Opportunity Denial

Opportunity Denial – A Disruption Evaluation Framework

A glaring hole exists, I believe, in the game strategy literature surrounding the evaluation of hindering your opponents’ strategies and goals. As a concept, it’s obviously known, and it’s known to have value, but the amount of value it has is poorly understood. There’s no framework for knowing how to compare it to advancing your own game plan. In this article, I seek to fill that void.

Opportunity Denial

               The basic concept of these evaluations is something I call “Opportunity Denial”. Effectively, it can be summed up as: “The value of thwarting your opponents’ goal is equal to the difference between the value of the goal you have stopped and the opponents’ next best goal”. Effectively, it’s the flipside of opportunity cost – the value of your own prospective choice is tempered by the value of the next best option in that case, and the value of your denial works the same here. In short, denial is more valuable when your opponent doesn’t have any other good options, and less valuable the closer your opponent’s best unstopped option gets to being as good as what you’re preventing.

Examples

Chess

               Chess is a game where this concept is already fairly well understood (albeit, not by this name). The biggest case of this is with space. A space advantage is often referenced as a good thing, though not often explained. Why is it valuable? Because it constricts your opponent’s pieces – generally, they can’t go to squares attacked by your pawns, and it’s hard to get behind enemy pawns safely, so having advanced pawns means your opponents have fewer squares for their pieces. This is a big denial insofar as they don’t have enough good squares for their pieces, which means that as more pieces get traded off, the less you are denying them, as they have more options per piece overall, and so your space advantage is good for less and less.

               A similar situation presents itself in deep endgames with Kings blocking each other. The opposition is a big deal because it lets you deny your opponent the opportunity to advance. As long as the opponent has another piece to move, then this doesn’t matter as much, but as the number of other pieces goes down, the more zugzwang comes into play, and the opposition matters a lot more.

Magic

               In Magic, the concept gets referred to as playing on a different axis. For instance, you can imagine a limited deck of 20 Plains and 30 Swords to Plowshares. Such a deck is never going to lose to most limited decks you’ll come across, which must win only through a pretty limited number of creatures beating you down. However, once your opponents bring any other kind of way of winning – a bigger deck to deck you out, a hexproof creature, a non-creature threat like a planeswalker, etc, then you’re just cold. Often in limited, winning though other means isn’t really viable, so you might be fine (assuming you can guard against them boarding in a hundred extra basic lands and milling you out that way). But in constructed, this is a very bad idea. This is because even though you’ve shut down the creature plan hard, you are only denying them on one axis, and there will be decks with other axes. This concept is exemplified even more by cards that do this on their own, like Moat or Ensnaring Bridge. These cards can take care of creatures pretty well, but they aren’t exactly busting a lot of formats. Part of this is because those cards can be answered, but a big part is that they don’t cover everything. Bridge needed a deck like Lantern Control, which completes the lock by stopping alternatives from getting in hand, in order to really make a huge mark.

               This is why most control decks end up playing Counterspells – a counter can answer basically any spell. Even in these cases, there are some things you can’t answer – too many spells per turn, uncounterable spells, lands – which is why particularly in the older formats, with lots of options, pure control decks don’t end up doing super well all that often, and also why they tend to do particularly poorly in wide open new formats, because they don’t have a narrow list of threats such that they know exactly what they want to answer.

Ticket to Ride

               Generally placing trains, or picking up certain colors of cards, simply to block your opponent isn’t a great strategy. This is because they can usually just go for something else, besides what you blocked, and be in totally fine shape. The closer you get to the end of the game, or the more you’re sure they have some particular route they need to complete, the more it can start to become reasonable.

Multiplayer Games, generally

               In this case, your opponents’ collectively are analogous to one opponent in a 2-player game. And in this setting, attacking a single opponent tends to be a poor strategy, precisely because each of the other players is unaffected, so your collective opponents’ next best plan – in this case, beating you with more or less any other player – is hurt relatively little. Where it becomes more reasonable is, predictably, when that particular opponent you’re attacking is much ahead of everyone else.

Dominion

               The most obvious case of this in Dominion is Contraband. Contraband isn’t such a good card usually, because you give your opponent the power to deny you. That ability is reasonably powerful, because at some point, there’s usually going to be a specific card you need – Victory cards if nothing else – at which point Contraband is pretty useless to you. And besides this, there are almost always other options which are nearly as good as a $3 +buy treasure for 5 anyway (and usually, stronger).

               However, the concept comes up in many other situations more commonly. There are a couple of other cards(/landmarks/events) which are pretty direct in this respect.

Take, for instance, the Landmark Defiled Shrine. With N tokens on it, buying a curse is exactly like buying a victory card worth N-1 points, right? So if there are, let’s say, seven counters, then it’s the same as  buying a (0-cost) Province? Not exactly. First of all, there’s an issue about piles running out – usually buying a province will hasten the end of the game moreso than buying a curse (though I guess that’s not always true). Moreover, though, there’s some amount of denial to each play. When you get the curse, the points leave Defiled Shrine, meaning that you’re effectively stopping your opponent from making the same play on their next turn. Some people say that this is like a 12 point swing. But when we look at this under the paradigm of opportunity denial, we can see that this is not the case. First of all, you haven’t denied them anything if they weren’t going to buy a curse anyway. But even if they were, they now get to spend that buy on something else, whatever the next best thing was. So it comes out to the full 12 point swing only in the case where they were otherwise doing nothing with the buy.

Let’s compare that to buying a Province. Every province you get is a province your opponent can’t get in the long run. But getting a province now doesn’t do much in terms of the overall number they can get until the game is about to end. Is buying a province, therefore, a 12 point swing? No, it isn’t either. First of all, your opponent may not be going for provinces at all – if they have access to VP tokens, or alt victory cards, or some other way of winning the game, then it doesn’t make much difference. Additionally, while buying the province is a long term denial of the Nth province (where N is how many remained before you bought it, plus how many they have right now), that only tends to matter as N gets low. In other words, denying them the 7^th province doesn’t matter so much – it’s the 5^th and the 4^th where it starts to become pertinent. And the fastest way to deny them those may not be to buy one straightaway.

The same logic from the Province case actually applies to any pile that is running out. Think about a case where there's only one pile of villages, and generally the best deck to go for is some kind of draw-your-deck-using-terminals-then-play-a-bunch-of-payload thing, which is often the case. In such a situation, having more of the villages means you can play more actions - more draw cards, as well as more terminal payload cards. Fantastic. But is it worth it? It's easy to imagine a situation where, let's say the fifth village will eventually move you from two provinces per turn to three. And you already have five, so you're set there, but there's one left, and you're trying to figure out whether to deny your opponent. Let's also assume that it will cost you a turn to get the village (because if it's free, then obviously you should do it). In this case, the answer is pretty clear that you should not bother with denial - you're costing yourself a turn, and your opponent will get to cut some gains (one less village and a bit less payload, since they can't support it), which means they're actually getting off the ground faster. Between all that, you might still be ahead, but it's hard to imagine you'll be more ahead than if you just went for your own greening phase. The more interesting question comes up when it flips you from single province turns to double. This reduces time from greening start to four provinces by two turn cycles. Spending time on the village which is superfluous for you costs you one turn, and them not needing to build as much means they can cut this one village, along with probably one draw card and about two to three payload cards. One thing extra for you plus 4-5 for your opponent looks like more than enough turn cycles, but we have to remember that probably some of these things get bought on the same turn anyway, and the extra village does also help your reliability (probably more so than the extra cards hurt it). So all in all... it's actually a close call, and depends on the specifics. But certainly the value over not denying isn't super high.

Making Luck Episode 5: Pregame Analysis

This week, Adam and I take a long look at how we approach analysing a board before the game starts - how to pick a strategy, what to look for, etc. We also look at a few 'bonus' example boards before diving into the next Kingdom of the Week!

Making Luck Episode 4: I Got You Saying the Previous Thing (City)

Last week, Adam and I took a bit of a goofy look at everyone's (okay, not everyone) improving Kingdom card: City.

Making Luck, A Dominion Podcast

 My good friend Adam Horton and I have started doing a weekly(...ish) Dominion Podcast entitled "Making Luck". We're covering a variety of Dominion topics, mostly strategic, of course. Every week, we'll end the show with a kingdom to discuss and analyze, and then the next week we'll go over conclusions we've drawn from playing some games in the meantime at the beginning of the show. You can find the 'casts on Adam's YouTube page (I might add them to mine at some point, if I can get find myself enough time to do so), or wherever you like to get your podcasts. If there's some way you consume podcasts that it ISN'T available, please let us know.

We also really look forward to interaction and comments from our listeners. We're working out exactly where best to do that (maybe someday we'll have a website?), but for now, you can comment on the YouTube pages, or on the posts on this blog (in future, each episode will be getting its own blog post), or you can email me through the "Contact" link at the bottom of the blog.

Anyway, here are the episodes so far:

Episode 1: I Touch You and Instantly the Purring (delaying or skipping Potion)

Episode 2: I'm Disappointed (Forager)

Episode 2.5: Hermit/Market Square Com-BO (Adam only)

Episode 3: Curses Are Better Than Silvers (Draw-to-X Engine)

Swindler

Swindler is a card which I've long rated very highly. It is cheap, and in the best case, incredibly devastating. However, recently it has lost a lot of its luster in my eyes. Let's break it down.

Starting Off
Swindler is terminal. This should give you some amount of hesitancy in opening Swindler/Swindler. On the other hand, the attack can be very powerful, so it's not crazy to think that it might be worth risking the collision. There are 2 main general factors here: how much does the collision hurt you, and how good is the attack?

Checking the opening percentages, we can see that compared to Swindler/Silver, by opening double Swindler you're losing 19% chance to hit 5 at least once, and a couple percent to go 5/5. You're also nearly 25% less likely to hit $6 (all of these figures are for turns 3/4 and assume no funny business from opponent giving you cards or stealing them from your deck, or spy attacking you, etc. - though it's important to note that without some kind of spy effect, their Swindler attack doesn't change these numbers for turns 3 and 4). You have a 37.9% chance to attack them twice, and a 98.5% chance to attack them at least once, up from 0% and 83.3% respectively. This means that by opening double Swindler, you get slightly more than .2 fewer 5-costs and slightly less than .25 fewer 6-costs (if you want those), and in return, you get .53 more Swindler plays.

To figure out whether or not that's worth it, you need to gauge how important hitting 5 (or 6) is, and how much the attack is worth. Let's go after the attack first: 7/12 (58%) of the time, you're hitting a Copper, which you will always be turning into curse. Copper into Curse is very good in the early game, because coppers are a huge part of the economy. 1/4 of the time, you're hitting Estate. This is really bad - worse than silver since it skips their estate for them. Indeed, you're always cycling early game, which is not good for you, though the appeal of the good cases is definitely enough to overcome that. Still, a quarter of the time it's actively bad. The last 1/6 of games, we are hitting their buys. How good this is varies a LOT from board to board, as when there's something really bad (used to be true more than it is now, but note that it's effectively always true for 5-costs by going into Duchy), this is very good. But sometimes you're e.g. turning Swindler into Silver, which is a downgrade, but a minor one.


Money Paragraph
So though I've gone for double Swindler in a huge percentage of games I've played where that was an option, I now think that this is usually incorrect, that Swindler/Silver is often better. The cases for this are when there's a key 5 or 6 you want to get early. The cases where doubling down on terminals is better include those times where there's something bad at every price point, and of course when the 4s are not much worse than the 5s. I also want to note here that Swindler/Swindler is a decent amount better (in a relative sense) 'on the draw' (i.e. as 2nd player), since you are more likely to hit a key card (on turn 4, your opponent has more total bought cards in their deck). Since hitting these cards is the best thing you can  usually do, that is a noteworthy if not huge boost.


Later On
Swindler is a fine card later in the game, but it tends to not be special. Hitting estates is still bad. Hitting Copper turns from being very good (denying a good fraction of economy) to being very mediocre, as one copper into a curse doesn't matter so much at the mid-stage, and the fact that you skip the copper for them starts being a non-negligible fraction of that penalty. The simple way to look at it is, there are just fewer shuffles left for the junk to be junk, so one shuffle of skipping the junk is a bigger fraction of the total times that your opponent has to draw it for the remainder of the game.

Hitting important cards can still be quite good, but very often the opponent's deck has a lot of redundancy, so that messing one thing up is not too terribly difficult to correct with future buys. This is particularly true of a well-established engine, where they can just re-buy whatever component you're denying, and given that they're drawing lots of cards almost every turn, they get to do so quite quickly. If you play many Swindlers in a turn, it can still be very good, since it's much harder to deal with something like 4 extra terminals all-of-a-sudden, but if you are really having the chance to play 4 of a terminal payload card in a turn, there's often going to be an alternative that's better.


Strategically
Swindler is a card which really wants you to be keeping track of knowing your opponent's deck. Knowing what you're going to hit can be very nice at times (though unless you have a Spy effect, you usually only have some probability cloud of a guess). More importantly, though,you want to know what card is going to be worst for their deck. Do they have too many terminals? Not enough payload? Are they lacking +buy? Something I don't see often enough from other players, but which I feel like I do often, is giving my opponent a card and then buying the exact same card. Sure, sometimes there's a Thief on the board, and you just give them that every time because it's terrible, but especially as with more expansions we've had fewer 'bad' cards, it's more often the case that you want to give them a marginal card, and you want to make sure it's the most marginal one for their specific deck.

One place where a Swindler-heavy strategy can really work out is in an Aggro Pile deck. It's a disruptive card that slows the opponent down, and it can also take chunks out of piles. It's usually pretty hard to make this your game plan from the start, because you have little control over what you hit, but it's something to be aware of as the course of the game progresses. If piles get low enough, especially depending on your position in terms of luck and deck quality has unfolded, you might want to start angling to get that pile ending, applying pressure to either seal up a short-term advantage (most likely in points) or hoping to get lucky because you're in a very bad spot. If you get in this situation, you need to be very careful about how much you lower piles and what you do in terms of points. If you start spinning the points angle too early, then your opponent's better deck will have time to crush you. But if you continue to slam your opponent with Duchies as you are also depleting piles, this may well turn out poorly for you as well.....


Defenses
The most obvious defense you can take is to buy cards only on values where there's nothing really bad to Swindle into. You usually can't/shouldn't really make a go of this, as 5 always has Duchy, but 5-costs also tend to be really good and important to get. You should not take a big hit in card quality just to try to avoid something getting swindled, especially since it's far more likely for you to draw and use the card than for the card to get swindled. What you should do, though, is be willing to take some very marginal downgrades. The obvious kinds of examples here are something like Village over Walled Village when Thief is on the board and you aren't relying on the Walled bonus (which you almost never are). In general, 3s tend to be safer, as there aren't tons of very bad 3s, though 4s, 7s, and potion-costs are potentially actually the safest, in those cases where they're the only card at that price point available (though you do have to worry about running the pile out). Super marginal cantrips are things you can think about avoiding altogether. Pearl Diver is really the poster boy here - the chance to get turned into Estate is sometimes quite bad. On the other hand, having these means other things are less likely to get hit, so you need to figure out whether you're more in need of protecting your few key cards ("Good Stuff" decks often fall here) or staying clean and not getting yourself junked up (engines hate having an extra estate).

More importantly as defenses come other cursing attacks. It's certainly possible to get both these AND Swindler, but when the curses run out, you risk turning them back into coppers, which is very bad - at this point in the game you usually would much prefer Silver to Swindler, and because this point will come, you need to seriously consider whether the early spurt of attacking effectiveness from a 0th shuffle Swindler is worth it.

There are a number of other minor defenses. Moat and Lighthouse work about as well as they ever do (though they can get turned into Estates I suppose - this usually isn't a deciding factor though). Silver flood decks shrug Swindler off fairly well - often they give you a silver back, and worst case you're getting like a Chancellor, which really isn't that bad when you're silver-flooding. Jack of All Trades and Hermit are particularly good, since getting Coppers turned into Curses actually makes them trashable, when otherwise they wouldn't be. Against those cards, you usually skip Swindler, though I will note that if you do Swindle a copper in those cases, you should almost certainly go ahead and give the Curse. Cards with on-trash benefits help defend a fair amount (usually), but it's quite a situational thing. Be on the lookout for them, though.



Overall:
Swindler is a strong card. When cheap options are good compared to expensive ones, and especially when there are bad things to stick people with, going for multiples can be good. This can lead to pile outs, but you need to have lots of game awareness.

More often, you will get one as an annoying attack that helps you ramp up early on. There's quite a bit of variance in the card, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

Gardens: An Introduction and Dominion Theory

Ah, Gardens. For a long time, you were my favorite card.

At some point, I determined to not lose to this card - which is probably how I got the itch for all the alternate VP that came later. It's true, though, that mastery over it is not a simple thing. I have learned an awful lot, and I think there's still a chunk out there that I have yet to bite off. But let's dive in.

Running in head-long
The most naive strategy in "going for Gardens" is to just buy as many as possible as soon as possible. People don't stay on that for very long, because it doesn't take much to figure out that your deck gets so bad, you actually have to build more to be able to afford all the Gardens. But it's not too uncommon to see players who do only a few turns of preparation before starting their charge into Gardens, buying every card possible as soon as possible (i.e. maximally jamming coppers into their decks), and trying to get lots of Gardens and lots of cards more or less ASAP. Let's take a look at a couple of examples to demonstrate this kind of approach.

Candlestick Maker
I have recently seen it floating around that Candlestick Maker is one of the better "Gardens enablers", with the implication that a headlong strategy here could make real strides. The idea was to end the game around turn 17, by which point it was supposed to be not uncommon to have 6 point Gardens. Memories can apparently be faulty: In order to get to 6 point Gardens, you need to add 50 cards to your starting deck. Turn 17 means 17 natural buys, which means you need 33 additional buys from CSMs. Work out the example yourself, and you'll see that even if you stack your deck, you can't get that many - indeed, you max out at 55 if my memory serves right. However, having a best-case-scenario mentality isn't very useful anyway, so what I'm going to do here is look more at an average case. Examples like the following can show the power of theory-crafting in planning out many kinds of strategies, broadly.

Turns 1-2 you are buying CSM. Turns 3-4 you are getting, most likely 3 more. How did I come up with 3? Well, the maximum possible is 4, but to get that, you need a CSM turn 3 with at least $4, another one turn 4 with at least $4. And you can float a token, potentially. However your deck is only capable of producing $9, and 2 cards miss the shuffle. If either of those is a CSM, you're done. If they're both coppers, you once again can't get there. If both CSMs fall in the same turn, you're once again hung out to dry. There are a lot of fail cases, and indeed it's not crazy unlucky to only get 2 more (though it is fairly unlucky). So 3 is a reasonable guess. Then turns 5,6,7 will be a single shuffle, in which you are pretty likely to get the remaining 5 CSMs. At this point, you are likely to have played CSM about 6 times. Assuming you're using all your spare buys for coppers, this means you're looking at somewhere around a 23 card deck. That means you're looking at a 4 turn shuffle next, and 1-2 CSMs, on average, missing that shuffle, with it being more likely for more to miss if you have been luckier earlier and have more cards now. 4 natural buys plus 9 CSM buys gets you 13 more cards, taking you after turn 11 to around a 36 card deck. This gives you a 7 turn shuffle, in which 0-1 CSMs will miss, most likely. Thus, after turn 18, you're looking at 53 cards.

Here is where we need to start looking at what exactly we're buying on these turns. Surely lots of the buys are heading to coppers. But we're also obviously going to want to buy actual things, too. And especially with the coin tokens to smooth us out, we don't want to waste any of the 'real' money we are producing. If we're playing this headlong rush, that means we will be buying Gardens. If we go back to the point at which we're anticipating the CSMs running out, at the end of a shuffle on turn 7, we see a 23 card deck with 3 Estates, 10 CSMs, and 10 Coppers. The money density of this deck is 20/23 or about 4.35 per hand. We can also anticipate having 1-2 tokens left when we enter this stage. Given that, it seems very likely that we'll be able to buy Gardens on each of these 4 turns, along with our 9 coppers. We're likely to pick up another couple tokens as well. This means that at the start of the shuffle on turn 12, our money density will be 29/36, which is a hair over 4 per turn. Thus, we can still Gardens-per-turn for the next 4. Following this, though, we're dropping off a bit, so by the time we go for Estates, we won't be able to double consistently. Overall, then, we're looking at 20-21 turns to be able to empty our 3 piles. If we look back, this is most likely going to leave us just shy of hitting 60 cards (which would take 1-2 additional turns, average case).

So what we end up with is: 20-21 turns to empty piles and end the game, 8 5-point Gardens, and 11 Estates, for a total of 51 points. This equals the number of points from a player who is able to empty all the Provinces without trashing their Estates or touching Duchies. Of course, the problem is that this simply isn't good enough. I'm not sure if this is even good enough to be straight-up Big Money. Probably yes, but only barely. Of course, they are almost always going to have some improvement on straight money, so you'd better have an improvement on straight CSM/Gardens if this is what you want to do.

Workshop
Workshop plays out in some ways very similarly to CSM. Gain a bunch of them, buy out of the Gardens, empty the Estates. It's the most classic rush strategy in the game. In this case, we are even Workshopping the Workshops (which is not great if you're contested, but as I often say, you want to consider non-mirrors when picking strategy, and only consider mirrors when implementing). Of course, Workshop is also terminal, which means you are going to be a little bit slower to empty them, but also means you want to stop 'shopping 'shops a bit before you actually empty them (buying the last 1 or 2 when you have exactly $3, or if it gets late enough, gaining them later on). The terminal-ness of the Workshop is a pretty big downside in comparison, but this is more than compensated for by the increased economic upside. When I gain Gardens, Workshop made $4. Even when I gain Workshop, it made $3, and $2 for Estate is still better than the $1 from a CSM. Of course, collisions happen, and without tokens, you probably aren't going to be able to use all of your $$ efficiently, providing some waste. This means you won't see the full benefit of the $4 economic potential.

Still, the games will start out playing more or less the same. Then, because you're worried about collision, you start gaining Gardens a turn or two faster. The key point is that throughout the period you are gaining Gardens, you're also buying other cards which actually help you end the game (mostly Estates), as opposed to just picking up coppers. 7 turns before you start greening, into about 9 turns of gaining Gardens+Estate, plus an extra turn to finish off stragglers means you are going to be finishing somewhere around turn 7. Of course, you're going to have gained way fewer cards in that time-span - we're looking at barely 4 point Gardens as opposed to almost 6 - but the increase in speed is a big deal. 43 points is enough to outlast 6 Provinces, which in all honesty is still not all that special, but it's quite a lot better.


Some Fundamental Concepts
There are two main approaches you can take with this kind of head-first charge for Gardens. One is to try to rush down and end the game. This is great if you can actually end things fast enough, but most often, that's just not going to be possible (the major exception, of course, is the card Ironworks). The other is to try to score incredibly large numbers of points. This also tends to not be great most of the time (Beggar is, once again, a very large exception).

Does that mean that the card isn't good? No, not at all. Does it mean it's doomed to be merely an alternative to Duchy as a means for getting a few extra points at the end of a game? Sometimes, but not always. It can still be the star of the show. How? Well, headlong rushes can still happen sometimes with multiple enablers. More to the point, if you build just long enough to be getting 1-2 Provinces and THEN dive for the Gardens, things can turn out well. But most often there are one of two strategies with which this card can get you there:

Aggro Pile
If you haven't checked it out, I might suggest my previous blog post to familiarize yourself with what this deck is all about. But how Gardens comes in is, if you add some kind of attack, particularly a junker, to the Headlong rush mix, then suddenly you are in business. You're emptying piles slower, but only slightly slower. More importantly, you are slowing your opponent down quite a lot, and while you certainly aren't shrugging the junk off yourself, it doesn't hurt you nearly as badly. This thus gives you enough time to finish up piling out without getting horribly outscored by an opponent going after the big cards.

Engine
I know, it might seem crazy. But in all honesty, engines tend to be the ways to maximize Gardens. Engines love Gardens. After I made that determination to not lose to Gardens, the way I most often did was when I went head-long, and my opponent opened Chapel... and then went for Gardens.

The thing to understand here is that engines are better suited to gain more cards over the long term than virtually any other deck. Once you get a running engine, it's very common to be gaining 3,4,5, even more cards every turn, as you add a little bit of payload and maintain your draw apparatus. Going straight for enablers doesn't permit that, and over a time-span of almost any length (look at the CSM as an example), you really aren't going to be doing better than 2 cards per turn that way. The fundamental problem is that as your deck gets bigger, your shuffles get longer, and you see your enabling cards less often. In contrast, as engines get bigger, they continue to see every enabling card nearly every turn - so even though they have fewer overall, they see them much more often.

Because of this, Engine decks routinely end up to be nearly the size of your more 'traditional' Gardens decks, and especially with the help of wasting a bunch of extra final-turn buys, they can often actually end up largely, sometimes by quite a substantial margin. Chapel-ing away ten cards is insignificant against an extra card or three per turn across the remainder of the game.




As an example of this, I would like to point to this game. Of course, this isn't a comparison to a head-long rush - my opponent didn't go for Gardens, and indeed this would have been a clobbering regardless. But the point is that, in 13 turns, I was able to gain 8 Gardens and have them all be worth 5 points, and you don't do that by rushing them, you do it by building an engine. The reason why this is so powerful in an engine is that it gives you a lot of flexibility, because it's a massive well of points which you can 'float'. If your opponent goes straight for Gardens, you clean up by just taking down all the Provinces. If, though, they go for Provinces, then you have a massive reserve of points waiting for you in the form of Gardens, which means you don't really need to worry about losing a Province split by any margin other than 8-0.


Of course, there's a lot more to the card than this, but I hope this introduction has been helpful.

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.