough of the time to make CR's free card a big benefit for the Jack player?