-
- Dominion: Alchemy
-
- Dominion: Prosperity
Counting House is best when you have your deck in the discard. Naturally, the obvious way to accomplish this goal is with Chancellor. The problem this faces is the sheer improbability of drawing your Chancellor, plus your Counting House, plus a +Actions card, amidst all your Copper. It’s OK, but pretty difficult to pull off.
The better (and cooler) way is with Golems. Build a deck of many Golems and a single Counting House, with no other Actions. Each time you play your Golem, it will find your Counting House, then discard your entire deck searching for another action (unsuccessfully). At that point, play your Counting House and draw all the Copper in the deck into your hand. Rinse and repeat.
This approach suffers from its flaws as well—it’s inflexible, for starters. Counting House has many synergies (Bank, Coppersmith, Warehouse), but none of them would work well with this strategy, which explicitly depends on the existence of only one non-Golem Action card in order to discard everything else. Moreover, it requires quite a few Golems in order to be effective, and ironically enough, suffers greatly when you actually draw your Counting House as part of your hand. (Though you can always hope your opponent will play Minion or Militia.) But the biggest advantage this combo has over Chancellor/Counting House is the ability to buy further Coppers without gumming up your combination. If you have enough Golems to reliably draw at least one each turn, then as long as you buy a single Copper along the way, you can guarantee a $8 turn every turn.
Dominion Strategy 
“The better (and cooler) way is with Golems. Build a deck of many Golems and a single Coppersmith, with no other Actions. ”
You mean counting house instead of Coppersmith I guess. Anyway you can delete the comment afterwards. I would’ve written this per mail but didn’t found a contact link.
From the admins: Fix applied, thanks
It totally works. I just got wrecked by it. Of course, I didn’t help matters any.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201012/10/game-20101210-142217-66791183.html.gz
I used this today on isotropic, and it worked very well. I feel kind of bad now, though, because the person I was playing had “gramma” in her name. I hope I didn’t just annihilate a player with a cheap trick when she didn’t really know what was going on.
how about 1 chancellor, 1 counting house, and a bunch of golems…
all you need to do is buy 2 extra copper, and then every time you draw golem without chancellor/counting house in hand, you hit colony.
1 scheme, 1 golem, 1 counting house? Carry the scheme til you find the golem, then play it and the golem. Top deck the golem every time, which will then find your scheme and counting house every time. Magic?
Ah, grasshopper, but then you do not get the “Chancellor” effect which is this combo’s raison d’être.
Two Schemes, two Golems, and a Counting House would work though (again, Scheming both Golems every turn). But is it too slow to set up when your opponent plays Theory’s strategy? I can see two good options:
1. Buy the Schemes early, and Scheme the Counting House through your deck to be reasonably assured of getting a 4+Potion turn on each reshuffle. This might work well if you get an early $5 turn, but you won’t get your Provinces until you have both Golems safely on top of your deck, whereas Theory has been buying Provinces sporadically ever since he got his first Golem. I would guess the Scheme player comes out ahead here but I’m not certain.
2. Follow Theory’s strategy and maybe snag a Province or two; but if you happen to choke on a bad shuffle and can’t buy a Province or another Golem, buy the Schemes and hope that the added reliability of your engine makes up for it later. There might be a small window of time and a select set of circumstances where this is good, but buying the first Scheme will break your engine until you buy the second one and get your Golems top-decked. Speaking out of sheer level-18 intuition it doesn’t seem worthwhile.
…Scratch that last post. That combo wouldn’t work at all since what if you hit the Counting House with the first Golem, before you’ve discarded your deck.
I’m no expert player, but it seems to me that scheme, golem, counting house would be worth going for. In most turns you would get around 2/3 of your copper, so instead of buying a lot of golems, you just need to buy a lot of coppers. And in the golem/counting house you need to not draw your counting house, whereas here you just need to not draw both scheme and counting house.
A combo that would work every time and draw all of your coppers is King’s court, scheme, golem, counting house. Play them in that order and put the first 3 on top. But to do this I think it has to be a colony game and you have to hit the 7 pretty early.
Top-decking the Golem is not nearly as helpful as it looks. Of course, it would be awesome to guarantee a Golem every turn, but remember if you don’t have a top-deck option, the Golem isn’t going into a discard pile where you have to wait several turns for a reshuffle. The deck gets shuffled *every turn*. So having 2-3 Golems generally gives you enough reliability to hit your Province (or Colony)-buying combo once every couple of turns anyways. If you don’t hit your Golem, you probably have a hand full of treasure, which you can use to buy smaller green cards, since they don’t really hurt you much.
* Ok not every turn, but every turn in which you play the Golem.
King’s Court / Scheme / Golem