I recently hosted my 20th in-person Dominion tournament near Cincinnati, OH. Scheduling for this one was a bit more difficult and we had some last-minute cancellations, but we still had ten people compete for the title of tournament champion and for the first time in a while we have a new winner! This was only Ben’s second tournament (he cashed in the first); it’s refreshing to see some new folks make their mark so quickly, so congratulations to Ben! Congratulations to Jonathan and Ryan who also cashed.
The spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms used is available here and here are the final standings of the tournament:
1. Ben
2. Jonathan H
3. Ryan
4. John P
T5. Charlotte
T5. Jake
T7. Shaila
T7. Jeremy
T7. Nathan
10. Michael
I’d now like to talk about the designed kingdoms for the final stage of the tournament; it’s likely that these will be the last ones designed without the upcoming expansion Arcana. I’m glad I had a chance to get through the last of my finalized ideas without the new set; most of what I have on the ideas list are not completed kingdoms, so hopefully the next tournament will feature some cool new ideas from the new set. I was pretty happy with these ones though 🙂
Finals Kingdom: Governor, Flagship, Merchant Camp, Experiment, Throne Room, Tactician, Advisor, Anvil, Leprechaun, Forager; Friendly (Governor), Way of the Owl — A few different ideas at play here. First, the possibility to get many Wishes in one turn using Throne Room and Flagship on Leprechaun. Second, the explosive nature of the payload with multiple Thrones and the passive trickle of Governors into the deck. And third, the ability to play multiple Tacticians in one turn using Thrones and Way of the Owl. With Forager potentially representing huge payload, the extra draw has the ability to not only provide a lot of consistency to the deck, but take a load off of Governor so it can focus on Gold gaining and remodeling. Unfortunately neither player in this game went for Tactician, but in playtesting I found it to be quite good (it was one of the things I designed the kingdom around so I kind of wanted it to be that way).
Third Place Kingdom: Laboratory, Sacrifice, Develop, Lighthouse, Clerk, Alchemist, Vault, Tunnel, Nobles, Blockade; Invasion — This kingdom is all about Invasion, an event that rarely has so many of the things it does be relevant. Loot as the only +Buy is a bit scary to put in a kingdom, but in my playtesting I never felt hurt by missing a +Buy even when my first two Loots didn’t give it, partially because so many of the Loots that don’t give +Buy are quite good here (they all make good Develop food) and you’re usually just getting an Invasion for the first few $10+ turns anyways. Sacrifice and Develop work well on the Duchies to keep deck control if needed, and are cards you probably already have in the deck by that point, and Alchemist serves as a second stack of Labs that you can grab with Invasion without putting a Potion in your deck. I put Vault/Tunnel in partially as a distraction but also as a nice efficient way to build payload — depending on how my early-game Develops lined up I sometimes made use of that.
Semifinals Kingdom 1: Native Village, Ronin, Wheelwright, Vampire, Crucible, Silk Merchant, Rustic Village, Conspirator, Bank, Importer; Sickness, Fellowship of Scribes — Covid is coming and you need to have a plan. The trashing is too slow to deal with the Curses, but luckily we have Ronin. Ronin is the best card out there for giving consistency to draw-to-X decks and it’s important here, even though there are other tools as well. In the endgame this deck looks like a big pile of cards with just about everything in it, but it functions quite well and is pretty fun to play. Just make sure to get your boosters people.
Semifinals Kingdom 2: Procession, Rats, Amulet, Seer, Rope, Library, Skirmisher, Courier, Shop, Sycophant; Advance, Way of the Monkey, Order of Astrologers — Procession and Rats, what’s not to love? Actually, it’s very good here — with Advance to get rid of extra Rats and Monkey to make it pretty easy to control the number of Rats in your deck, it’s actually a pretty solid core of the deck. In my playtesting, Rope ended up not even being necessary. Past that, Procession can make the entire composition of your deck change violently over the course of one turn, with lots of tools for an easy pivot to different forms of deck control and payload. Seer with a Silver flood from Amulet can be viable, transitions into and out of draw-to-X with Library are also viable, and everyone’s favorite — the Rats autopile! In the game that was played, one player had drawn their deck and had a very big turn with low piles, but was just short of finding a win that turn. They lost on the next turn, but after the game there was some discussion and there was a forced win available with a Rats autopile.
…
The tournament was fun, people had fun, and that’s a good thing. But I can’t help but think there was a way that more people could have had fun. Lots of people wanted to go and weren’t able to, which I was aware of… when I started trying to schedule the tournament. There just wasn’t any time that worked for most people. I normally set a date 3 months before the tournament, but I’m thinking shortly after this post I’ll be setting a date for the Fall 2026 tournament.
One other thing I wanted to talk about was the tournament matchmaking script — I recently made some changes to add a feature where it would actively try and prevent the case where the same player ends up in multiple 3P games if the tournament has an odd number of people. There’s still a small improvement I want to make before I publish it, and when that happens I’ll edit this post with a link to the scripts.