This is my Dominion

Merry Christmas everybody! I hope you all had a superfantastic Christmas, I know I did! I am not one for gifts, so going into Christmas, everyone in my family was asking for my list (which I never had written) and this is what I came up with:

A card game that I can't remember the name of (but will update you on when I get my fb message back from paul)

Amazon gift cards (so I can deal hunt on CDs)
Anything unusual that I can show off EX: Super Mario slippers (yeah, this is broad, but you should know me by now)

To say the least, I probably had less of an idea of what I wanted than those who were getting me gifts. Eventually I did hear back from Paul, who told me that the game in question was Dominion.
 

I have only played 4 games so far (and won 3 of them =D), but I can already tell that this is a game I want to play a lot more of. Not only is this game fun to play, but it also stretches your mind and makes you get creative. But why am I talking about Dominion in a Magic blog? Well you don't need to play Magic to get better at Magic! As Paul said when he introduced Mark and I to this game, "this is basically a deckbuilding game". In fact, as one blog, The Mad Hatter's Gift Guide, said:

"This is a deck building game where everyone starts with the same hand and each round you buy new cards to add to your deck from a collective pool of available cards.  Think of it as almost reverse Magic: The Gathering mixed with a little monopoly as the goal is to accrue as many land points as possible."

Basically, the game starts with each player having a deck of 10 cards consisting of 7 Copper and 3 Estates. Coppers provide 1 "dollar" each that you can use to buy more cards to add to your deck. Estates are worth 1 Victory Point at the end of the game, but over the course of the game they do absoutely nothing. You can buy Action cards which can do things like make you draw extra cards a turn or make your opponent discard cards or put Curse Cards in their deck that are worth -1 Victory Point and do nothing. You can also buy Silver and Gold, which are worth 2 and 3 "dollars" (I don't know what they really call it...) each, and Duchy and Province which are worth 3 and 6 Victory Points each.

Obviously the best way to win is to buy as many Provinces as possible because they are worth 6 Victory Points and only use up 1 card slot, compared to Estates which are worth 1 Victory Point for that same 1 card slot. But how do we get there? This is where we play the game, get creative, and gain some insight that we can bring back to Magic.

In Patrick Chapin's book "Next Level Magic", he takes time to talk about the 4 Perspectives:

Top-Down: Examining what is good/bad depending on what IS there
Bottom-Up: Examining what is good/bad depending on what IS NOT there
Front-Back: Exploring how we want to start and how we use that as a foundation
Back-Front: Determining how we want to finish and how we get there

Now here is what makes Dominion such an awesome game: there are 25 action cards in the set, but each game you play you randomly select 10 of them, and only use those. That means each time you play theres a different card pool to choose from. There are 11,861,676,288,000 possible card pools.

Because there are over 11.5 TRILLION possible card combinations, trying to learn the strategy for a hundreth of a percent is complete suicide. This is where practicing the 4 Perspectives comes in. Front-Back and Back-Front is generally the same as you want to keep your deck as short as possible (because more cards = less liklihood of drawing the cards you want/need) and you want higher quality cards (theres no mana to have to mess with). So this game really stresses Top-Down and Bottom-Up thinking.

I obviously can't go into card-by-card detail because everyone except for Mark and Paul will be completely lost reading this, I can share on some of the games of I have played where I capitilized on recognizing what was and was ont good.

The second game I ever played (of 4) I was with Paul and Mark and our 10 card pool had 4 or 5 attack cards which created a negative effect for all of your opponents. The 3 of us were immediatly drawn to these, especially one called Witch, which makes you draw 2 cards AND gives all your opponents a -1 Curse card. Pretty soon, attack cards were getting thrown during everyone's turn. I noticed there was a card no one had touched yet called Moat, which can make you draw 2 cards, but can also be revealed if in your hand to prevent someone's attack card from hurting you. I bought as many as I could (I think I had 6 or 7 by the end of the game) and pretty soon I was able to dodge almost every attack card coming from Mark and Paul. I wound up winning that game by 1 point and Mark had over a dozen Curse cards in his deck.

Another game I played, there was a combination of multiple things going on. First, there were 2 cards that let you Trash your cards (completely remove from your deck, as opposed to discarding, because your discard pile will eventually gett shuffled back into your deck) to get better ones, and there were also 3 really good draw cards, 2 of which allowed you play more cards each turn. At one point Pat (my opponent this time, it was a 1 vs 1) chained 7 draw cards into eachother. So while you start with 5 cards in your hand each turn, he had 10 in hand by the time he was done. Lastly, there was only one attack card, which was frankly not too powerful (Spy) so there wasn't much disruption coming from your opponents. Because of these factors, I was able to keep a relatively thin deck (40 by the time the game ended) and I ran very few cash sources as I could very consistantly draw into them and I didn't have to bulk up my deck too much. In Dominion, you discard your hand at the end of each turn and draw 5 new cards. With 40 cards in my deck, it should take 8 turns to burn through the entire deck, but thanks to all the card draw, I was able to turn it over every 6 turns. Pat had a slightly larger deck, so it took him about 8 turns to turn his deck over, and in turn I was able to hit my bombs more frequently, and I won because of that.

Magic is such an awesome game because of the way it stretches your brain and makes you think in ways that you normally wouldn't in everyday life. If you are looking for a different game that can still bring some stuff back to your Magic game, then I highly recommend playing Dominion! There are a couple expansions out, so if you manage to burn through the 11.5+ trillion combinations of game setups, you can add a couple dozen more actions cards and make endless combinations even... endlesser... yeah.

Anyways, that is all for now, until next time, stay classy!