Interview with Olneyce

I contacted Olneyce, the player who won the DominionStrategy.com 2011 championship¹. I emailed him some questions about Dominion, and I found his answers very informative. His insights are below, but first, some terminology:

• Engine: An efficient strategy/deck that emphasizes a selection of action cards².
• Greening: The act of buying victory points².
• Big Money: A strategy that emphasizes treasure cards and victory cards. In extreme, this strategy may ignore action cards entirely².

Q: What are your favorite action cards to use in the basic set?

My favorite card here is probably Laboratory, which stacks very well with itself and sets up the principle of big hands.  My other clear favorite is Chapel, which alters games to an extent that almost no other card can manage.  I love engines and sleek decks, so it’s no surprise I love this card.  And, along the same lines, I am almost always happy to see +Action cards in a kingdom.  The humble Village is nice, but Festival is one of my favorite of those.  I like the way it gives +Buy, which is sadly rare in the base set, and the Festival/Library combo is one of my favorites.  Finally, I also like Moneylender a lot.  It’s one of the cleanest trash-for-benefit cards in the game.  It isn’t fast enough to dominate many games, but it is a solid opener a lot of the time.

Q: Are there any weak action cards that you think players should avoid?

It’s a truism that no card is always weak; even the worst card can have its moment to shine.  That said, some of the cards in the base set offer a stern test of this maxim.  Thief is almost never worth buying.  In most cases it will help your opponent more than you.  Many other cards often fail the Silver test. That is: in most cases you’d be better off simply buying Silver (Chancellor, Bureaucrat, Feast, Remodel, Mine).  And Adventurer almost always fails the Gold test. Moat is strong if you’re worried about attacks but [when attacks are absent it] is rarely worth it.  And Workshop is usually not worth buying unless you’re using it for Gardens or to speed up a Village/Smithy engine.

Q: How do you figure out when to start buying victory points instead of money or action cards?

This is a great question.  Figuring out how to make the transition to green cards is one of the hardest parts of the game.  There’s, of course, no hard and fast rule.  You need to first assess what sort of game it is.  Are you simply racing for Provinces?  If so, you’ll want 5 Provinces and will need to have a strong enough deck to still make $8 with some regularity with four Provinces mixed in.  If it’s going to be a messy game with lots of Curses, you may be looking to end the game on piles while picking up a few Duchies.  In that case, you will probably be less worried about clogging things up.  Are you building an engine?  If so, green cards will trip you up a lot more than your opponent who is playing a more money-based strategy.

If you have access to +buy cards and can conceivably buy two or more Provinces at once, you can afford to wait much longer.  Let your opponent slow down and then swoop in for the victory.  Are you pursuing an attack-based strategy?  Then you’ll want to maximize the times you can play your attacks, which generally means holding off on switching to green cards.

All that said, here are a few general principles:

• In a two-player game, everything is zero-sum.  If you get five Provinces, your opponent can only get three. Getting to 5 should be your top priority.
• In general, if you are near a reshuffle, wait.  That will give you another time through your deck.
• Pay attention to your opponent(s).  You don’t need to score the ideal number of points; you just need to score enough to win.  That might mean greening a bit earlier if you can assure yourself five Provinces without destroying your buying potential.  You might limp to the end, but if you can limp ahead then you’ll win.
• All things considered, if you’ve got $8 to spend and only one buy, your presumption should probably be to buy a Province.  That certainly doesn’t mean ‘always buy it,’ it just means: you ought to have a clear reason why you’re doing something else.
• There are very few cases where you should buy Duchies and (especially) Estates until the end-game.  Green cards in your deck are a killer.

Q: What are some of the most important concepts for a Dominion player to learn?

1. Don’t forget to buy money.  The base set is not particularly friendly to complex strategies. The action cards simply aren’t powerful enough, and there aren’t enough great combinations.  While playing a pure Big Money strategy is almost never ideal, the strongest strategy on many boards will require you to spend on money.
2. Don’t get too fancy.  Playing actions is fun, but victory cards win you the game.  You should always compare your planned strategy to the best money-based strategy on the board.  Simply buying money and Provinces will get you to four Provinces in about 17 turns.  That’s a lot faster than most action-based strategies.  Toss in a Smithy and Big Money will get four Provinces in 14 turns.  You need to think about how your plans can do better than that.
3. Pay attention to attacks.  This is particularly true in three or four-person games, but is also important in two-player.  Witches are must-buy cards in almost any game.  Militia is not quite must-buy, but it can massively slow down the people that it’s hitting.
4. Pay attention to trashing.  Moneylender is a nice opener because it gives you the buying power of opening Silver, but clears out your deck a bit.  Chapel is a massively powerful opener because it frees you up to construct a tight deck.
5. If there’s no +Action card on the board, you rarely want more than two or three action cards.
6. There are only a couple cards that offer +buy in the base set.  If your kingdom doesn’t contain any of these, you can build an awesome engine that can spend $20, but find yourself still only buying one Province per turn and losing to your Big Money opponent.
7. Don’t count on drawing what you need together.  Your deck is going to grow over the game but you still only get to start with five cards at a time.  No matter how many neat actions you’ve got, you need to match them up in those five cards to get things rolling.  This can often doom potentially exciting combos like Village/Smith and Festival/Library.
8. Beware the sunk-cost fallacy.  Sometimes the right move is buying nothing. Often the right move is to spend less than you could spend. Don’t buy Adventurer just because you’ve got $6 to spend, if Laboratory is going to help you more.  More generally, while it’s usually wise to stick to your initial strategy rather than changing horses in mid-stream, you have to be willing to occasionally take a risk and adapt even if it means that you wasted a couple early turns.
9. Get to $5 after the first shuffle.  The $5 cards are often much better than the cheaper ones.  You might get lucky and start 5/2, but if not, you want to make sure your opening buys will help you buy one of those power cards on the next shuffle.
10. Watch out for reshuffles.  All the cards in play will miss the shuffle if you trigger it mid-turn.  This has the potential to ruin several turns if you’re not careful.
11. Nothing is absolute.  These are all guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules.  Be willing to break them if necessary; just make sure you’ve got a good reason for doing it!

References...

1 Theory. (2011, Jan 30) olneyce: 2011 DominionStrategy.com Champion! Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/2012/01/30/olneyce-2011-dominionstrategy-com-champion/
2 Theory. (2013, Feb 9). Glossary. Retrieved from http://dominionstrategy.com/glossary/