This article was written by Titandrake, with minor adaptations for the blog. Interested in writing for the blog? Check out this F.DS thread for details.

I like to model Dominion gameplay as two broad categories: strategy, and tactics. Strategy is your plan for the entire game, and tactics is your plan for this turn. In this article I’m going to focus on just one aspect of the tactics: how to play your hand. This is the nitty-gritty of Dominion optimization – it’s easy to autopilot your hands, but you can get surprisingly large gains from tightening your play. These small edges can add up to 1-2 turns of speedup, which can be enough to decide the game.

1. Watch Your Shuffle Timings

If you only get one thing out of this article, it should be this.

shark_bait’s Deck Control article is 7 years old, but still holds up well. Whenever you run out of cards in your draw pile, you reshuffle your deck. All cards in play and in your hand will miss that reshuffle. If you can control when you reshuffle, you should try to do so when your discard pile has good cards and your hand has bad cards. If you have a lot of good cards in play and a lot of bad cards in your discard pile, you may not want to reshuffle at all.

Whether you want to reshuffle or not is very context dependent, which makes it hard to give general advice, but I’m mentioning it because it’s that important to keep in mind.

2. Draw Cards First

Most gainers gain cards to your discard pile, which influences your next shuffle. If you want to draw the card you’re planning to gain, you want to play these gainers before reshuffling, since that will let you play it sooner. Conversely, if you don’t want to draw the gained card, playing the gainer after the reshuffle guarantees you can’t draw that card for 1 cycle through your deck.

In either case, you should play the gainer as late as possible – right before the shuffle if you want to make the shuffle, or at the end of your turn if you don’t want to make the shuffle. Delaying the decision gives you more information – depending on what you draw, you may decide to gain a different card than you intended.

For cards that trash from your hand, play them later rather than earlier. It doesn’t matter when you trash your cards, because you’ve already drawn them. Trashing them now won’t retroactively save the draw you spent. The only thing that matters is that they get trashed before you finish your turn, so that you can stop spending draws on bad cards.

This is most important for Junk Dealer and Upgrade. These cards are cantrips, which makes it tempting to play them as soon as you draw them, but unless you need that card now, you should play your other draw cards first, to see if you can find a better trash target.

3. Card Revealers and Shuffle Timings

Consider Wishing Well. It both draws a card and reveals a card, which triggers a reshuffle if you have fewer than 2 cards in your deck, even though it may only draw 1. Let’s say your hand has a Peddler and a Wishing Well, you have exactly 2 cards in your draw pile, and you don’t want to trigger a shuffle. To get the +$1 from Peddler, you need to play Wishing Well first, wishing for a card you don’t have, then play Peddler to draw the 2nd card.

Similar principles hold for Sentry (reshuffles with < 3 cards), Cartographer (reshuffles with < 5 cards), Patrol (reshuffles with < 7 cards), and others.

4. Unintuitive Discards

If you get hit with a discard attack like Militia, you have to choose the best 3-card hand. Note this may be different from the 3 individual best cards in your hand.

Let’s suppose you’ve built a deck that can usually draw itself every turn. Your hand is:

Village, Smithy, Smithy, Gold, Gold

If you get hit with a Militia, you should discard the two Golds. Sure, Gold makes a lot of money, but if your deck is consistent enough, keeping the draw cards will let you draw through your deck until you redraw the discarded Golds.

Here’s a real world example. It’s early in the game. My draw pile has 2 cards left. My hand is:

Warehouse, Copper, Copper, Estate, Estate

My opponent plays a Militia. I decide to discard the 2 Coppers.

Why? I’m not going to buy anything that costs $2, and because it’s early, it’s unlikely I draw many good cards from my Warehouse. I also know that playing my Warehouse will trigger a shuffle. If I keep my Estates, I can make both Estates miss the shuffle. Sure, the Warehouse misses the shuffle too, but that’s worth it. This was a scenario where the best hand was actually one that had Estates in it.

5. Saving Your Throne Rooms

Some cards are better to copy than other cards. You always want to double the Action that gives you what you’re lacking the most. If you need draw, then Throne Room a Smithy. If you can comfortably draw your deck, save it for a card that gives +$ or +Buy. If you need Actions, then save your Throne Room for a card giving +Actions.

In all these scenarios, it is better to hold onto Throne Room until you know what you need this turn. If you draw poorly, you may need to double a +Cards action. If you draw well, you’d rather double an Action that gives +$.

If you draw a hand of Throne Room and 4 other Actions, then playing Throne Room first is probably wrong. You want to play your other Actions first, to see if you can draw a better target for Throne Room, and then play Throne Room only when you’re at-risk of running out of good Throne Room targets. (Either because you are running low on Actions, or because you are drawing too many Throne Rooms and not enough non-Throne Room actions.)

This logic is especially important for King’s Court – the best target for King’s Court is almost always another King’s Court. Saving King’s Court to the last second gives you the best chances of tripling a King’s Court.

Throne Rooming a Throne Room is usually correct, because it let you play a Throne Room twice while using only 1 action. However, if you have plenty of actions, it’s better to play your Throne Rooms individually. If you do TR-Action1, then TR-Action2, you still get to play Action1 twice and Action2 twice. However, splitting the Throne Rooms gives you more flexibility if you want to play another Action in between the two doubled Actions.

It takes a bit of practice to keep these tactical decisions in mind, but there’s no reason not to do them. With some practice, many of these choices become second-nature, leaving you free to focus on the important strategy questions.

In last week’s article we visited the concept of overdraw and explored the most common situation where it is useful — when you can gain a card and play it on the same turn. We’ll finish this two-article series with this week’s addition.

To review, overdraw is the situation where you would draw a card, except your deck and discard are already empty because all of your cards are either in play or in hand.

Drawing your deck is great, especially if there is a particular card you want to make sure to draw and play every turn — Mountebank, Miser, Travellers, etc. It’s great enough that whenever it’s possible, you’ll seriously have to think about going through the trouble to make it happen consistently.

At first glance it appears that if you keep adding cards to your deck that draw nothing, this is inefficient because if you had a card to draw, your turn might be better. While this is true, and you don’t just want to overdraw your deck by a lot without a good reason, there are many good reasons why overdraw can be useful.

The reality is that unless the cards you need to draw are in exactly the right positions every shuffle, a deck that can draw itself exactly without any overdraw will not draw every card on every turn. Adding one or two cards that draw nothing on a perfect draw (i.e. overdraw) is one way to add consistency to you deck so you draw everything more often. This is especially true in decks that have consistency issues to begin with, like draw-to-X decks.

Extra consistency is also a big deal include when you’re being attacked: if I drew my deck this turn, but I’ll get hit by a Militia next turn, the overdraw was wasted now but it might not always be that way. The consequences can be even worse when your opponent plays a junking attack on you repeatedly and you lose control of your deck because you couldn’t stay on top of things. Overdrawing is a great way to prevent yourself from falling behind while you’re being attacked, and can also make sure you play your own attacks consistently. This is especially true in games with more than two players.

You may also run into the situation where you’re overdrawing your deck if you just drew your deck for the first time and trashed your last Estates and Curses. This situation is pretty good, but be careful that you don’t get to this point by trashing Coppers too fast. If you trash some Coppers but continue to overdraw your deck, you may have been better served by keeping the Coppers around to spend for a few turns before getting rid of them. In this situation, you’ll want to plan your next few turns, making sure you can still draw everything and hit the price points you care about to build your deck the fastest.

If you find yourself winning the game by a lot, either due to a lucky draw or maybe a strategy you think is much better than your opponent’s, you may build your deck more conservatively because the main way you can lose from your position is to have too many stall turns — turns where you have a bad draw and are unable to do much of anything. Building your deck to overdraw in this situation, even if you deviate from what you think is the best build path, can be the right play.

Overdraw can be OK in some situations where you plan to add some VP cards to your deck and you would still like to consistently draw your deck.

As long as you have at least one good reason to build a deck that overdraws itself, it’s usually a good idea to do so. Knowing why you’re building for overdraw can help you identify the situations where you want to go for it, versus the times where just drawing most of your deck sometimes is perfectly OK.

This article was originally written by Titandrake, and was later adapted for the blog. Next week we’ll have the second article in this two-part series.

What is overdraw?

Overdraw is the situation where you would draw a card, except your deck and discard are already empty because all of your cards are either in play or in hand. As an extreme example, consider a deck of 5 Laboratories, nothing else. Your starting hand will be 5 Labs, and none of them will draw any cards, because there are no cards left in your draw or discard. A less extreme example is a deck with 5 Labs, 3 Coppers, 1 Silver. This deck is guaranteed to play all 5 Labs. The first 2 Labs will draw cards, and the remaining 3 Labs won’t draw cards. Both of these decks are overdrawing.

You can calculate overdraw carefully if you want to, but usually you can figure it out on the fly. On a given turn, if you’ve drawn your deck and have extra draw cards left over, you’re overdrawing. You can easily see much you’re overdrawing by looking at the remaining draw you have in hand at this point.

The core principle of overdraw is simple: any time you could have drawn a card but didn’t, you’re wasting a draw. If there’s a way to avoid wasting that draw, you can use it to get more out of your turns. Gainers are the simplest way to do this, because it adds a new physical card to your deck, but there are also other ways to convert extra card draws into resources.

Examples

With the right setup, you can do some explosive things. Here’s an example from a game I played about two weeks ago. At the start of my turn, I had 2 Stonemasons, a Bandit, and tons of overdraw and actions thanks to several Lost Cities and Encampments.

• Played Bandit, gaining a Gold.
• Drew Gold with overdraw. Stonemason trashed Gold into Bandit and Plunder.
• Drew Bandit and Plunder with overdraw. Played Bandit to gain Gold.
• Drew Gold with overdraw. Stonemason trashed Gold into 2 Plunders.
• Drew Plunders with overdraw.

So, to recap: in a single turn, I gained and played a Bandit and 3 Plunders, which gave me an extra $6 that turn (not to mention 3 VP). From here, I ran away with the game.

Plaza can convert a draw of a Treasure card into a coin token. If you draw your entire deck, you can repeatedly draw and discard a single Copper to multiple Plazas. letting you get several coin tokens.

Tournament is another big example. With overdraw, a single Province can be discarded to multiple Tournaments, to gain multiple prizes in one turn. It helps that the Prizes you gain can themselves help with triggering the reshuffle needed to get the Province back into your draw pile. I once played a game where it was clear Followers was the most important prize. My opponent got to Province first, and gained Trusty Steed first. I thought this was a mistake, right up to the point where he redrew Province and played a 2nd Tournament to gain Followers too. Gaining Steed first simply minimized the chance he would run out of actions to play the rest of his deck.

In these examples, we are not always using our overdraw on newly gained cards to our deck. Instead, we are using our extra draws to draw existing cards multiple times, and using other card effects to make this useful. This principle applies especially to Market square in games with enough draw to reveal and draw the Market Squares multiple times in one turn.

I’ve focused on the flashy examples in this article, but that doesn’t make the less flashy examples useless. Whenever you’re in a position where you’re about to waste card draw, take a moment, and see if you can gain a small edge by making use of your overdraw. Trust me: it adds up.

There are many other considerations related to overdraw, revolving around the consistency of your deck and when you would want to build to overdraw your deck or not. These will be addressed in next week’s article.