On Saturday, April 20, 2024 I held my 16th Dominion tournament with physical cards near Cincinnati, OH. 16 people showed up and we inducted a new winner into the Cincinnati winner’s circle — Behram! Behram and his group have been to a few of my tournaments but this is his first win.
The other players who cashed were Ben and Nathan, both former champions. Behram also won the trophy match against me, making him only the second person out of nine to do so!
I’d say the highlight of this tournament was the finals match, which was very tense; I’ll discuss more details below while discussing the kingdom itself. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet which contains all of the kingdoms used in this tournament, including all the backup kingdoms that weren’t used. And below are the complete standings for the tournament:
1. Behram
2. Ben
3. Nathan
4. Steveie
5. Robert
T6. Charlotte
T6. Nick
T6. Michael
T6. John
T6. Jacob M
T6. Jake S
T12. Kim
T12. Ryan
T12. Jim
T12. Stephen
16. MeganNow I’ll talk briefly about the kingdoms used in the semifinals and the finals/third place match; as usual they were designed by me:
Semifinals kingdom 1: Tide Pools, Outpost, Contract, Witch, Cemetery, Bishop, Supplies, Pawn, Council Room, Enlarge, Save, Crafters’ Guild: The idea for this one initially was just to make Tide Pools good without Guide, which IMO is a tall order. The main thing I started with was just Outpost — play all your Tide Pools and then an Outpost and just forfeit your Outpost turn. Outpost is probably the second best synergy for Tide Pools and the nice thing is that you get to shuffle all your Tide Pools back into your deck for all of your “functional” turns. I thought Contract as the only village would be nice awkward thing to put with that. But wait once you have Contract you can discard your hand and then play your Contracted card and have a functional Outpost turn! And so I decided to throw in a couple of other things you can do at the start of your turn before discarding on top of that, with Enlarge and Save but also kind of Bishop as well (if you have multiple Contracts you can Bishop something before discarding then draw after). Tide Pools ends up being pretty good here and I believe in the semifinal match, the person who had more Tide Pools won the game 🙂
Semifinals kingdom 2: Frigate, Capital City, Lookout, Old Witch, Messenger, Tunnel, Hamlet, Jack of All Trades, Procession, Marquis, Wall, Ritual: I love Frigate. I know most people don’t but I sure do. Wall too <3 I just wanted a really crunchy board that involved them both: junking with Old Witch and decent gainers with Jack and Tunnel oppose Wall, and making sure you have Frigate coverage at all times can really hurt your opponent. The player who knows the best way to prioritize and time all of these things according to what their opponent is doing has a big edge here. In my opinion, this board was just fun to play and had lots of crunchy decisions. Don’t you agree?
Third place match kingdom: Charlatan, Silver Mine, Magnate, Bazaar, Church, Jewelled Egg, Courier, Menagerie, Oasis, Inspiring(Gladiator), Capitalism, Colonies: I had two ideas here based around Capitalism. The first was just to make Magnate better by making most things in your deck into treasures. The second one is a soft spot I have for playing most of your turns in your Buy phase using Capitalism as your main village, but having it also work on deck control cards in a meaningful way. Yes Bazaar is here and you can build a good deck with it, but from my playtesting, you can do much better by just skipping it. Using Oasis and Courier you can play action cards from your hand that aren’t made into treasures with Capitalism, this includes Church, Menagerie, and more Magnates. You also have Inspiring treasure-Gladiators (and even Inspiring Fortunes!) to help out, and Silver Mine can just gain you the card you need to make all of this work. The result is a deck just full of good cards that can have really big turns. I enjoyed the interactions with Menagerie here the most, as there can be crunchy decisions over whether you hold your extra Coppers to make Magnates better, or play them to activate your Menagerie. This board will make you think very hard about the order you play your Treasures in!
Finals match kingdom: Sleigh, Hermit, Improve, Storeroom, Stowaway, Taskmaster, Ranger, Weaver, Secret Passage, Smithy, Stampede, Fountain, Shelters: This one received the most playtesting and resulted in the most tense game of the tournament in my opinion. This kingdom started out as two different ideas: the first one is a deck where Taskmaster was the only (sustainable) village but the only $5 card is Duchy (plus there’s no Copper-trashing), and the second was a Stampede/Storeroom deck. Putting the two ideas into one kingdom and tweaking the enablers for each deck allowed for some pretty interesting matchups. A lot of playtesting and tweaking was done to get the decks pretty equal to the point where I’m pretty confident that there’s a certain dynamic here. The Taskmaster deck is stronger than the Stampede/Storeroom deck, but if the Stampede/Storeroom deck aims to empty Duchies before going for Provinces, it can win.
In the finals match, both players committed to the Taskmaster deck and the Duchies were gone very quickly. With both decks over-terminaled, Behram was able to build towards the Stampede/Storeroom deck which proved to be the better pivot (as opposed to what I think was a more Madman-focused plan) and this gave him a convincing win.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who showed up — most people who come to my tournaments drive quite a ways to do so and that’s not lost on me. If you’d like to stay up-to-date on in-person Dominion events near the Midwest, USA area, check out this Facebook group. Hope to see you this fall!