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[liopoil]

I doubt rebuild can get 8 provinces before KC-goons-masq goes off, especially since there are tons of trashers in that kingdom.

[Robz888]

I doubt rebuild can get 8 provinces before KC-goons-masq goes off, especially since there are tons of trashers in that kingdom.

I'm not sure. You might be right. But Rebuild is really good at eating through the Provinces. You don't need 8 Provinces here, you just need to Province into Province a bunch of times.

Which, maybe you can't do. Rebuild doesn't have like great support here.

[liopoil]

maybe. there isn't much in terms of economy here... I mean, they do need to get 2 KC and 1 goons, which is pretty expensive.

[SCSN]

If your Province and Rebuilds never collide, you need 9 Rebuild plays to end the game (1x Estate -> Duchy, 1x Duchy -> Province, 7x Province -> Province). If you keep buying Rebuilds with your 5s, you should be able to end it in about 15-16 turns I think.

[sudgy]

And, I forgot, with Chapel, it gets set up even sooner...  I would want to figure out which is better, but that would be kind of hard...  Anybody want to play an several unranked games with them?   

[JacquesTheBard]

I know how intensive Rebuild can be, but this is a little much. A high-trashing board with access to the King's Court Goons Masquerade pin should not be viable. Consider that all points generated by rebuild will be in the form of formal victory cards. In other words, they can all be easily trashed. Consider merely the aftereffects of a Goons attack on a Rebuild player when it comes to hitting $5. The Rebuild player won't get more than 3 Rebuilds at best before going into a slump under goons pressure. This is certainly enough to perform decently, but remember that the goons engine will be gaining VP tokens during the building phase.

If the kingdom were only Rebuild, Chapel, King's Court, Goons, and Masquerade, setting up the pin could prove tricky. But as is, there's an economy card in the top 10: Wharf. Wharf makes the difference, I think. It gets your draw going to help the King's Courts connect key action cards, and boosts your economy to hit the crucial numbers. With a few wharves in the deck, it gets consistency in the midgame that will likely help the pin take off.

Ironically, KC-d Wharves might bypass the pin by allowing the pinned player to draw back up and counter with a pin of his or her own. However, a Rebuild player likely won't use wharf. The extra draw makes Rebuild less likely to connect, and the opportunity cost of a $5 matters tremendously to a Rebuild player. Is the Rebuild rush strong?

Of course. 

Is pure Rebuild stronger than KC-KC-Goons-Masquerade with Wharf, Steward, and Chapel support?

What do you think? 

[dondon151]

KC-Goons-Masq sets up pretty quickly.

[WanderingWinder]

Your link to part XV is down to 27 and then XVI is the top 15.  You are missing a link to 26-16. 

This should be fixed now, thanks.

Further, could you make the list itself a linked one where each one links to the post where it is described?

I am not sure what you mean here - best guess is you mean to make every card in the list link to the post with descriptions like all of them before it, and I suppose it is possible to do that, but I'm not really planning on taking that much time - sorry.

Thanks for an awesome list, it was really fun to read.

You are welcome - thanks for reading!

[WanderingWinder]

If your Province and Rebuilds never collide, you need 9 Rebuild plays to end the game (1x Estate -> Duchy, 1x Duchy -> Province, 7x Province -> Province). If you keep buying Rebuilds with your 5s, you should be able to end it in about 15-16 turns I think.

There's a couple problems with this. First, I think this would just be too slow...?
Second, are you taking into account that you will be hit reasonably often with goons attacks and lots of masq pulls?
Third and by far the most important, they aren't absolutely forced and locked to go for the pin, the pin, and only the pin. If you play like this, all they need is KC-goons-any way at all to make $2 to buy a province and a few copper and have more points than you do in a conventional sense. Which means you basically need to rebuild other stuff up. Which means you will be slower in ending the game.

[WanderingWinder]

So, I have posted my current, updated rankings  in the OP (it is very hard to get all 205 in perfect order, there's probably a little bit of flopping around still to do). Notable changes:
Doctor is way down. The problem here is, it just doesn't work all that often, and you end up with like 4-6 cards trashed and very slow (and terminal) to get at the last few.
Forager is way up. Yeah, it's good - junk dealer is so high, and this is still, I think worse, even with the cost difference, because a card is so valuable. But it can't be much worse.
Masquerade now takes the top spot. So, it's less totally dominant than some of the other top cards (i.e. the strategy without it can beat the one with it maybe 25% of the time, whereas with other high cards it is closer to 2%), but it has a few big things going in its favor: it is basically always a good card for your deck (very few bad cases), and it counters or combos with essentially every other powerful card - counter to junkers, naturally, other strong trashers (they lack things to pass), and goes well with discard attacks. And of course goes big with KC and makes pins and such.
Rebuild has gone down, albeit a little bit. There is a way to beat it, and that's play reasonably good BM.
There's *several* other little changes, but none that I can think to comment on at the moment.

[Robz888]

Love the new list. I think you overrate Steward, but... I mean, I think you overrate it by a place or two, not in a huge way or anything.

On the other side of things, nice to see Harvest take its rightful place alongside Scout and Adventurer.

[Powerman]

Masquerade, Ambassador, Steward - 1,2,3... HUH?

[SCSN]

If your Province and Rebuilds never collide, you need 9 Rebuild plays to end the game (1x Estate -> Duchy, 1x Duchy -> Province, 7x Province -> Province). If you keep buying Rebuilds with your 5s, you should be able to end it in about 15-16 turns I think.

There's a couple problems with this. First, I think this would just be too slow...?
Second, are you taking into account that you will be hit reasonably often with goons attacks and lots of masq pulls?
Third and by far the most important, they aren't absolutely forced and locked to go for the pin, the pin, and only the pin. If you play like this, all they need is KC-goons-any way at all to make $2 to buy a province and a few copper and have more points than you do in a conventional sense. Which means you basically need to rebuild other stuff up. Which means you will be slower in ending the game.

Oh I certainly agree with all that and I don't think Rebuild is competitive on a board of the old top-10 (I do think it's dominant on the new top-10 board, though ), I was just providing some baseline information.

I do have a question about the pin: does it actually beat a simple KC-KC-Wharf strategy? If you can reliably KC a Wharf or two per turn you can still do plenty of stuff if the worst 3 of 5 cards are trashed each turn (just buy some Coppers to not run out of bad cards to pass). So can you set up the pin quick enough to prevent a KC-Wharf counter?

My experience with pins is limited to one KC-KC-Margrave-Masq thing that took me 21 turns to set up b.c. of Cultist junking and Masq being the only trasher. With Chapel help it will certainly be faster, but you can have KC-Wharf going in 9-10 turns. Will it be that fast?

[JacquesTheBard]

I may be odd in this, but I actually agree more with the old top 10 than with the new top 10, doctor excepted. I concur that Masquerade is above Ambassador, and spot #4 seems good for Rebuild, but while trashing and junking are both excellent, it's not the whole game. And as far as buildup and payload cards go, KC and Wharf are my all-time faves. Much to WW's credit, though, he kept Goons in there. I wonder: does Goons act as a Rebuild counter? I would imagine that once the VP tokens push you past the VP count of the Rebuild player, the Rebuild player is left with very few solid options.

Something I notice about the grand list is that Moneylender has advanced, and that Bridge seems to have dropped. Why has bridge changed significantly? It has always been a solid engine payload. Is that no longer the case?

[Kirian]

Man, you've got like three separate $3 trashers in your top three slots on that list.  Don't you know Lookout beats them all??!!

[Watno]

Rats is still way underrated imo (you actually dropped it even farther down???), and Mystic as well.

[Wrclass]

I personally think that WW's current list is the most accurate list of dominion cards out there. Rats needs to be so far down because it a nine-card kingdom with no TFBs

[Watno]

Well, since it's the only list I'm aware of, that's not that much of an achievement. But I mostly agree with the list.

I disagree about Rats needing to be so far down because it's often dead. There are many kingdoms where Horn of Plenty, Tactician, or Scrying Pool are dead cards. Still, they are around position 50.

[LastFootnote]

Rats needs to be so far down because it a nine-card kingdom with no TFBs

This isn't quite true. Rats creates its own benefit when trashed. I wouldn't call Lookout, Forager, or Junk Dealer trash-for-benefit cards, but they still combo with Rats.

[Watno]

Do you have logs of any such combo working out, LastFootnote?
I have never tried that and can't really imagine it working well, but I'll happily be proven otherwise.

[scott_pilgrim]

Rats needs to be so far down because it a nine-card kingdom with no TFBs

I've been wondering recently if Rats can be a viable mid/late game pick-up in slogs with no other trashers (also no Vineyard/Scrying Pool; obviously Rats has potential in those cases).  If you have a big enough deck and you time your Rats purchase well, you won't have more than five or six Rats by the end of the game.  If you always have a junk card in hand (which is the case in many slogs), then Rats is just a cantrip that clears it out of the way, which is good, and then it gives you another card that does that, which is good.  As long as you make sure that only a low percentage of your deck is Rats, they should be good.  At worst, if you turn a Curse into a Rats and then never play that gained Rats, it just gave you a victory point.  But in many slogs you'll want to play the Rats you are gaining.  The only thing I can see really going against it is maybe if it's in competition with victory cards that you would rather be picking up by that point in the game.

The general consensus seems to be that Rats is necessarily a dead card when it doesn't come up with one of its "combo cards", but I'm becoming skeptical of that.

[LastFootnote]

Do you have logs of any such combo working out, LastFootnote?
I have never tried that and can't really imagine it working well, but I'll happily be proven otherwise.

I don't have any logs handy. I use Rats with Forager and Junk Dealer very frequently and I win most of those games. But I win most games I play in general and my opponents aren't ever top-tier (I don't play Pro games), so I don't think it would prove anything.

The reason it works is because the +1 Card you get from trashing Rats is worth more in conjunction with the +1 Action you get from these non-terminal trashers. That tends to make up for the fact that you're not benefiting from Rats's $4 cost.

Try it out yourself in a few games.

[Mic Qsenoch]

Do you have logs of any such combo working out, LastFootnote?
I have never tried that and can't really imagine it working well, but I'll happily be proven otherwise.

I don't have any logs handy. I use Rats with Forager and Junk Dealer very frequently and I win most of those games. But I win most games I play in general and my opponents aren't ever top-tier (I don't play Pro games), so I don't think it would prove anything.

The reason it works is because the +1 Card you get from trashing Rats is worth more in conjunction with the +1 Action you get from these non-terminal trashers. That tends to make up for the fact that you're not benefiting from Rats's $4 cost.

Try it out yourself in a few games.

I would say Junk Dealer and Forager are clearly Trash for Benefit cards though, even if the trashing aspect is stronger. I don't really buy Lookout/Rats.

[LastFootnote]

I would say Junk Dealer and Forager are clearly Trash for Benefit cards though, even if the trashing aspect is stronger.

Uh, usually when we say "trash-for-benefit", we're referring to trashers that give some benefit commensurate with the cost of the trashed card(s). Examples include Salvager, Remodel, and Apprentice. Chapel is not a trash-for-benefit card, even though the trashing benefits your deck. Junk Dealer and Forager fall into the same category of deck thinner; they don't care what's being trashed. They are not trash-for-benefit cards.

I don't really buy Lookout/Rats.

That's fair.

[Mic Qsenoch]

I would say Junk Dealer and Forager are clearly Trash for Benefit cards though, even if the trashing aspect is stronger.

Uh, usually when we say "trash-for-benefit", we're referring to trashers that give some benefit commensurate with the cost of the trashed card(s). Examples include Salvager, Remodel, and Apprentice. Chapel is not a trash-for-benefit card, even though the trashing benefits your deck. Junk Dealer and Forager fall into the same category of deck thinner; they don't care what's being trashed. They are not trash-for-benefit cards.

Surely Altar is a Trash for Benefit card? I can't imagine why the term "Trash for Benefit" doesn't include Forager, Trade Route, Junk Dealer and Altar.  I always thought people said "scaling TfB" whenever they talked about the cards that cared specifically about cost (Apprentice, Salvager). Although I suppose the Remodel variants care a lot about cost but don't "scale" necessarily. In the end I guess it's just down to community usage. I didn't get a sense that the cards I mentioned wouldn't be TfB, but I could be wrong.