Deck Building Fundamentals and General Advice

General advice for playing Dominion well and improving your game.

The Nature of General Advice in Dominion

First a disclaimer. Dominion is a deck builder that focuses heavily on variety, not just in the number of cards, but ways to heavily change the game experience, especially when you start playing with the more exotic expansions. As such, it is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to provide advice that will apply to every game. However there are still fundamental principles that are worth knowing that will allow you to play better. Just remember, for ever piece of advice it is possible to construct edge cases where in some games it is not the correct approach.

This guide is not going to cover the game basics and assumes you already understand the rules of how to play. The app has great interactive tutorials hidden in the menus which I recommend you play first before reading this guide.

Cycling

You have limited opportunities over the course of a game to add cards to your deck, so you want to make the most out of the cards you add. The more often you play a card, the more value you get from it.

Consider this scenario: Player A buys 3 Witches, playing 2 of them twice each and 1 of them once, giving 5 Curses to player B. Player B buys only a single Witch but plays it 5 times, also giving 5 Curses to player A before the Curse pile empties. Player B's purchase was clearly more efficient, and instead of buying 2 more copies of Witch like player A did, Player B could have bought 2 Laboratories instead, which is a much better card to have than Witch once the Curse pile is empty.

When you play a card, it usually goes into the "play area", where it stays until the end of your turn when it is discarded. As the card is now in your discard pile, you won't be able to play it again until you have finished drawing through the rest of your deck, when you shuffle your discard pile to create a new deck. The longer it takes you to reach the end of your deck and trigger a new shuffle, the longer it will take to play the good cards you added to your deck.

This leads to a general principle: the faster you can "cycle" through your deck and trigger a new shuffle, the sooner and more often you get to play the strong cards you've gained.

Generally there are 2 main ways to cycle faster through your deck:

• Drawing more cards into your hand, e.g. Smithy.
  
• Having fewer "stop cards" in your deck.

A "stop card" is a card that does not help you draw through your deck. More generally, it is a card that does not give at least +1 Card when played. All of the basic Treasures and Victory cards, e.g. Copper, Gold, Province, are all stop cards. The more stop cards you have in your deck, the longer it will take to cycle through your deck, or the more drawing resources, like Smithy and Laboratory, you need to add to your deck to cycle all the way through it.

Stop cards secretly make your other cards a little worse by making it harder to play them as often by slowing down your cycling. New players know that Curses are bad because they lose you points, but they actually have a much worse effect: they are stop cards!

You can avoid having too many stop cards by simply gaining fewer of them, but there is another powerful effect often available in games of Dominion, you can trash them.

Trashing

Chapel is the most misunderstood card by new players. What is its purpose? Well, you can trash Curses with it. So is it only good when Witch is also in the game? It only costs 2 coins so it must be weak.

What if I told you that Chapel was widely considered the most powerful card in the Base game, and in or near the top 10 strongest Dominion cards still to this day, despite over 15 expansions worth of cards produced since?

Most of the time, you start with a deck of 10 very weak stop cards: 3 Estates and 7 Coppers. These cards are very weak as it wouldn't be much of a deck builder if your deck already started off very powerful.

Your starting Coppers and Estates are not useless, but they are extremely inefficient stop cards. While you need some money at the start of the game and the Coppers can provide that, the Estates usually do nothing at all until the end of the game, which is not worth 1 point at the cost of drawing them into your hand many many times over the course of the game, getting in the way of drawing useful cards.

Trashing your starting Coppers and Estates quickly is very powerful. Having less bad stop cards in your hand massively reduces the amount you need to invest in drawing to cycle through your deck quickly, letting you focus your gains on cards that do more cool and powerful things.

Note that in order for Chapel to trash Curses, it needs to be drawn alongside the Curses, which is much easier to do if your deck is smaller and you have already trashed away the Coppers and Estates before the Curses start arriving.

Trashing is a very powerful effect that is more widely available in Dominion than many other deck builders. While Chapel is a particularly efficient example, trashing comes in many forms.
For example, Moneylender can trash Coppers for 3 coins this turn, while Remodel can trash a card to gain another in its place, but is better at trashing more expensive cards than the 0-cost Coppers and Curses.

Cards that trash are often high priority as the sooner you remove your weak starting stop cards from your deck, the sooner you improve your cycling and obtain deck control.

Beware of Triggering Bad Shuffles

A quick note while focusing on the topic of cycling.

When you try to draw cards when your deck is empty and shuffle your discard pile into a new deck, only the cards in your discard pile are put into your new deck. If this occurs in the middle of your turn, often times you can find that the best cards are elsewhere, such as in your hand or your play area.

Some cards such as Cellar discard other cards for a bonus. With these you tend to put the worst cards into your discard pile such as your Coppers and Estates, resulting in a discard pile filled only with these bad cards. This can result in you triggering a "bad shuffle", where you end up shuffling a new deck filled only with bad cards.

If you've ever seen a new player use a lot of Cellars, shuffle their deck mid-turn, then complain how their next hand was only Coppers and Estates and how bad their luck is, odds are high that there wasn't any luck at all; they accidentally created a whole deck consisting of only bad cards.

Always stop and think when triggering a shuffle mid-turn, and consider if the cards that are being shuffled into a new deck are cards you would want to appear in next turn's starting hand.

You Don't Have to Spend all your Coins

You have 8 coins and 1 Buy on turn 6. Should you buy a Province? Almost certainly not.

Decks need different cards at different times to build most effectively. For example, you might want cards that trash early on, then once you have some Action cards you might want a Village before adding more Action cards, and so on.

You should prioritise gaining the card that is most beneficial to your deck right now. Sometimes this might be much cheaper than the money you have. If you are consistently overspending, this is a sign that you need more +Buy, but sometimes you may find that the cards you want to gain alternate between widely different amounts, such as 5-cost Witches and 3-cost Villages. In this example it may be fine to simply overpay for the villages and waste you coins, rather than add more Witches that you don't have enough actions to play.

An example of an expensive card that new players very often love to purchase when they shouldn't is Gold. Gold is very expensive and also not very good for the cost. In addition to being a stop card, which is bad, it is inferior to many 5-cost action cards. Gold is mainly a fallback that is always available to provide a way to afford Provinces in games where nothing better is available, but better alternatives are common. Statistics collected on games involving high-level players show that the number of games they purchase Gold range from merely 10% - 25% of their games, depending on the player.

But Make Sure You Can Afford What You Need

On the other side to not spending all your money is ensuring you have enough money when you need it. In some games, the cards you want can be very expensive. Sometimes the cheap cards you don't want in many quantities, if at all. You want to avoid being caught out in a situation where you find all of the cards you want cost 5 but you only have 4 and are considering adding a fourth Silver into your deck and then it turns out you never achieve deck control because you added too many stop card Silvers, or spend your turns buying nothing over and over.

While Silver is a weak stop card, buying a single Silver can often be a useful way to give your deck just enough buying power to reach the expensive cards you want to buy. In Dominion, there is a big difference between the price points of 4 coins and 5 coins, more so than any other price difference. This is because your default situation of the 10 starting cards and 5 card hands has a very hard time of generating you hands that can spend 5 coins, although it's not impossible.

Note that generally, drawing cards is another way to produce money early on, if it is easy to draw a lot of cards early then you can simply leave the Coppers around for longer, and use drawing more of them as a way to achieve reaching the price points you need. On the contrary, if you are heavily trashing early, you may need to buy more Silvers as trashing cards from your hand tends to leave you with less cards remaining to generate money with, so need a way to generate money from a smaller number of cards.

The Terminal Tax

Any Action card that does not give at least +1 Action or does not play other Action cards as part of its effect, is called a "terminal". This is because it reduces your number of available actions you need to play Action cards and so contributes to ending your "Action chain". For example, you can play as many Merchants and Markets as you want, but as soon as play Smithy, you can't play the Merchants and Markets any more.

You need "villages" to play multiple terminals each turn. There are many cards in Dominion that give 2 or more +Actions, and many, but not all, have "Village" in their name. Festival is an example of a "village" that is not named Village.
Note that Throne Room is also considered a village despite not directly providing any +Actions, because it gets two other Action card plays as part of its effect (another card twice). If you play Throne Room on a card that gives +1 Action, like Merchant, once it has finished resolving you have more actions than you started with, similar to playing Village.

Terminal action cards after the first one can be considered more expensive than they appear, because you also need to add villages to your deck to support playing them each turn. I call this the "terminal tax". Decks filled with terminals require a lot more gains to be effective because many of the gains need to be spent on villages. If the kingdom does not allow you to gain many cards per turn due to a lack of buys or extra gains, you need to consider very carefully which terminal Actions you want to gain.

Before you achieve full deck control, especially very early in the game, it can be reasonable to have more terminals than you can play each turn, in the hope that you simply won't draw them together. As such, villages are not an immediate priority.

The Best Defense Is a Good Offense

Is Witch in the game? You could buy Moats in the hope of blocking any incoming Curses, but there's a better way to avoid getting Curses, and that is to give them all to your opponent first.

Junking attacks are limited by the number of junk cards left in the pile, and stop working once the junk pile empties. On similar lines, a way to prevent your opponent affording an expensive 5-cost Attack card is to disrupt your opponent from having good turns by attacking them first.

Note that this advice largely applies to 2 player games. As player counts increase, the junk is more evenly spread around when one player chooses not to use the attack. In a 4 player game, one person not playing any Witches may split the Curses 10 - 7 - 7 - 6. By comparison, if you refuse to junk your opponent in a 2 player game, you lose the Curse split 10 - 0.

Ending the Game

You win Dominion not by having the most points when the game ends, but by ending the game when you have the most points.

I have long forgotten who first said the above quote and was not able to find the original source. This is a long-standing saying in the Dominion community that raises an important point. In Dominion, the end of the game is largely player controlled, as the game only ends due to players choosing to empty certain supply piles, and can be deliberately worked towards or avoided.

The game ends at the end of the current turn when any of the following conditions are met:

• The Province pile empties.
  
• The Colony pile empties (from the Prosperity expansion)
  
• Any 3 supply piles empty (4 piles when there are 5 or 6 players)

In general, if your opponent has more points than you, try to avoid lowering piles such that they can end the game on their turn. Take note of how many buys, coins and gains your opponent can produce, as this determines if it is possible to end the game next turn. If piles are already too low, you need to catch up on points immediately.

Be wary of the Estate pile. In two player games, 16 coins buys you 2 Provinces, but it also empties the Estate pile if you can buy 8 cards. In some games extra buys are available very easily, e.g. Festival is your primary village. The Curse pile can also be emptied similarly if your opponent has enough of a point lead! However this is mostly a two player thing, as both of these piles get larger with more players.

The Timing of Gaining Victory Cards

When should you start gaining victory cards? (Also known as "greening") This is one of the most difficult decisions to make in Dominion. A core part of Dominion is that Victory cards that you need to score points to win the game are usually stop cards that clog up your deck, so gaining them too early destroys your deck's ability to function.

Typically the strongest decks look to build up to large turns then gain Victory cards as late as possible, so that as little time as possible is spent drawing those Victory cards. On the extreme end, decks with heavily snowballing cards like Bridge from Intrigue can "mega-turn" and buy all of the Provinces from the supply on a single turn!


How late you can leave buying Victory cards is dependent on your ability to draw and gain many cards. If many cards can be gained in a single turn, piles can be emptied more quickly, and so the game can end sooner. Your ability to draw cards determines how much you can build up to large turns and also manage having many Victory cards in your deck. This allows you to support having Duchies, which are less efficient in terms of number of stop cards than Provinces. Being able to support having many Duchies allows strong decks to have more time to build more by lowering the pressure caused by Provinces lowering.

On the contrary, decks that struggle to draw will cycle slowly, which increases the length of time between gaining a Victory card and drawing it into your hand, making them less impactful, which allows you to start gaining them earlier. After you have shuffled for the final time, any cards you gain will never be drawn into your hand, as so you are free to gain only Victory cards without impacting the quality of your turns. The longer it takes to cycle through this shuffle, the more turns you have to freely gain only Victory cards.

Useful Links

Here are some more great places I can recommend if you want more information on playing Dominion well:

• The Dominion Strategy Wiki[wiki.dominionstrategy.com]: Not just a database of every card, many cards have strategy sections that have undergone community review that will give you more information about specific cards.
  
• Dominion Discord[discord.com]: The main Discord server for Dominion. A great place to discuss strategy.
  
• Burning Skull's How to Base Dominion: A widely regarded playlist of Youtube videos where Burning Skull plays base-only games of Dominion against weaker players and commentates in depth on the decision both himself and his opponent are doing. Watching good players play Dominion can often be more instructive than reading guides. Note the games take place on a different Dominion client to the Steam app, which is why it looks different.
  
• HolZ's Youtube channel: HolZ records and commentates his play fo the daily most days.
  
• MicQsenoch's Youtube channel: Mic Qsenoch played through most of the first year of daily kingdoms against Hard AI with commentary.
  
• WanderingWinder's Youtube channel: WanderingWinder has video commentary on literally thousands of Dominion games. These are also played on a different client to the Steam app and so will look a bit different.

[Kieran]

Point 1 is covered by the Beware of Triggering Bad Shuffles section, although that spends more time calling out how Cellar makes this situation more prominent because Cellar is a particular trap in this regard for new players that I've seen people fall into a lot.

Point 2 is assuming both players otherwise have a similar deck, which wasn't meant to be implied in the example. When this sort of Curse split occurs with such a difference in amount of junking cards in practice it's usually because the 3 Witch player is going for a slow cycling mostly-treasure strategy, hence why it makes more sense for them to have multiple copies, and in this case would be vs a player going for something like Chapel, aiming to play that 1 Witch every turn. I was hoping the rest of the section would go on to explain how a thinner deck can get away with less copies and improve the efficiency of all their cards by cycling faster.

[spressi]

Very good advice, thank you!
I especially liked the additional links - I will check them out :)

I have two comments:
1. With the concept of cycling, it is important to introduce the concept of cards skipping a cycle .
Let's assume you have a hand of 1 Village, 1 Witch, and 3 Coppers and 2 cards left on your draw pile. If you play both village and witch, you trigger a shuffle making your witch miss a shuffling cycle and thus being available much later for the next time. In this case, the additional card from village is very likely not worth the delay of your next availability of your Witch, especially early in the game. Of course, you often cannot avoid it but it may still be valuable to mentally track if important cards skipped cycles for you or your opponents in order to adjust how risky you have to play (more bad luck requires more risk taking to keep up a chance for winning).

[spressi]

2. I think your example with Witch and Lab is a bit confusing. You state "instead of buying 2 more copies of Witch like player A did, Player B could have bought 2 Laboratories instead". The problem with this line of reasoning is that if Player B did buy Labs instead of more Witches, they would not have managed a 5-5 split of Curses. Of course, it does not make much sense to buy a witch if the curse pile is already almost empty but if your opponent started with 5-2 in a game with witch, no defense, and little deck control, it may be warranted to buy 2-3 witches instead of labs in order to not get drowned by curses eventually (especially if e.g. village is available).

Would love to hear your opinion on this! I have some experience in Dominion but I'm clearly not an expert :)

[J-Hymz]

Thank you!