Every year or so, the Dominion community (led by Qvist) produces a democratic ranking of Dominion cards. As the results are being released, I thought I’d compare my rankings to the community rankings and comment on the cards for which my ranking differs substantially. Today I’ll look at cards costing between $0 and $2.
First, here is my full ranking of $0-$2 cards:
And here are the cards that I ranked most differently from the community. Feel free to dispute any of these with me.
| Card | Ben’s Ranking | Discussion |
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+11 | My ranking methodology when comparing card A and card B is usually a combination of estimating on what percentage of boards I would choose to buy this card and comparing how I think a player who could buy card A, but not card B would do versus a player with the opposite restriction.
Neither method is perfect of course, and the presence of Heirlooms further complicates matters. Pixie games always come with Goat, which tends to push the game toward engines and engine-ish money strategies. Now it’s entirely possible that I just ranked this card too high, but in games like that, I often find myself picking up Pixies when I have spare buys. It’s rarely game-warping, but Pixie is probably the best Fate card at mitigating the randomness of Boons. |
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+11 | I was surprised to see that this ranked seven spots below Lighthouse in the community rankings. The tradeoff between the two is essentially an extra coin on the turn you play Lighthouse vs. the ability to buy a Guardian on demand. In a deck that is consistently drawing itself, maybe you miss the coin over the on-demand-ness, but in any other deck, the ability to buy it on turns that you don’t find your Guardian is huge. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that this card is underrated and will climb in next year’s ranking. |
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-9 | There’s no disputing that Delve can be useful, but in most games, there’s a limit to how many Silvers you want in your deck. Every now and then, a game comes along where you buy Delve nearly every turn, but my experience with Delve is that it gets bought no more than two times on most boards. I’m also not a big believer in opening double Delve + $3. |
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-9 | Ratcatcher is non-terminal trashing, which is usually very strong in Dominion. My main issue with Ratcatcher, and why I put it where it is, is that it’s slow. You only get to use it a turn after you play it and it tends to miss shuffles. (There’s also the issue of only being able to trash from your starting hand) It’s nice that Ratcatcher removes itself from your deck, but if you want to clean all the junk out of your deck, Ratcatcher can be absolutely glacial. |
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+8 | Faithful Hound is a combo card. It can either be awesome or awful depending on the board. Maybe I’ve had proportionally more “awesome” games than the rest of the community. I may have it a little over-rated, But I feel like “discard for benefit” comes up often enough that Faithful Hound is worth putting near a Moat-like power level. |
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+7 | Eh, I could be wrong about this. Pawn is very much a utility cards, and utility cards are tricky to rank. I feel like Pawn is a key card more often than the cards I ranked under it. |
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+7 | Lurker is a game-warping card, and I feel like its effect on a board is comparable to Stonemason. Most games you can’t ignore it if you don’t want to risk falling behind, and it empties piles really fast. The downside is that you really want to do that Treasure Map thing where you collide your Lurkers, and Lurker is less great if you don’t.
Due to its game-warping-ness and the typical arms race around Lurker, I feel confident in my ranking. |
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-7 | I’ll be honest: I’m not as high on Monastery as a lot of other people. On most boards, Monastery is not a fast trasher. If you can open with a gainer and line it up with your Monastery, it can be, but that really doesn’t happen all that often. So most of the time, you’re just trashing one card in the early game (which is when trashing is most crucial).
Now that one card can be a Copper from play, which is great — that’s why Monastery is at #11 rather than down in Ratcatcher territory. But I feel the comparison with Bonfire to be overblown. The main reason Bonfire is great is that it trashes before the first reshuffle and makes sure that you opening buy doesn’t miss the shuffle. Monastery feels a lot like Forager minus the +Buy. And for me Forager minus the +Buy at $2 is a fringe top ten card. |
