Instructional Game #2: Scrying Pool, Saboteur, and Switching Gears

Game Log

The card that jumps out to me here is Scrying Pool. Scrying Pool is incredibly powerful, on many boards drawing huge amounts of cards non-terminally. Something to note, though, is that, without trashing, you need other cards that draw cards in order to draw your deck. They don't have to draw many cards - cantrips work just fine - but they do need to draw some. Oasis is pretty good with Pool, but doesn't actually fill that role. Which means that here, you actually need a good amount of Worker's Villages. I do think that Pool is probably still worth it - it's really that good - but it is not as much a slam dunk as you might think (or as I thought at the start of this game).

Something I want to note at this point is that you will definitely want Marauder here. People think that Scrying Pool negates Looter attacks, but this isn't really true. Sure, it's less bad for my Scrying Pool deck than it is against a lot of other decks, but it's still a real pain. There's a couple reasons. First, the subtle one is that you can have Ruin on top of your deck followed by non-action: in this case, you will keep the ruin, then not draw all that much, whereas if the ruin wasn't there, you'd skip your non-action, and at the end of all this, you've drawn FEWER non-ruin cards than you otherwise would have (and drawing extra ruins really doesn't compensate). Second, and I think more important (though I'm not sure, as it's a bit tricky to quantify), you are just less likely to start with a Scrying Pool in your hand, which means you end up drawing stone nothing significantly more often than if the ruins weren't there. So this is really a pseudo-counter. While the Spoils do also reduce your ability to draw, they do so less offensively, especially since you can get rid of them at will, which isn't true of the ruins.


Ok, on to the game:
I open with Oasis/Potion. My opponent is on a 2/5 and gets a Saboteur. Ok, let's talk a bit about this decision. Saboteur is not a very good card. Really at all. However, I find it to be quite a reasonable opener on some boards. It will usually completely desctroy one of the opponent's opening buys, which is really a serious setback so early in the game, and then it provides some added value. It's still not great, and lots of other cards are better, but it's something you can do in a pinch.

His Saboteur hits my oasis on turn 4, and then it nails my potion on turn 5. In the meantime, he's added a potion of his own, but I've been fortunate enough to get two Pool buys in before my Potion goes down.

At this point, I decide to shift gears. Instead of rushing on focusing to re-buy my potion and continue with my original plan, I decide to play anti-Saboteur. There are a number of factors that lead me to this. Perhaps the biggest thing is that the Pools themselves are immune, which means that he's going to be able to nail my Oases, Potion, and Worker's Village with pretty high regularity. And since there are no decent 2-costs on the board, I end up getting nothing for them. So instead, I go for the anti-Saboteur strategy of "buy the most expensive thing possible". This will let me downgrade into those Potions if he hits my Gold anyway, and in general really lessens the effectiveness of his Saboteur. It's also fast enough that I figure I won't be too bad off against the Pool player, especially given that I already have a couple myself, and he was slow to start getting them. I am definitely still looking to pick up actions, when that's reasonable on a price-point, as they work much better with the existing Pools I do have.

I get a key stroke of luck on turn 11, when he ends up hitting 1p, which slows him WAY down in getting to his second Scrying Pool. At this point, he's going to be very, very slow at maneuvering the game into the state he needs. On that same turn 11, his Saboteur hits of my Golds, and I turn it into a Potion - I actually think this is a pretty serious mistake on my part, as it's a bit late to try to go back into pools, and I would have been much better served by simply taking a Marauder.

By the time we reach the end of turn 16, our decks looks like this:

His deck is going to be humming pretty nicely here, IF he can find his Scrying Pools often enough. My main trumps are my lead and his relative lack of Pools. I am also very well-positioned against his Saboteurs. The most damaging card for him to hit would be the Marauder, followed by the Oases. Nothing else is really close. Hitting Bank or Gold is not going to be much of a downgrade for me. And hitting my Provinces, at this point, increases the strength of my deck, dramatically increasing my chances to make MORE provinces. Three pools are also not really enough to zero in on my good targets with reliability. Still, there's some danger left for me, and if he can get a couple more Pools, his deck will suddenly be firing with pretty good regularity. I still like my chances here, because I only need a couple more Provinces to put him in a very difficult position (and he should seriously consider not playing his Saboteur starting around this point). And he definitely has some more building to do in the mean-time.

After some reasonably favourable draws for me, we reach the following state after turn 21:

...where it's very important to note that there is a province in the trash. What this means is that I believe I'm actually in very good shape. It's true that his deck is much better at this point, but I am closing in on having a fairly insurmountable points lead. I also have a Pillage, which apart from giving me safe sources of money, will, I hope, more importantly steal a big chunk of one of his turns by nabbing a Scrying Pool. Now, you might think that having such a big point lead doesn't mean much, given his Saboteur. The problem with this is, he really needs to train that Saboteur very well in order to hit what he wants - otherwise he's pretty likely to actually score me points by playing it. And even if he hits Province into Duchy, that is not such a huge blow for me. Indeed, he's in the difficult spot of needing his deck to maintain reliability whilst also running out the Duchies (to make his Saboteuring of Province that much more effective). Simultaneously, he has to worry about three-pile endings in that plan: Oases are gone, and only one Scrying Pool remains. So perhaps his best chance is to actually get a huge economic thing going and score a bunch of points at once. Triple Merchant Guild can help, but it will take a while, and my deck is not so bad - and he's running out of VP left in the supply, meaning he's running out of time. On top of this, he's still not actually that reliable to find a Scrying Pool. Yes, he is a favorite to do so, but not a huge one.

Despite him hitting some of my Victory cards, I am able to cash them in for other VP, and he has another dud turn. I more or less seal the game by grabbing another Province on turn 24.

Instructional Game #1: Of Ambassador

Game Log

Setup:

The first thing to notice here is that Ambassador dominates the board.

I am going to go ahead and make a quick note here, that it may look like Possession counters Ambassador. But that isn't really the case - generally, for Possession to work, you need to be able to play it pretty often, and if you skip Ambassador, you're not really going to be in a position to do that - and indeed, you will have trouble even getting to buy Possession. When you add in that the thin-deck Ambassador player can force her opponent to take an Ambassador anyway, the "counter" really looks like it falls apart, at least in the vast majority of circumstances.

Okay, having said that, getting thin with Ambassador tends to just be dominant. This board is a bit tricky, though, because there's not really much to do after you do get your thin deck. Still, you need to go for Ambassador, because there also isn't much to do against it anyway, and there are at least SOME support cards. If there were a good Big Money enabler, a la Vault or Embassy, you could consider skipping Ambassador here. But there isn't.

Okay,s o the next thing to notice is that ways to increase your hand-size are VERY scarce. On board, there is only Wishing Well. And then in the Black Market, you can get Minion, Masquerade, Vagrant, Native Village, Throne Room and Governor. That's it. And it's pretty slim pickings. Some of those are VERY conditional. Being able to increase your hand-size is absolutely massive, especially in Ambassador games, so you will want to go after this hard.

Let's talk a minute about Black Market here. It's possible to go for it - pulling a Masquerade or Governor or Goons can be very, very nice. But I don't like it here, at least early, because you really need to focus on getting to drawing your deck, and Black Market is pretty thorny when it comes to that. Realistically, you aren't going to be able to get to Governor or Goons quickly, so you would really be hoping for Masquerade. And then you have to ask the question, how much better is Masquerade than another Ambassador? It probably is some better. But you've also spent $3 to buy a terminal that doesn't draw anything, and you need to get lucky to rip the Masquerade off the top. Even if you do, having BM in your deck, I am not sure that you're actually ahead of where you would be if you'd just have other 3s instead.

So on a 4/3 opening here, you need to go for Ambassador, and then you have a choice. You could go Fishing Village, which isn't crazy, but I really think it isn't good here. What is it for? The answer has to be another Ambassador, in which case it's mostly just better to get that second Ambassador before the FV. Yes, you can definitely construct shuffles where it would be better, but things are more likely to not collide than to collide, and anyways, getting to play Ambassador on both turn 3 and 4 is a way bigger benefit than the Fishing Village will ever get you. You are much further ahead. So I think you need either that second Ambassador, or Wishing Well. I'm really not sure between the two, but I tend to lean slightly toward the second Ambassador - there's just more upside, I think.



Anyway, on to the actual game:

I get a 5/2 as it turns out, and go in for Ambassador/Hamlet. Hamlet is hardly going to do anything for me here, I figure, but it has to be better than nothing. My opponent opens Ambassador/Ambassador. And I'm already at a significant disadvantage, but the next draws tend to be more important than the opening draws, so I am certainly not out of it.

On turn 5, my opponent buys a Mining Village. I think this is already a pretty significant mistake. He already has a Fishing Village to let him play both Ambassadors. While Mining Village is by no means the worst card available, as a cantrip, and a card that makes it less likely for him to get terminal Ambassador collision, I just don't think it does all that much for his deck, really. I would be much more interested in starting on the Wishing Wells.

Nevertheless, my deck remains slightly worse than his for many turns, as it takes me a long time to get a Fishing Village, which relegates me to getting 2 an awful lot, whereas he can start to build a bit on 3s. By the end of my 15th turn (and I went second), our decks look like this:

As you can see, I have a little more junk than him, and on top of this, it's his turn, so he gets to hit me back harder before I do. Perhaps even more importantly, he has two Wishing Wells already. This is a very significant advantage, and I really ought to be just losing already.

However, on his turn 16, he does something which I believe is a bit rash: he buys a curse. This really is how you want to pound someone in many cases, but you really need to be well set up for it first, because you are adding junk to your deck, which, if it doesn't go well, can potentially backfire. Adding a third type of junk to the mix means that you are really making the game about slinging that junk back and forth (though largely, these games already are, to an even greater extent than people realize - perhaps more games on that in the future). You need to make sure you are going to win that fight; otherwise, you should have built more. I am still significantly behind, though, with quite a lot more junk than him.

Between his twenty-first turn and mine, our decks look like this:

The big thing to note here is that he has 7 Wishing Wells to my 3. That should allow him to maintain drawing his deck way better than mine, and he can even, with extreme care, slowly build his way up to getting Provinces. Meanwhile, I need to constantly be on vigilance about deck-size, and track my deck very well to make those Wishing Wells count. Fortunately, that isn't actually all that hard to do, and by playing the Wells late, and making wishes based on strategic considerations as much as probabilities, I can draw my deck pretty reliably. What I mean by that is, if I don't have more drawing cards behind, I can wish for a draw card. But if I do (say I drew one off the first part of the Well), then I can wish for a dead card, knowing that if I hit another draw card, I can be fine anyway; if I would wish for a draw card and the dead card is on top, it can be much worse. Of course, this needs to be balanced with raw probabilities.

The bigger thing to note, though, is that I can't really maintain this off of three wells if I need to 'go big' and contest on expensive cards, since the only way to GET to those expensive cards is by buying more stop card, as those are the only things to produce money. Given that, I need to win the game via the deck-size war. So I chip him back the Curse and the Estate and buy a third Ambassador. On his next turn, he returns the estate and ONE of the two curses he has, and buys a Black Market. I believe this is the key mistake in the game. I believe the best play would be to both return the second Curse as well and buy a third Ambassador of his own. I believe that he effectively can't lose the game at that point - it's not as though I can afford to not return the junk cards, as he could pump me full of coppers, at which point my deck would collapse, and he could win in many different ways. And if I do return junk to him, he can always do it at least as well, if not better. He can add a third Fishing Village and a fourth Ambassador and just pound me into submission. Or he can commence building up slowly at that point. In any case, I would basically have no way to win, given the Wishing Well split, as my deck just can't maintain very many cards. So I would just be stuck treading water, and he would have a long time to pick his spots, very safely. On the other hand, taking Black Market is probably also fine, if he returns both curses as well. He can build up, and he should be able to maintain his deck as fairly clean off of two Ambassadors. He could also keep a curse and gain the third Ambassador, which should be safe and allow him to pound me on deck-size at some point. The big point here is that trying to BOTH build up his economy and half-pound me into submission is biting off more than he can chew. I don't think it's actually doomed to fail (he at least should have some time to change his mind and flip back), but it's at least opening up this hole for me to have an advantage, which he didn't really need to do.

At this point, I want to stress that my opponent in the game is a very VERY good player, and has bested me more often than I have him. I certainly don't want to make it seem like the decision was stupid, or anything like that. I do think it was the wrong call, but it's really hard, really really tricky to make these decisions in the heat of a game, and even the best of players - with Mic certainly being in that small group - can make the wrong call, particularly in such a tricky situation as this.

He pulls a Governor out of the Black Market, but the third Ambassador makes pretty quick work of slamming him with curses, and he is unable to keep up. By turn 26, I have a forced win (though I missed it - it was actually Mic that pointed this out to me), and on turn 27, I empty Curse as the third pile, winning with a score of -2 to -3.