This Saturday, July 21, 2018; I put on my ninth Dominion tournament with physical cards near Cincinnati, OH. This one was officially sanctioned by the publisher, meaning that I got to give some extra goodies out to the people who made it, and also it consisted of 3-player games.
Turnouts have been growing recently, my January 2018 tournament had my largest turnout yet of 23 people and I was expecting to have a couple more for this one, but we ended up with a huge pool of 31 players! As an organizer, I don’t think I could have asked for a better experience and I’m hoping the success continues and the player pools continue to get larger.
One more time I want to thank everyone who came out to play and everyone who has been talking about these tournaments. These are successful, and are starting to grow even faster mostly because of you all.
I’d like to give a summary of the four designed kingdoms we used for the finals of the tournament. What I’ll do is post them here first, then the rest of my comments, and then talk about the kingdoms at the bottom of this post. So if you want to play these kingdoms without any spoilers, just don’t read the bottom of this post after the warning.
Finals set 1: Pooka, Shepherd, Baron, Miser, Counterfeit, Border Village, Village, Gladiator, Royal Seal, Armory, Lost Arts, Inheritance
Finals set 2: Forge, Peddler, Hamlet, Moneylender, Farming Village, Candlestick Maker, Merchant, Venture, Jack of all Trades, Fortune Teller, Arena, Bandit Fort
Finals set 3: Mandarin, Capital, Legionary, Night Watchman, Crown, City Quarter, Moat, Butcher, Ironworks, Charm, Donate, Pathfinding; with Platinum/Colony
Finals set 4: Festival, Journeyman, Tunnel, Chapel, Secret Passage, Shanty Town, Artisan, Gardens, Silk Road, Bureaucrat, Bonfire, Mission
I’ll post the standings below, but first I want to give a shoutout to the winner of this tournament, Nathan. This is the second time he’s won one of my tournaments and he won this one in a pretty convincing fashion. Out of 8 games he played he won all of them except for one, setting him pretty far ahead of the rest of the field. There were four other people who cashed, taking home portions of the huge prize pool: Ryan, Jessica, plus Adam and John who split the 4th place prize.
The scores for the top 9 players represent their scores in the final round, with the scores in parenthesis being their scores in the preliminaries (which compare to the preliminary scores of all of the other players below).
Our champion, Nathan, won’t be able to attend GenCon in a couple of weekends, so Ryan will be representing this tournament at the world championship.
I’ll do my best to continue to have these every 6 months. I’ve been told that everything in my life will change once my first child is born, which should happen in about two months, but if it’s humanly possible, I’ll be having my next tournament somewhere around January of 2019, and I hope to see everyone there!
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SPOILERS BELOW
Don’t scroll past here if you wanted to play the finals sets without hearing my commentary on them.
SPOILERS BELOW
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All right, let’s talk about those designed kingdoms. I don’t do quite as much playtesting on the 3P kingdoms, just because it’s harder to do, and I also wanted to try some different things that aren’t possible to playtest using the online client. What this means is that I’m a little less confident that what I’m saying about these kingdoms is any good. Let’s get into it:
Finals set 1: Pooka, Shepherd, Baron, Miser, Counterfeit, Border Village, Village, Gladiator, Royal Seal, Armory, Lost Arts, Inheritance
I know it’s a popular direction to go — you get to stack your deck at the start of the game for my IRL tournaments, so people naturally want to do some crazy-powerful openings. I normally don’t go for those sort of puzzley-type openings in my designed kingdoms, mostly because I question how much that tests Dominion skill, but I thought I’d give it a shot here with at least something else thrown into the opening to make it tough.
The only thing I can really say about this board with confidence is that you want to start with Cursed Gold and 4 Coppers on turn one, and buy Inheritance. There are a lot of options for what you could Inherit here, and I wanted to put everything that looked like a good Inheritance target in, but with nothing that stood out as the best play. Inheriting Shepherd, Baron, or Miser all seem very sexy, but right now I’m leaning towards Village as the best thing to Inherit on T1, with Miser coming in a close second.
Let me be real with you here, I’ve built a lot of terrible decks here, and it’s really easy to get caught up in things that aren’t very good: Shepherd is in my opinion a vastly overrated card, and Pooka seems like it could work out here but I’m just not all that convinced. Given that all of the sources of draw are dicey at best, I’m not convinced that building a huge deck is the way to go here. Maybe just blitzing Misers until you can make them worth $8 is the best thing to do here.
The other crunchy parts of this kingdom are the fact that the only way to trash your Cursed Gold is to Counterfeit it, which gives you two Curses. There is no way to trash Curses either.
Finals set 2: Forge, Peddler, Hamlet, Moneylender, Farming Village, Candlestick Maker, Merchant, Venture, Jack of all Trades, Fortune Teller, Arena, Bandit Fort
I love Bandit Fort, and I especially love janky boards where Bandit Fort really steps on everything you want to do. There’s no draw here except for Jack of All Trades (which is not really draw) so what you can do is limited here, but there are a couple of paths I could see being good.
The first idea is to thin with Moneylender and try to get as many Peddlers as possible, then Forge them into Provinces. The second idea is to get Farming Villages and Fortune Tellers. The third idea is to have your economy come from Candlestick Makers, but I’m pretty sure this is the worst option available. I also think that Jack of All Trades could possibly fit into any of these decks, but you’d have to be very careful about it.
If it was me, I’d open Moneylender/Candlestick Maker. I’d spam Hamlets and try to drain Peddlers, picking up a Forge at the first chance. My money is on the Forge/Peddler strategy here, but I can see the attack on Fortune Teller being really disruptive.
Finals set 3: Mandarin, Capital, Legionary, Night Watchman, Crown, City Quarter, Moat, Butcher, Ironworks, Charm, Donate, Pathfinding; with Platinum/Colony
This is another one of those sets that I based around a combo deck. In this case, the elephant in the room is Mandarin/Capital, but it’s countered hard by Legionary.
So what do you do here? Well you need to draw a lot of cards, and you need to have a lot of action cards in order to draw that much in the fact of Legionary. City Quarter is hard to get, so I imagine Moat is pretty good here as well.
In the end, Capital shenanigans are probably the best payload you can ask for. Crown and Mandarin will probably still work, but Mandarin doesn’t play all that nicely with the bigger decks you can build here, unless you can build in something with Crown, maybe Night Watchman, etc. I was kind of hoping that Crown would be a better enabler for Capital than Mandarin would…
How would I open here? That’s actually really tough. I can see arguments for opening with Charm or Butcher along with a Moat, and even throwing an Ironworks or a Mandarin in there before Donating. From there, how I build depends on how fast I want to get Legionary online and what I see my opponents doing.
Finals set 4: Festival, Journeyman, Tunnel, Chapel, Secret Passage, Shanty Town, Artisan, Gardens, Silk Road, Bureaucrat, Bonfire, Mission
There’s a strong sloggy option here with Bureaucrat, Silk Road, Gardens, and Tunnel with Festival to support. There’s also a higher-payload deck you can build here with Festival and Journeyman for draw, Artisan and Chapel to support, and can even work in Shanty Town and Tunnel with the help of Secret Passage. This deck also can make some good use of Mission as well.
Two decks, and I imagine that the Journeyman deck is probably best if nobody is contesting those components, and it’s closer if two people go for that and a third player goes for Bureaucrat. Adapting to what you see from your opponents is probably key here, which is tougher if you want to not open with a Chapel, but still potentially doable.
How would I open? Well I’d stack a 5/2 and get Festival on turn one, and probably a Chapel on turn 2. My insight here is that Festival is a good card for every deck, so aiming to get a lot of those is my priority. I’d hope to hit $6 ASAP for an Artisan, and probably build the draw deck unless I felt like that was going to be a losing proposition (not enough Festivals) in which case I might pivot towards a deck that focuses more on Silk Roads than Gardens.