This is my first attempt at writing an article on the site. It’s likely to be a little vague in some places, perhaps give advice that better players would disagree with and maybe over/underfocus on some areas. In fact, most of the concepts I kinda thought through myself, and in particular I might use some non-standard terminology. Any feedback will of course be appreciated.
Don’t expect anything ground-shattering from the article, but hopefully, it would be a useful read for someone in the level 10-25 skill range. That’s primarily where I’m aiming, I guess.
As of posting, I’ve completed 2 of 5 sections. I will complete the last three if/when I can, but I wanted to get some feedback now.Your engine is finally picking up steam. You’ve played your Native Villages, your Rabbles are slowing the opponent down, and you’re drawing into your golds. You play them down, and count up your money. $12... $15... $17 to spend! That’s two Provinces, right there, you tell your opponent.
“Uh, wait.” he says, looking at you, “You don’t have any extra buys.” And he’s right. And there isn’t even any on the board. You die a little inside, as you realise your engine will never work the way you’d hoped it to.
If you’ve been playing Dominion long enough, then chances are you’ve been careless enough to walk into a situation like the one above at least once, building the perfect engine, but failing to notice a key component was missing. In this article, I’ll be going through what I think are the five key components to a perfect engine, and also talking about what you can do when one or multiple of those components are missing.
The five componentsAt it’s most simple, there are five key things an engine wants. These are:
- Card draw - the ability to increase your handsize and draw more cards from your deck.
- Extra actions - the ability to play more terminals, or play your terminals more times.
- Extra buys/gains - the ability to buy/gain more than one card per turn.
- Trashing/sifting - being able to see your good cards more and your bad cards less.
- Payload - sort of a catch-all for cards producing money, as well as strong end effects and attacks.
Note: Payload is my own terminology here. I dunno if there’s a more standard name to it, but I’ve never really seen anything. I think I caught Stef calling it payload once (while halfway through this article actually, so that’ll do for me.Some of these are more crucial than others and many cards cover (to some degree) multiple categories at once. The really exciting part of engine building though, is when at least one of these parts is missing, or weak. Sometimes in those cases, the correct choice is to not build the engine. Often though, the correct choice is to build it different...
Card drawCard draw (which for the sake of this article, is referring primarily to cards giving +2 cards or more) is probably the most iconic feature of engines, drawing through masses of your deck every turn. Good drawing is so important to engines, as it’s the easiest way to play multiple strong cards in a turn, something that most engines want to do. Very often, it’s combined with extra actions in the ‘village/smithy’ combo of, get extra actions, use them to draw big, repeat. But there’s a few different kinds of extra drawing and how you play your engine can vary depending on what you have.
Terminal drawThis is the simplest kind of drawing, and the paragon example is Smithy, who gives +3 cards and no extra actions. In short, these will increase your handsize, but will not give you extra actions. To use these effectively in an engine, you will need extra actions, else you’ll be playing something more like Big Money. The basic plan is the ‘Village/Smithy’ combo mentioned above - play cards giving +actions, play your terminal +X cards to draw into bigger hand sizes, repeat.
Good examples of these cards are: Smithy, Rabble, Margrave (also +buy), Catacombs (also sifting), Torturer), Hunting Grounds, Embassy (also sifting) and others.
Non-terminal +X cardsThis drawing has one key difference from terminal draw, and that’s the presence of +1 action (or more) on the card. Probably the simplest example is Laboratory, giving +2 cards and +1 action. These are much simpler to use in an engine - you play, them you draw more cards, you play some more. Unfortunately, there’s two big downsides to them. Firstly, they’re relatively expensive compared to their non-terminal counterparts - a Village and Smithy gives the same net effect as two Laboratories, but costs $7 compared to the Labs $10, for example. They’re more reliable, but you pay more for that reliability. Secondly, they often have conditions on activating. Wishing Well requires you to guess your next card correctly. Menagerie requries some careful hand management (or luck) to have no duplicates in hand. Crossroads requires victory cards in hand, and the list goes on. Using these as your source of draw will often be worse in the ‘perfect’ engine than non-terminal draw, but may be more important in kingdoms with no (or limited) +action, or when non-terminal draw isn’t available. Fortunately, they don’t conflict with a terminal drawing engine - just as long as you’re playing villages as well - so you can take both types without worrying.
Other notable non-terminal draws include Scrying Pool and Hunting Party.
’Draw up to’ XThe third kind of drawing, and probably the hardest to use effectively in an engine. The most famous example is probably Library from the base game. These cards, rather than letting you draw a huge hand and then play it out, draw you up to a reasonable hand, which you probably want to do something with before drawing up again. Festival/Library is probably the most notable draw up to X engine, where you play a bunch of Festivals, play a Library, then play more Festivals and repeat. As all (current) draw up to X cards are terminal, this engine needs some source of extra actions. Typically, these engines look to play their payload repeatedly throughout drawing, such as non-drawing terminals or disappearing non-terminals (cards with + action but no +card). One issue with draw up to X type cards is that they don’t work so well with other drawing. If you play two Labs, then Library will only draw you one card - hardly worth caring about.
Examples of draw up to X cards are: Library, Watchtower, Jack of all Trades (which also trashes, but is dubious to use as your drawing!).
When there isn’t drawingOften, there are good engine components on a board, but just a lack of +cards to go with it. In that case, is the engine doomed? Sometimes, but not always.
Firstly, cantrips can be strung together to give often powerful effects. If there’s no +cards (or only weak +cards) then the viability of an engine will likely depend on the effectiveness of the boards cantrips - which probably means, look for good $5 cantrips such as Highway, Market and their kin, but also for cards like Conspirator and perhaps Mystic. Secondly, is there any potential way to use cards like King’s court to draw extra cards? You should usually not consider this a major source of extra cards when determining the viability of an engine, but it can draw you up to a large hand - a hand of two King’s Courts and three Highways will draw you up to 9 cards.
When drawing lacks but you want to build an engine, often you will desperately want good trashing, and get your payload from the engine itself. You want as few cards to get hung up on as possible, which makes greening difficult, so ideally you probably want to megaturn, if possible, or have good sifting, or score VP tokens, or generally have some plan for your greening phase. But this does mean, without good drawing, engines can be extremely hard to play correctly. Plan accordingly.
Extra actionsFortunately, Extra actions are a little simpler than card draw, as there are very few kinds of them. In short, extra actions is any card which can increase the number of terminal actions you can play in a turn. ‘Village’ type cards are most common, but there’s also the special case of Throne Room and Golem type cards, which can also serve as psuedo-villages.
VillagesSo having said villages are the most simple type, let’s move straight onto them. A card is typically considered a village if it gives +2 actions. Unsurprisingly, the card Village itself is the typical example. There’s not a lot to be said about villages, they’re easy enough to use in your engine. Probably the only tricky question is, when and how many? If you’re drawing your deck, the answer to how many is likely, at least enough to play all your terminals, and perhaps one or two more. When is trickier - usually not on your first shuffle (but some villages you would), but soon rather than later.
One thing that can affect your engine is the choice of village. Each has a slightly different effect, different costs and these can cause small or big changes to your engine. For example, Worker’s Village at $4 isn’t prohibitively expensive, but is slightly more than a vanilla village. However it does provide you with +buy, which is a big advantage in terms of getting your engine set up. Or Bazzar, at $5, can conflict with buying other engine components, so you’d ideally want some cheaper components you could buy on the board so you don’t have to decide between Bazzar and a payload/drawing $5 constantly.
There are lots and lots of notable villages. Worker’s Village (+buy) and Hamlet (+buy but discarding) are good for engines, providing +buy. Native Village and Fishing Village can work very well with draw up to cards, due to not providing +card. In fact Fishing Village is extremely effective itself, giving +action on TWO turns, not just one. Border Village lets you grab a village and a $5 component together and makes for a ripe trash for benefit target as well. I could list more, but I’ll stop here.
Nonstandard VillagesThis covers two categories. The first is the Throne Room, King’s Court, Procession and Golem line of extra actions. These are all radically different cards, but the basic principle is, you can get extra actions by playing more than one card with +action. With all but Golem, you can even just chain these cards themselves, then play loads of terminals at once multiple times each.
On their own, these are probably not viable as your source of village - it’s too slow to set up a lot of the time. However with other villages, or a non-terminal based deck, they can really shine, multiplying your actions and beginning to do crazy things.
The second category here is Crossroads. This little $2 provides you with +3 actions, but only once. It’s hard to build a good engine when you’re limited to 3 terminals - it will often (but not always) be worse than just playing more straight money. The key thing is that you should be very careful with your choices of terminals. Crossroads of course can also fit into a normal engine on it’s own along with other villages, and it works as a strong draw card as well if you have lots of green cards in your deck.
When there isn’t extra actionsNow we’re getting to the interesting part. Can you build an engine when you don’t have a source of +actions? I’ve already implied you can, so what should you be doing? The first thing is cantrips and non-terminal draw. If there’s trashing, Scrying Pool could be extremely potent, drawing most of your deck in a single play. Normally you’ll be looking at something like Laboratory, though. Without +actions, your drawing might well be weaker. That means that you’ll probably not cycle your entire deck every turn, which is worth noting.
Without extra actions, you can only play one terminal per turn. You’d want that to be a good one, of course - attacks and other strong single effects work best. Drawing is usually bad, as you’ll likely be drawing lots of actions dead.
