Duke

Duke is one of the most classic "alternate" victory point cards, dating all the way back to Intrigue. The complex of Duchy+Duke is also worth an enormous amount of points - potentially at least, the most possible on most of the boards upon which it appears, even more than the stack of Colonies. While there are occasionally some diverse applications for the card, the price point of $5 usually puts it out of range of rushes, and the sheer count of green cards you need for it to be effective usually disqualifies it from engines, meaning that by far its most common home is in a Slog style of deck. Let's dive in.

Duchy or Duke? Get the order right.

It doesn't take much math to figure out that, for a given number of 5-cost Victory cards, the number of points you have is maximized when Number of Duchies = Number of Dukes +3. This leads a lot of players early on to getting 3-4 Duchies and then alternating between Duchies and Dukes. This is almost always the wrong move. The reason for this is that you don't care about how many points you have right now, you care about how many points you are going to have when the game is over. And since Duchy is, on its own, a better card than Duke, you want to build up your Duchies first. If we assume we are against a Province-seeking opponent, we are looking to win the game by locking up more points than they can muster before they end it by piling out the provinces. 8 Provinces is 48 points, and to match that, we need 11 Duchy/Dukes - most optimally spaced at 7 Duchy + 4 Duke = 49 points. Thus, a rough rule of thumb is to get 7 Duchies before turning for Dukes. Not uncommonly, you'll actually go for all 8, since that is better still against an opponent that might snipe a Duchy from under you. Similarly, there are some cases where you flip for Duke a little sooner - for instance if the opponent can use Trash-for-Benefit cards to "Mill" Provinces out of the supply.

Also worth mentioning here is that, given that your opponent is playing for Provinces, you actually don't want to get Provinces of your own, even if you spike $8 for one. Just get the Duchy. It will probably be worth more points in the long run, but more importantly than that, it helps them reach their end-goal of ending the game on the Province pile much more than it advances your points lock.

Beating the Slog

There are a couple of main methods you have of trying to defeat a Duke slog.
Option one is to go over the top. A Duchy/Duke player is counting on their complex of those two cards to overpower anything else you might be doing by just being so hugely many points as to lock you out. If you can tap into a bigger wellspring, then this plan is suddenly going to look a lot less attractive to them - now they need to actually drain both piles as well as a third; you've taken inevitability away from them. Colonies are a big way to do this, nearly always invalidating the slog's plan. Jumping from $8 to $11, it turns out, is just not as big a deal as needing to go from 11 to 16 victory cards (all those extra junk cards really deteriorate the deck). While all the D/Ds would technically score more than all the Colonies, Colony player can take some Provinces or even just one duchy to flip that around. Another big way of going over the top is with VP Tokens. Golden decks score 4 points per turn in perpetuity, and with chewing provinces down a little, it can get there in a bit under 20 turns; Multi-Goons hands can easily score WAY more than any green card, and even single Goons or some Monuments, when combined with Provinces, can overcome the deficiencies of Provinces alone - though to be fair, those cards can work with Duke, too, if you can't build a deck to really capitalize on them by playing them more often. Finally, other Alt-VP cards are usually going to help a Province-seeking player against a Duke-seeking adversary. The reason for this is that the Duke player simply isn't going to have so much opportunity to buy them. If I am going for Duchy or Duke every time I hit 5, how often am I really going to be buying Gardens? While on the other hand, Gardens plus Province can, combined, go toe-to-toe with Duchies and Dukes - in short, more points just move the goal-posts, and that's not good for a player seeking to lock the opponent out on points.

The other main option is to be faster. This could mean a rush, but usually we're talking more about emptying the Provinces quickly, and the main way to do that is with a mega-turn strategy. All 8 Provinces at once is ideal, but over the course of 2-4 turns is still often going to be good enough, if you can do that reasonably quickly. Horn of Plenty is okay here, but you need very good draw for that, as you really need to empty ALL the provinces. Something like Bridges really hit the spot, though, letting you clamp down with a powerful air of finality.
"Normal" engines can get there, but they need to be pretty strong. The point here is that you need to get all the provinces, which means at some point you're going to be carrying 6 of those clunkers around in your deck. Typical engines are not built to be able to handle that. If you do want to go this route, you want to make sure you want to build "extra" before you start greening. If your engine is incredibly resilient (or if you're playing a super resilient Province-seeking Money deck, which is rare), you can even try to snipe some Duchies from your D&D opponent. It's very uncommon for this to come up, as it is going to be too much of a detriment for the engine almost always, but it does keep the D&D player "honest" - if they spend too long picking up money and neglect locking down their Duchies, you can start to give them problems.

Mirrors

A very large thing in the mirror match is winning the Duchy split. With more Duchies, you have more points already, each of your Dukes is worth more, and each of their Dukes is worth less. It's just absolutely vital. A 5-3 Duchy split means that even if Dukes go 3-5 the other way, you'll still have a 6 point lead. 6-2 and forget about it - even 1-7 on Dukes wouldn't make up the deficit. So in short, it's pretty important to not lose the split.

Having said that, you also need a plan for after the Duchies go. Sometimes, that's barreling into Dukes headlong ASAP. But usually it's a little bit more subtle. The thing is, in order to not lose the split, you probably greened pretty early, which means that when the last Duchy comes off the table, your deck is probably pretty terrible. Furthermore, being able to spike a province, or even a few provinces, is a big swing when the split was close. And if there isn't a third pile being depleted, there will almost surely be time for some provinces. Dragging out 8 estates is just really miserable (though occasionally correct). So unless there is a spammable or dropped third pile, usually the next thing to do after Duchies go is to spend a little time building - being opportunistic on price points, of course, as you generally should be when you're in the Money Density regime.

Enablers

As is generally true of slogs, we're in the money density regime, which means that treasures are just good cards. We want to hit $5 a lot here, and because we need to worry about the split, we tend to green pretty fast, which means our Money Density is pretty consistently staying below $1/card. Silvers help to bolster that a lot, and of course Golds do tremendously, though usually you aren't going to have time for lots of golds (Hoard  and Soothsayer do say hello, though). And since the deck is so bad and constantly adding green cards, Copper tends to be good, too. However, I have said this quite a bit in the past, and people tend to make too much of it. Copper tends to be a good card in these decks, but it isn't great. Against discard attacks, you usually don't want it. If you are in the mode where you're going to be looking to spike Provinces, hold off. Woodcutter variants tend to be pretty good because they let you get these coppers, but that isn't the hugest deal. Horse Traders is better, since you often have green to discard, and usually your best two cards will get you the 2 you need to make 5. Feast can help, especially if you need a third pile, though it's not stellar. Any silver-gainers tend to be quite good. Duchess, as you might expect, helps as well. Trashing attacks tend to wreck you pretty hard - trashing just one Duchy does huge damage.

Example Logs

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151211/log.0.1449869627044.txt
In this game, we've got a pretty classic match-up of slog vs engine. I have Count and Nomad Camp as enablers, he has Forager to trash down and indeed to try to contest Duchies, being able to trash them later. If he's able to do enough of this, then I will have to get a third pile empty beyond D&D, which is going to take me quite a while (either Nomad Camp or more likely Estate are the prime choices here). Indeed, he's able to get 3, which is kind of the key number here. The problem is, once he trashes all of those out, I can still overcome all the provinces with only 12 D&D - which means he needs to keep some around, but his deck can't afford that fast enough. In the end, he's probably better served by hauling towards all the provinces faster - indeed, even as was, he ends the game with 7 - though in balance, Count is a better enabler when it can straight-up gain Duchy.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151210/log.0.1449761347012.txt
Here, I focus on treasures to slog. Mandarin is a pretty nice enabler, providing a good chunk of money and control over your draw to try to hit 5-5-5-5 more often. My opponent largely follows suit, but picks up some Nobles, an Expand, and even (most egregiously) a Vagrant over a Silver. Nobles is a fine card to have, but you have to look at your alternatives - it could have been a Gold (and at some points, Duchies). Expand is also a fine card, but not great - your deck is largely full of coppers, silvers, D&D, none of which are really great Expand targets. So it's great if you can get it with your estates, but you're not hugely likely to do that reliably enough. And Vagrant is good, but even drawing 2 cards EVERY time wouldn't be much if any better than a silver, and of course the Vagrant will still miss often.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151209/log.0.1449697325049.txt
In this game, my opponent is able to get out to a lead in Silvers, which improves his longevity. I have to dive Duchy pretty fast to not lose the split, but where that leaves us is with his deck being quite a bit better than mine for the next phase. Crucially, as discussed above, he is able to get a couple Provinces, and this makes it so that me winning the Dukes doesn't really matter. Bureaucrat is a quite good card in these slogs, but it's not so huge to be able to overcoming such a big deficit. (No, I'm not sure how I could have played better, but probably I could have - the second BCrat is probably a mistake? And maybe I can look at building more, even risking losing the split??)

Dominion: Treasure Map

Treasure Map is one of the most misunderstood cards in all Dominion. Often cited as the prime example of a card which going for can sometimes bring a weaker player a luck-based win even when it's not the optimal strategy, it is actually a card which is fairly high-skill, and which by its presence will lead the better player to win more often.

The Level Zero Strategy

The most basic thing people do with Treasure Map is buy two as fast as they can, maybe get a third to help them collide, buy some treasures, and then use the golds off the collision to rumble in for Provinces.

This is a bad strategy. A really bad strategy.

In fact, the optimal play with Treasure Map and no other cards on board barely defeats not getting Maps at all. If this were all that was going on for a given board, then it really would come down to luck in if the Map player collides fast enough. (On the other hand, that's not really much different than straight Big Money, where it's all about how well that money clumps together).

Fortunately, there is almost always something better available on the board. And the big point here is that even when the Map player collides immediately, on the vast majority of boards, the other strategy is STILL going to beat this naive one. There is just so much else you can be doing, and four Golds is not really enough to finish the game out without support.

The Level One Strategy

The next step is to add in cards to help your Maps line up with consistency, greatly accelerating when they collide and give you the pay-off. The classical combos here are Haven, Warehouse, and Chapel (though to be fair, Chapel tends to help other things more). This is way stronger than the level zero strategy, and has enough raw power to be more or less correct on a non-trivial, if still small, number of boards.

Four golds probably still isn't enough, but a key point for this strategy is that the helper card helps you to smooth out later draws as well - this is the classical purpose of Haven, if you notice, and one of the main roles of sifters - at least in money-based or "good stuff" decks.

Still, this strategy tends to not be terribly strong, because though it has some punch, it isn't anything special - just a decent version of Big Money, and not even a great one.

The Best Usage

All this might lead you to think that Treasure Map just isn't a very good card and that you can pretty much ignore it. For the most part, you would be right. But there really are some cases in which it can be key. I am taking about cost-caring trash-for-benefit cards a la Salvager and most especially, Bishop. In this case, Maps are basically a way to use 2 buys and $8 to get 4 6-cost cards of value to trash.

In order for this to work, you need a very potent engine - you're gaining 4 golds with this every turn, and what's more, you're putting them on top of your deck. You need a lot of drawing power in order to break through all those stop cards. This tends to be pretty slow to set up. But if you can get it going, this really is a lot of fuel. For this reason, Bishop really is the best combination - the Golds provide you with a huge source of points to overcome even a big deficit of green cards, and the player who is trying to buy victory is probably going to stall, trying to grab them all.

Card Studies: Governor #1

One of the things I would like to do on the blog is take more in-depth looks at certain cards. This is probably based more about what I'm learning myself (and I feel like it's fairly often that I will 'level up' on a card) than on what I feel like I have some kind of mastery over. Anyway, I'd like to do this by looking at some game logs I think are instructive, one-at-a-time and then hopefully with some compilation pages for those different key cards. Over time, we can hopefully build up a pretty good repository.

Anyway, I'm going to start with Governor, which is a card I didn't feel like I had a very good feel for only a short time ago, but which I feel I've made a huge leap forward with in order to get to... mediocre with it.



Game Log

Setup:

Some notes on the opening here: Looking at it now, I kind of like double Silver. Priority number one is to get Governors ASAP. It's also somewhat important, though, to ease your burden in drawing through your deck. I actually don't think that's super important, but it's nice if you can get it done.

I actually opened Wishing Well/Silver, but I think that's not the greatest, since I want to be able to multi-Governor quickly. Buying multiple Governors in a shuffle is going to be facilitated by getting the second silver, and the Wishing well cycles you to playing those Governors faster, it's true, but not by THAT much. The other thing to note is that Governor trashing a 3 into a Governor can be a real way of upping your Governor count fast, but if that silver is such a huge part of your economic output, that becomes less of a possibility. I get a second Silver on turn 4, which I need to do at some point, but I think it's just better to do this sooner rather than later.

My opponent went for a Loan, which is the other thing to consider here, but I don't really like it. You have to get treasures at some point fairly soon, and you take a pretty significant hit to your chances to hit 5 - I don't think the bit of trashing is worth it. And specifically he pairs it with Wishing Well, which I like even less, as it will crimp is ability to Governor up reliably. Of course, in this case, it works out okay, as he gets a 3/5, which puts him 'in the game', but I don't think the reward for this justifies the 25-30% (not an exact number) of the time you are WAY behind.


As the game progresses, I get more Wishing Wells, and he gets quite a bit more in the way of actions.

He gets a huge turn 9, which lets him triple Governor and win the split 6-4. I gain a couple Golds and buy a Province (trashing Hovel) on my own 9th turn. I think the most critical turn of the game is turn 10: My opponent draws a lot of cards and then... does nothing but build a lot. He gets a Prince, two Embassies, a Storeroom, and a Throne Room. The problem with this is that it just doesn't work very well in the style of Governor. At the end of it all, he only has $8 in his deck (Storeroom notwithstanding), including just one Silver and one Gold. Of course, all this building would be great in a lot of situations, but with Governor around, he is simply not going to have the time with those cards in his deck for it to pay off.

On my turn 10, I only have to use one Governor for draw, and I'm still able to double Province and pick up an Expand (which has a little bit of extra value here by virtue of its $7 cost - can be defensively upgraded into Province).

My opponent's turn 11 he really goes off with his engine, but in the end, he picks up no points, and another Prince. And he's drawn me 4 cards in the process. This lets me choose my time and 'go for it', double Provincing while using Expand to mill another. This gets us to this point:

And while I don't technically have 50% of the VP here, it really is a hard lock - he needs the last Province and 7 Duchies, which will take him a couple turns at least - and in the meantime, I will get some more points, which means he'll need basically all the rest of the estates, which will simply take him too long.



Takeaway:
Governor games end quickly - don't spend too long building.
Winning the split is big, but having an eye on what to do afterwards is also important.
Be cognizant of when you need to start greening - it's usually pretty quickly.