Last weekend I hosted my 21st in-person Dominion tournament in Cincinnati, OH. We had thirteen players including some new faces, but when it came to the winner it was a familiar face: congratulations to Nathan on his fifth (!) tournament win, along with Charlotte and Jake who also cashed!
Jake, who also cashed, is not in the picture because the third place match ended up not being played — one player decided to concede the third place match before it started. For that reason, I won’t be revealing the kingdom I had planned for this game; I spent more time than normal playtesting these kingdoms and I’d like to see it get a chance to be in my next tournament.
The spreadsheet I used for all the kingdoms is available here and below are the final standings of the tournament.
1. NathanNext I’ll discuss the three designed kingdoms that were played during this tournament. I feel like these kingdoms were more mentally taxing than normal, which was intended 🙂
2. Charlotte
3. Jake
4. Behram
T5. Quinn
T5. Stephen
T7. John P
T7. Michael
T9. Nick S
T9. Nate H
11. Ben
12. Jeremy
13. Shaila
Semifinals Kingdom 1: Transmute, Silk Merchant, Lurker, Council Room, Figurine, Shop, Poet, Highway, Tools, Kitsune; Reckless (Transmute), Panic, Prepare — Transmute usually isn’t a great card, but this kingdom it had a lot going for it: it’s the only to trash cards from your deck with Kitsune around, and it doesn’t stay in your deck, which overall is a good thing. One of the main ideas here was that with Panic inevitable, there was a decision to be made to trash Coppers with Transmute just to gain more copies versus just letting them get panicked away. After the very strange deck control situation is resolved there’s enough synergy with Lurker that the endgame likely gets pretty weird with lots of good options for what to do and Highway as a looming threat, that the game takes on a very tactical nature.
Semifinals Kingdom 2: Coin of the Realm, Village Green, Souk, Ronin, Enlarge, Armory, Animal Fair, Transmogrify, Importer, Squire; Tireless (Souk), Trappers’ Lodge — Ronin is a heck of a card, it can take a bad archetype (draw-to-X) and make it into something that’s actually good to play even with minimal support. Granted, there’s quite a lot of support here and it’s the only draw so of course it’s the core of the deck you want to build here, but the way you build it is the tough part. With the ability to pick your opening I really like a turn 1 Armory, followed by gaining a Transmogrify with that Armory on turn 2 and buying an Importer. After that I like Transmogrifying the remaining Estate into a Coin of the Realm on turn 3 and the draws dictate a lot of what you want to do from there. There are a lot of situations that I like getting a Ronin with the first $5 instead of just barreling down Souks.
The tricky thing here is that the Souks are Tireless. It’s true you’d like to have them in your starting hand, but they get put on top of your deck so you really want to have a duration Village Green in play to help make that happen. The problem is that I’ve put Tireless into two in-person kingdoms and it was being played incorrectly both times, with the Tireless card being put on top of the deck before drawing the next hand instead of after, which changes a lot of things, and neither player noticing that was a problem. I think unfortunately because of this I’ll have to put Tireless on my ban list for future tournaments — sadly Dominion really is a computer game these days, isn’t it?
Finals Kingdom: River Shrine, Hostelry, Change, Alchemist, Stonemason, Vineyard, Witch’s Hut, Weaver, Footpad, Artificer; Exploration, Triumph, Flourishing Trade — This kingdom is a LOT. It’s more complex than I would normally put in my designed kingdoms if I’m being honest, so I made sure it was there for the finals game. Before we started to play the game I had to have a discussion with the players about the Stop-Moving rule and how it affects this board, which is not something I intentionally wanted to do, but there was no way to edit it out of the kingdom while keeping everything I wanted in. The winner of the tournament found “the thing to do” here which led to him winning the game, but there’s a lot of other stuff happening as well, so let’s talk about it.
The first idea in this kingdom has to do with Change, Alchemist, Stonemason, and Vineyard. Change can gain Potion-cost cards (honestly I wish that wasn’t a thing but here we are) so in order to get Alchemist in your deck, you don’t have to buy a Potion, you can just Change an Estate into one and take just one debt. That seems OK. You can also use Stonemason on Alchemist to gain two Vineyards so you have access to the entire kingdom without Potions. I guess I just put them out anyways as a distraction. This core (along with some other very good support here) can be very powerful, and I do like getting a Change and throwing in some draw in some situations, but mostly it served to be the thing you do if the next thing gets mirrored and neither player is able to win the game with it somehow.
Hostelry plus Triumph is nuts by itself. It only needs some very minor support to be worth going for, but I kind of turned it up to 55 with this kingdom. When I was promoting the tournament, a “teaser” I did was a screenshot of a final score against the Hard AI where I scored almost 300 points in 8 turns against it, which happened while playtesting this kingdom. You start by opening with Exploration, then River Shrine. You thin down and grab some gainers (Weaver, Change) while still getting Exploration tokens on your River Shrine turns until you can put an Artificer or two in your deck (Witch’s Hut works here too but I don’t think it’s quite as good). Grab a couple of Hostelries early to get a few Horses, and try to get at least 2-3 Weavers as well. Once this stuff is in your deck (it really only takes like 6 turns) and assuming the opponent has played a River Shrine or two and cards are costing one less, it’s time for a truly ridiculous turn:
You should have enough Horses in the deck to draw just about everything, but even if you don’t it actually doesn’t matter. Discard a couple of Weavers and gain a Weaver and a Hostelry, and potentially more Artificers/Weavers, discarding your treasures to gain Horses, and because of Footpad, you can draw most of that immediately. You can repeat this quite a few times and draw your deck 4-5 times in one turn, all while racking up the number of cards you’ve gained this turn. Towards the end of the turn you can gain Silvers with the Weavers (that you can just immediately draw) and your unused action plays that function as buys to get a few Triumphs. During playtesting I was able to get five Triumphs on turn seven worth an average of 55 VP tokens <3. This is what the deck is capable of when uncontested.
But of course Hostelries and Estates can empty which is very limiting, so Vineyard can be a pretty respectable source of points in that case as well. This kingdom is just nutso and is a combination of a few ideas I had, so even though this kind of complexity is something I try to avoid, I had to make an exception here.
That’s about it for this tournament. I’ll be looking to schedule my Spring 2027 tournament pretty soon and I’m optimistic that there will be some new faces there for that one too!