Dominion: The Aggro Pile Deck

Aggro Pile:

One of my favourite strategies is to go for speed. To end the game on my terms. To take hold and bring it to an end before the opponent can really deploy their long-term strategy. Speed, not power.

This means three-piling. You need a few things for this to go right: the ability to get piles out, the ability to control when they empty, score enough points (and know how many that is), in the process. Usually, it also means doing something to slow your opponent down, as even mediocre Big Money decks are capable of scoring a reasonable number of points fairly quickly.

But WW, isn't this just a slog?

No. In a slog, at least how I'm thinking about it, you’re trying to get a matrix of VP points that is insurmountable. Your win condition is to get so many VP the opponent can never come back. In, contrast, aggro-pile decks aim to get the piles out and end the game before your opponent’s (typically superior) deck can get going enough to catch up with you. Your deck is not about scoring all the points possible, but rather about having all the pile control you can get, and having just enough pop to score a little more than the opponent.

Typically, you’re going to want your opponent to help you out in emptying at least one of the piles. Most often this comes from junking attacks (where, if they skip it, you’re going to crush them anyway - this is weakened significantly by the very strongest thinning). However, there are also some piles that just naturally you want to empty pretty fast - Fishing Village is a classic example.

Indeed, you generally need a combination of 2 enablers and/or naturally-emptying piles, and you will have time to knock the last one out by yourself. So Ruins AND curses works well, or a card like Fishing Village with either kind of junk, or some decent to nice gainer with a fast-emptying pile or junk.

Most often, you’ll be piling out with Duchies as that third pile. And you tend to start just hacking away at them near when there are a few gains left to 2 empty piles, and simply ride them hard until they’re gone.

It’s also possible to actually just blitz out piles, though this is quite a bit rarer. Ironworks is a key enabler for the rush, particularly with some Kingdom VP pile it can gain, since actually having 2 of your 3 piles be VP gives you obviously more points, which translates to a little more time. Stonemason is another big card here, as it can get rid of piles very fast. Same goes with Procession.

When playing against this kind of strategy, you typically want to not do something too fancy - that tends to be the number one way that Aggro Piles actually gets the time it needs. At the same time, you don’t want to touch Duchies at all, unless you’re either winning on the spot, completely locking them out (e.g. taking the penultimate Duchy with a substantial lead), or just contesting full bore in a mirror. 

Big Money tends to be a pretty bad matchup for this kind of deck, so you need to have a plan of defeating that as well. Indeed, Aggro Pile is a deck style which must always be very reactive to what your opponent is doing, and in most cases actually needs to have some kind of bailout plan as well - either you are an engine with an eye towards clamping down on the piles, or you have some kind of reasonable Big Money/Slog game-plan in case they go for points straightforwardly. It tends to be important to develop these fallback plans before comitting too hard to Aggro Pile.

Key Enablers in rough order from best to worst:

Junk: Ill-Gotten Gains (two piles by itself), Marauder, Young Witch, Cultist (which can sometimes be a second pile, but being this expensive is very risky), Mountebank, Sea Hag, Familiar, Soothsayer (though this is often more suited to Slogs)

Gainers: Stonemason, Procession, Ironworks, Border Village, Armory, Death Cart, Squire, Salvager, Workshop, etc. I want to point out City, as well, because if you can turn the corner on them at the right moment, it's often possible to slam down e.g. the Estate pile.

Empty-able Piles: Ruin, Curse, Stonemason, Fool's Gold, Squire, Hamlet, Duchess, Pawn, Pearl Diver (etc), often board-dependent, but things like Fishing Village, Ironmonger, etc that people just snap up at every chance because the cost is so low (and they’re so good)....






Example Games:
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151124/log.0.1448393618472.txt
Marauder, Cultist, Familiar - junk is flowing, you have multiple piles that are going to fall, so you can really start playing for the 3rd pile. I think Marauder over Cultist is very important here, since the spoils are good, drawing is less good (with a deck full of junk), and chaining is quite unlikely (and also has a chance to skip your Familiars. The important point is that treasures are good, which is very common in these kinds of games. My opponent shouldn't have bought the Duchy, but it's very unlikely they can get to 2 Colony and a Province in time, anyway.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151127/log.0.1448643955753.txt
Here we have IGG. Trader provides some defense, but also a combo. Jester helps, and FV isn't too bad, either. Notably, Duchess provides a great 3rd pile as well.
  
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151127/log.0.1448655452593.txt
Young Witch can make both Curses and Banes empty, and with Familiar available, this is a good bit more likely. Hamlet is another third pile, and so some jockeying for positions should have happened. Pile awareness here allowed me to steal this one.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151208/log.0.1449533322065.txt
Again, Curses and Ruins both running, Hunting Party is one of those stacks that tend to run, and we even have Stonemason for more shenanigans. 

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151230/log.0.1451490645872.txt
This one is all about piles that want to run (Highway, Market Square, Minion), plus the obscene power of Stonemason. In these kinds of games, you need to be very aware of what you need to do to run the game out, as well as what your opponents can do for the same.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160107/log.0.1452205936848.txt 
Another example in the same vein as the previous.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160107/log.0.1452191577234.txt
An example of the Procession style here. Very often you can process into process into mroe stuff into more stuff, emptying out LOTS of cards in a single turn. Note that you need to green pretty early to defend against your opponent doing do.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151119/log.0.1447972595341.txt
You didn't expect me to leave you without an example of a classic Ironworks rush, did you? The raw speed and power is on display here, since even facing down Goons on a Colony board, and totally uncontested (which is correct unless you want to mirror and contest fully), I'm able to knock out all the piles (and even nab a duchy) for a blistering 54 points and end the game in a mere 16 turns.

Know Your Basics #1: Ironworks Rush

Game Log

Setup:

...with Shelters.


Despite the Shelters and the Colonies, this game has to be an Ironworks/Silk Road rush. The problem is, there just isn't anything else to do. You can play for Stables, but this is just too slow. And you can play for a mix of that with Herald, but lowering the Herald pile actually speeds the Rush up even more than you in that case (as the Rush player is pretty happy with Heralds, but really really happy with the easily-empty-able pile). Adding Doctor to your Stables engine doesn't help too much on average (though I guess you can give it a whirl on 5/2 exactly - I don't *think* it's enough even there). It helps a Herald engine a good bit more, as those cards work synergystically, but again, the Herald engine just has NO time, and you have to look to Navigator as your payload or give in and get Platinum anyway.

In the actual game, my opponent goes for Doctor/Ironworks into... some kind of Herald thing where he prefers Golds to Stables for a while. I flounder around a bit trying to keep my options open and figure out what he's doing, oscillating a bit between playing to be able to go a bit long (probably close to just being wrong) with some Duchies and just ramming home the piles. In any case, I am able to close it out on turn 14, and it wasn't as close as the 32-10 final score would make it look.

In cases like this, it's important to note that the Rush player is going to have both the point lead and all the control over how the game is being steered, and that is not something you want to go up against - you need a LOT of raw power to overcome it.

Anyway, it's important to know a few of these basic concepts, like a rush, not so much because they will always be right (it took the rest of the board being fairly weak here, given the Shelters and Colonies), but because you need to have some plan that doesn't just roll over to them.

Instructional Game #4 Clean, Clear Subtleties

Game Log

Setup:

The first thing that jumps out at me here is Ironworks/Highway. Of course, in retrospect, there isn't that much support for it. In order for that to be a key or even significant part of your strategy, you need to be drawing good chunks of your deck pretty reliably. The only draw here is Torturer (a terminal with no village) and Vagrant (which doesn't help get the components together). The other way you can get to drawing that much is by thinning, but the only thinning is Counterfeit. It's possible to try to get Counterfeit to work, but it's pretty slow - and your opponent probably WILL be contesting you on Highways. So at best, that's a friendly interaction that can come up.

My opponent - again, a strong player - opened Ironworks/Silver. I actually think this is just a mistake here. Counterfeit/Highway probably should be a pretty central part of your plan, because Counterfeit thins and gives buys, and Highway leverages that pretty nicely. Perhaps more important, if you let one player get too many Highways, they might actually be able to do some pretty degenerate things. In any case, the important thing to note is that 5s are key. And Ironworks here, without a Highway in play, pretty much just grabs Silver. Now Silver is probably a reasonable card on this board, but here's where we look at the percentages: Silver/Silver is about 91% to hit at least one 5, including about 15% to get two. Ironworks/Silver is about 73% to get at least one 5, including about 1% to get two. Furthermore, if you use IW to grab a Silver in order to hit your $5, then you're not up anything over what Silver/Silver would have done unless you hit that 1% (in which case you've got an extra Ironworks). So where your real advantage lies, after the second shuffle, is in that, if you miss with your Ironworks hand in a way that you hit exactly $3 after gaining Silver, you end up with an extra Silver after that shuffle. (There's also some weird cases where your Ironworks misses the shuffle and then collides well, but these are really really fringe, and require getting Highway before Ironworks, and I really don't think you can bank on that). I in no way believe that that extra Silver can compensate for the lowered chance at hitting 5s. This thought process is what was going through my mind (not the exact percentages, mind, just the generalities) when I deferred my Ironworks until later - I want it to gain 5s, it can't do that soon, so I'd rather start my decks rolling.

Okay, so the game proceeds such that he does actually get that Ironworks leading him to $3, also hitting $5 on the other turn, equal spot, so that after the 4th turn, he straight up has an extra Ironworks compared to me. But the next shuffle is unkind to him (at this point, our shuffles become highly uncoupled due to the differing number of cards in our decks). By the end of turn 7, our decks look like this:

I have an extra Counterfeit. He has an extra Silver, Copper, and Ironworks. It looks at first blush that I might be a little ahead. But looks can be misleading - this advantage is already quite large, and he's going to need some good draws (more realistically, for me to have bad draws) in order to come back.

Over the next four turns, we can see how easy it is for an advantage like this to snowball: My deck is slightly trimmer, more efficient, and this compounds in on itself to get even sleeker (the extra Counterfeit is very nice for this as well), while picking up significant payload in a non-fattening way: the Card-neutral Highway. Thus, by turn 11, we are looking at:

I want to point out that my opponent has, given his situation, played very well here over the past few turns! His deck has lots of high-quality treasures and is set up like a quite decent Big Money deck ready for a healthy greening phase. Of course, the sleekness of my deck *ought* to leave me ahead here, but... over the next few turns, I play rather badly: I get a third Counterfeit (which I cannot support), and load up on Vagrants over Silvers. This is based on me still thinking of getting nice Highway chains capped off by Ironworks, but this is really an unrealistic pipe dream. My opponent keeps playing cleanly and hangs in the game the whole time. I make just one more good play, buying an Estate for effective $4 on turn 15 with 4 Provinces left - I am at the top of a shuffle and know I will never meaningfully see the next one, and given that the score is at all close, the point is absolutely worth it. Fortunately for me, my big early lead combines with a touch of first player advantage to overcome my later attempts to throw the game away, and I win on the 17th turn of the game.