Ranking the Base Game Kingdom Cards

What are the best and worst Kingdom cards in the base game?

Methodology

This guide lists the Kingdom cards in the base game from best to worst. Kingdom cards are those that make up the random selection of 10 piles, and not the 7 basic cards (Copper, Curse, Province etc.). There are 26 Kingdom cards in the base game.

The order was chosen not by me but by community consensus on the Dominon Discord[discord.com] in 2022 via the annual ThunderDominion ranking process. These rankings primarily consider 2 player games. Games with larger player counts can change the value of some cards in ways that may not be reflected here.

What does it mean for a Kingdom card to be "better" than another? There is intentionally no answer to this in the ThunderDominion rankings and it is left up to the voter to decide.

The ranking consensus on the base game in particular has been reasonably stable for a long time although some cards may move up or down a position or two each year particularly towards the middle of the group.

These rankings do not consider the cards only available in the first edition.

#1: Chapel

There is no doubt, Chapel is the most powerful kingdom card in the base game, and it's not even close. Trashing is very powerful, and few cards trash like Chapel does. The ridiculous speed in which Chapel can remove your starting deck is incredibly game warping.

Its extremely low price allows all players to purchase it regardless of the distribution of their initial shuffle, and it's very hard to find a reason not to buy it on turn 1 or 2 in base-only games. You need expansions to start finding reasons to not open with a Chapel purchase.

Chapel appearing so obviously overpowered might seem like a mistake, but it is intentional. Its aim is to drastically change the game when it shows up as part of Dominion's goal of variety in deck building gameplay. And in that regard, it sure does manage to achieve what it sets out to do.

#2: Sentry

Chapel taught us that trashing cards quickly is strong, and Sentry is the second powerful trasher in the base game that can trash multiple cards at once. As it provides +1 Card and +1 Action and trashes from the top of your deck instead of your hand, Sentry doesn't reduce the number of cards in your hand on the turn you trash, allowing you to continue to have powerful turns while trashing.

As you gain more cards into your deck as the game goes on, the density of bad cards in your deck reduces, and so Sentry is a high priority so that you can play it while the odds of finding bad cards to trash is still high.

Once you no longer need to trash, Sentry continues to help throughout the game by discarding cards you don't want to draw like Victory cards, and improves your reliability by reordering the cards on your deck. Has a particularly notable interaction in the base game with Vassal, removing a lot of the risk in playing Vassal.

#3: Witch

Giving Curses to your opponent is one of the strongest types of attacks in Dominion. Curses are very bad to have, not just because they lose you points at the end of the game, but mainly because they get in the way of drawing your good cards.

A good way to receive less Curses from your opponent is to first give all the Curses to them, as Cursing attacks stop working once the Curse pile empties. This can often make Cursing attacks a high priority and Witch is no exception.

Witch is a particularly powerful Cursing attack as it also draws cards. Drawing on Cursing attacks is powerful because it cycles you through your deck a bit faster so you shuffle the Witch back into your deck sooner so you can play it again sooner. This helps you bury your opponent in Curses as fast as possible, giving them less chances to prepare, react and respond in kind.

When the Curses run out Witch becomes like a very expensive Moat, which is much worse for drawing your deck than cards like Smithy, but the incredible early game benefit more than makes up for this.

#4: Throne Room

In Dominion your deck requires different effects at different times, both during your turns and on a game-wide scale. For example, you might want to focus on trashing and Cursing during the early game but not the late game, while on your turns you want to first focus on drawing more cards before playing the "payload" towards the end of that turn.

Throne Room provides immense flexibility by allowing you to get more of the effects you want at the time you want them, and allows you to shift your deck from performing one function to another without having to gain particular cards to do that. For example, you can Throne your Witches during your early turns, and then when the Curses run out you can use those same Throne Rooms on later turns on your Artisans instead. This saves you from having to spend your gains and buys on more copies of these cards to shift your deck's focus.

Another example: during your turns, you can Throne your Laboratories to draw your deck more reliably, then once you've drawn everything any remaining Throne Rooms can be played on your Festivals for more money. There is a possible reliability benefit here, as it does not matter what order you draw your Throne Rooms in, they are all used for the appropriate function at the right time, as opposed to your Laboratories and Festivals where you really want to draw the Laboratories first. Although it is important to note that you do need to draw the Throne Room alongside the correct card, so neglecting extra copies of your draw cards can make adding more Throne Rooms make your reliability worse, not better. A hand of only Throne Rooms can't do anything!

Throne Room provides you two more plays of another card at no additional Action cost, so is considered a "village". Playing Throne Room on a card that gives at least +1 Action results in a profit of +Actions, just like playing a Village does.

Lastly, Throne Room is a particularly powerful version of its type compared to similar cards from other expansions, because Throne Room is notably cheaper. It costs only 4 coins while its peers mostly cost 5. Throne Room can be gained by cards like Workshop, and can be considered a discount as opposed to buying an extra copy of the 5-cost card you might be playing your Throne Room on.

All-in-all, Throne Room provides a lot of value at a bargain price.

#5: Militia

Militia is a powerful attack which causes significant disruption to your opponent throughout the entire game. Notably, it is cheap enough to open with, which can severely disrupt your opponent's ability to afford high priority 5-cost cards and also reduce the effectiveness of trashing with Chapel.

Militia crushes traditional treasure-heavy strategies into the dirt, forcing your opponent to build a draw engine if at all possible. If you are stuck with 3 card hands, its very hard to even reach 6 coins to buy a Gold, let alone 8 coins for a Province, leaving these decks stuck buying Silver over and over and going nowhere.

By forcing your opponent to discard all the way down to 3, you only ever need to play it once per turn, therefore it is not much of a burden to add to a functioning deck for quite a strong outcome. It works especially well when your opponent has a hand larger than 5 cards, such as after you have played Council Room.

#6: Artisan

There are many cards across all expansions that gain cards costing up to 4 coins, which we call Workshop variants. It is significantly rarer to find cards that can gain 5-cost cards. Not only is Artisan one of these cards, it gains the card directly to your hand allowing you to play it without having to shuffle your discard first!

By forcing you to topdeck a card from your hand, Artisan reduces the number of cards in your hand when you play it, this offsets gaining directly to your hand. In this respect, this is framed as a negative drawback, but there are many ways it can be helpful to you. The most obvious example is that if you don't have any remaining Actions to play the Action card you just gained, you can topdeck it for next turn instead. Other examples include setting up guaranteed Vassal successes, and you can put a Moat on top of your deck to ensure it is in your starting hand next turn.

Another major benefit of Artisan is that it can gain Duchies, this allows a strong deck to more easily catch up in points later in the game, giving the Artisan player more time to build a stronger deck.

Given many 5-cost cards are very powerful, being able to gain them directly without buying them is strong, so unsurprisingly Artisan is also powerful. It makes up for this by being very expensive at 6 coins, which can be hard to reach early. However, by putting your newly gained card either in your hand or on top of your deck, Artisan does not slow you down when you buy it instead of some other high priority 5-cost card, because you will still get to play that 5-cost card during the next shuffle when you gain it via Artisan. Therefore Artisan is usually a very high priority card, the question is how are you going to afford it early?

#7: Laboratory

When you play a Laboratory the number of cards in your hand increases by 1. It does this without needing to invest in villages, as Laboratory refunds you its Action cost. Laboratory is pure and simple draw, and draw is very powerful.

A very simple card with a simple effect that fits into almost any type of deck. The lack of any ordering concerns with villages etc. makes it very reliable, but you pay a premium for that reliability. It is an expensive card at 5 coins, so its not always wise to just buy Laboratory over and over.

#8: Village

Village is so fundamental to the core identity of Dominion deck-building that we name the entire category of cards that give +2 Actions "villages".

Action cards that do not give at least +1 Action are called "terminals" because they end your Action chain. You need villages to play more than 1 terminal per turn. If villages are not readily available, you are heavily restricted in what you can do with terminal Action cards, which substantially changes how the game will play.

Village is a very nice village. It is very cheap, and by drawing an additional card it makes it easier to find two other terminal Action cards so you can make use of Village's effect. Note that this extra card simply replaces the Village in your hand and so is not considered real "draw" like Laboratory. Therefore putting lots of Villages into your deck won't impact your deck quality, but if you aren't utilising the extra +Actions, then you're also not actually doing anything.

As you don't need villages until you are actually likely to draw two terminal cards together, Village is often not a card you will open with, but its eventual impact on the game cannot be understated.

#9: Festival

Festival offers a nice package of bonuses all on one card, but most notably lacks any +Cards. By being a non-drawing village, Festival requires you to invest a little more heavily in draw to properly utilise it, but gives you both the extra Actions and economy to make that worthwhile. As long as you can manage Festival's additional draw requirements, it's a great way to ensure you have powerful, high economy turns.

Be careful with investing too heavily in Festivals, as you pay a premium for the combination of 3 different bonuses. It is easy to not take advantage of the Actions or the Buy, in which case you effectively paid 5 coins for a Silver, which is very inefficient. In addition to this, it is easy to stall out your turn if you have too many.

Festival is most notable for being a really good enabler for "draw-to-X" cards like Library by providing many bonuses while decreasing your hand size.

#10: Remodel

Remodel essentially replaces cards in your deck for better ones. The cost of the card you can gain scales with the cost of the trashed card, so Remodel is very poor at removing 0-cost trash like Curses and Coppers. It is much better at removing Estates, which are a high-priority for removing from your starting deck. By costing 4, you can open Remodel for these purposes, but at a significant cost of being very unlikely to buy a 5-cost card any time soon.

Other prime targets for Remodelling are other trashers once you've cleaned up your deck, junking attacks when the Curses run out, and cards gained by cost-limited gainers like Workshop. Silver and Gold are particularly nice targets, as there are many cards out there that gain these in large quantities easily, and they come at nice price points, with Silver turning into desirable 5-cost cards and Golds into Provinces!

Remodel can also give a leading player excellent end-game control by "milling" Provinces, trashing a Province in hand into another Province just to empty the pile to rush out the game.

#11: Market

Market is a flexible source of money that fits into any deck but is most notable for being a very undemanding source of +Buy. It doesn't require extra Actions or card draw to add more Buy into your deck and also comes with an extra coin to make that Buy more useful.

As a source of money Market is quite costly, especially given the base game also has Merchant and Poacher to fill this role at a cheaper price, even if those alternatives come with additional restrictions. As such, just buying Market over and over again is an inefficient way to scale your decks economic output.

The base game can sometimes lack strong payload for your deck and so Market can be the best option despite its inefficiencies. Outside of the base game, some expansions can offer up some quite powerful cheap cards which helps Market really shine, or cost reduction which can make Market's easy source of Buys incredibly strong.

When you are using Markets primarily for money, the extra Buys can sometimes offer up strong control for ending the game by buying out cheap piles such as Estates suddenly. So even though excess Buys can sometimes feel useless, try not to underestimate them.

#12: Moneylender

Moneylender trashes those horrible Coppers from your deck while giving you lots of coins to spend now, letting you purchase powerful cards while trashing down your deck at the same time, something many trashers can struggle to achieve.

While 3 coins sounds like a lot, it is worth noting that you do not get to play the Copper you trashed, making the coins-per-card you're getting from Moneylender no better than adding a Silver. So Moneylender is like a Silver that costs an Action but removes a Copper, which is a good trade.

Moneylender is very slow compared to Chapel, and is often ignored in the presence of Chapel. Moneylender is also unable to trash Estates, which are a more important card to remove early.

#13: Council Room

Council Room draws a lot of cards, then gives you a +Buy to get more use out of all of those cards. Drawing 4 cards is more cards than most of its peers, reducing the amount of draw you need to add to your deck. The downside is quite significant, all of your opponents get an extra card too.

How bad is that extra card for your opponent? That can depend a lot on what kind of deck they are building, but also how many Council Rooms you play as the extra card draw stacks. If you play too many every turn, it isn't hard for a simple treasure strategy from your opponent to buy Provinces quite quickly, especially as they can add their own Council Room for easy access to an extra Buy and huge value turns. If they are also building a strong drawing action engine with Council Rooms, you might simply help out each other and it doesn't matter.

Council Room likes being supplemented by other draw like Laboratory so you don't have to play too many each turn. If Militia is in the kingdom, you can discard all the extra cards from your opponents hand and the downsides of Council Room are largely mitigated, making it very powerful.

#14: Smithy

The simplest Action card in the game. Smithy draws you cards, but needs village support. Drawing cards is good, so Smithy is often relevant.

Smithy is notably cheaper than its peers, but offers no additional bonuses like its peers do. This cheap price makes it gainable by Workshop variants, so it's sometimes very easy to add a lot of Smithies to your deck. The low price also makes it possible to open with Smithy and Silver, which lets you roll the dice on getting a very expensive card early such as Artisan.

Smithy's archetype of "terminal draw" is fundamental to Dominion, much like Village. There are many variations on Smithy, and while Smithy is the most iconic, it isn't particularly notable.

#15: Merchant

Merchant is a very cheap and flexible source of coins provided you can draw a Silver on the same turn. If you do fail to draw a Silver, the Merchant effectively does nothing, merely replacing itself for no benefit, the same as if you had just not bought it in the first place.

If you are not planning to draw your entire deck on most turns, Merchant comes with an inherent risk, but it allows the decks that do heavily invest in trashing and drawing a cheap way to build up economy to make the investment worthwhile. It does not require further supporting draw to be added, in contrast to Silver at the same price.

Watch out for treasure-trashing attacks like Bandit! If you lose your last Silver and are heavily invested in Merchants, your entire economy can collapse in an instant. So you will need some redundancy, or possibly it will simply not be worth the risk.

#16: Vassal

Vassal is high-risk high-reward. It can be a very cheap way of adding coins to a deck, but only if it is successful in finding an Action card on the deck that you want to play next. When Vassal finds an action and you choose to play it, it is like Vassal providing an extra +1 Action and +1 Card.

When it doesn't find an Action card you want to play, it is worse than Silver because it cost an Action. This also happens when you have no cards left in your deck or discard, so you can't wait until you've finished drawing your deck first. You have to play it in the middle of drawing your deck, when suddenly losing an Action can be catastrophic, ending your turn early.

Vassal requires you to be able to build your deck in a certain way to be worth it. You want to have a high density of Action cards, so being able to trash your starting cards is important. Ideally you have a lot of Action cards have at least +1 Action so you don't accidentally spend your Actions too early. It helps to have spare villages to manage the occasional miss from your Vassals or if you draw them at the end of your deck. Finally, you can guarantee hitting the right card with cards that let you topdeck, like Artisan, or look at the top of your deck, like Sentry.

Usually you will be forced to add Victory cards to your deck so Vassal will always confer some risk. But if you achieve the conditions to make it good, you can build a very powerful deck with a high coin output at an incredible bargain.

#17: Poacher

Four coins is a fair price for +1 Card, +1 Action and +1 Coin with no conditions, which is what Poacher starts out as. Over time, it might start making you discard cards as piles empty. Discarding a single card is still a perfectly fine card, but discarding 2 or more is very bad.

It is very risky to obtain lots of Poachers, as your opponents can empty a pile and it will suddenly make your deck significantly worse. This means its presence does not let you lean hard on an action-heavy deck for your economy in the way the other similar cards in the base game do: Market, Merchant and Vassal. It is still perfectly fine to buy one or two Poachers in many cases, as a small supplement to some other way of earning economy.

While the discarding is usually a drawback, there are times when it is a positive and you buy Poacher specifically for the discarding. In some expansions, cards benefit explicitly from being discarded. In the base game Library and Sentry can benefit from it, in the case of Sentry it is to get junk cards out of your hand so they can be trashed.

The biggest issue Poacher faces is tough competition at its cost in the opening. Poacher is stronger early, but cards like Moneylender or Militia will likely be higher priority, and so you may simply not get around to buying a Poacher in time.

#18: Bandit

Bandit can be considered primarily a Gold gainer. It has an attack that tries to trash other player's non-Copper treasures, but as it only looks at two cards, it has a low search space to find any and so will miss often unless played in large quantities. This is more likely with more players, as multiple opponents may be playing Bandits, in which case the attack can start to noticeably hurt.

Gold is a pretty bad card to purchase, it is very expensive for its benefit. Gaining Gold without paying for it is very substantially better. If you have plenty of draw to reliably draw many Golds, Bandit can be a very efficient way to scale up your economy across multiple turns.

Bandit doesn't directly improve your economy until the next shuffle, as you need to draw back to the Gold before you see some benefit. In decks with low draw Bandit can be too slow, as it hurts your current turn's economic output and takes a while to cycle through your deck until you reshuffle then draw the Gold you added. Bandit is substantially better in deck-drawing engines, and you often don't need more than one.

Another major benefit of gaining Golds is that they cost a lot of coins, which is perfect for Remodel. Bandit and Remodel appearing together is perhaps the strongest reason to build a deck-drawing engine in the base game, as you can Remodel the Golds directly into Provinces.

#19: Workshop

Workshop can be an effective way to gain lots of copies of cheap cards, assuming there are cheap cards in the kingdom that you would like to have lots of copies of. Good targets include Village, Merchant, Throne Room, Gardens, Smithy, etc. It is wholly reliant on a good target being available in the kingdom. Silver and Estate are always present, but usually not the reason you gain a Workshop.

An important consideration for when to gain Workshop is the priority of cards costing 5. Some 5-cost cards, such as Sentry or Witch, can be really important to get as early as possible. If you gain Workshop on one of your first two turns, it will directly hamper your chances of buying a 5-cost card on the next shuffle, which could slow down your deck significantly. Figure out how to get deck control first, then add in Workshop to escalate your deck quickly.

An often overlooked benefit of gaining cards during your action phase instead of buying them is that you have the opportunity to draw and play the card you just gained on the same turn. This allows cards like Workshop to quickly amass more copies of themselves once your deck is running well in order to really ramp up the number of cards you can gain each turn and rapidly improve your turns.

While Workshop is ranked low on this methodology, it should be noted the methodology considers these cards in the context of Dominion as a whole. There are a lot of Workshop variants across the expansions and Workshop is one of the worst cards in this particular niche, frequently being outclassed if it shows up alongside its peers. However in the context of base-only games it is quite good despite this, as the primary gimmick of base is cheaper, no-frills versions of standard card effects. This puts a lot of good cards in the 4-cost range, and so Workshop's core effect is more useful than normal in base-only games.

#20: Cellar

At first glance Cellar might appear to let you draw quite a lot of cards, assuming you also discard many, and therefore be an effective way of cycling through your deck to your most powerful cards. What is often missed is that each use of Cellar decreases the number of cards left in your hand by 1, and so each time you play one your are potentially reducing the final output of your turn. It is frequently over-gained by newer players.

This "sifting" effect is usually worse than trashing all of your bad cards, and if you already trashed all of your bad cards, what are you going to discard with Cellar? In practice, decks frequently end up with some sort of dud card in them eventually, most notably Provinces, and sometimes you draw cards in the wrong order. Usually you want to draw your engine pieces first, and your "payload" last, Cellar can help mitigate bad luck in this regard, provided you have enough draw to draw back the discarded cards.

Cellar is very cheap which means it is often picked up when an opportunity just so happens to arise and can provide a little bit of extra reliability. It gets better the more cards you have in your hand, as you can sift past more cards at once, so really wants to be a part of strong engines.

Lastly, it has some extra utility when using Library as your primary draw, where the hand-size reduction is no problem and you benefit substantially by removing treasures and victory cards from your hand.

#21: Moat

When played as an action, Moat increases your handsize by 1, which is half the increase provided by Smithy. By only costing 2 coins, this might seem like a reasonable tradeoff, however it requires a significant amount of additional village support to use Moat as your primary source of draw, which is a kind of hidden extra cost. Draw is still useful and you simply make do with what is offered, but as a source of draw Moat compares poorly to its peers, and particularly has a lot of competition in the base game, which is filled with good draw cards.

It is worth noting that Festival is a poor village for Moat, as playing Festival then Moat leaves you back at the same number of cards in hand and so trying to draw other cards in this manner is unreliable.

Moat also provides immunity to all attacks as long as it is in your hand. The big challenge is to have Moat in your hand between turns. Occasionally you can guarantee it with a card like Artisan topdecking it at the end of your turn, otherwise it is purely down to luck. You can increase the odds by having lots of copies, which is a nice benefit if you're forced to use it as your main source of draw. Typically, players will be relying on other forms of draw and so their Moat density will be low, making Moat fairly poor as a form of defense.

Moat gets better with more players, as there are more opponents playing attacks. This makes you more likely to be attacked on any given turn, and also more times per turn. In 2 player, it is very common to ignore Moat entirely and simply deal with the attacks. Having a Moat in your starting hand can make it harder to have your turn work out by virtue of it being an inefficient card to start your turn with.

#22: Gardens

Gardens is a scaling victory card. It scales in a very generic way, with the number of cards you own, meaning that it is viable in a wide variety of decks. However, it scales very slowly, making it hard to be worth a significant number of points. It is very easy to make Gardens worth at least 2 points each, and pretty common to see it worth 3 points each. Scaling above this is much less common.

It is easy to fall into a trap of thinking that Gardens is only worthwhile if you don't trash your starting cards. In practice, strong engines tend to be much better for Gardens, due to their capability of gaining many cards per turn, which quickly makes up for removing your starting cards.

By only costing 4 coins, Gardens is in the range of Workshops, which are the kinds of card you want anyway for Gardens because they let you gain lots of cards. Gardens therefore is an incentive to build engines by providing an easy way to score before triggering a 3 pile ending, or a faster way to catch up on someone gaining Provinces. However it is worth noting that these strong engine decks tend to beat treasure-heavy decks that are slowly gaining Provinces anyway, so even though Gardens offers some appeal here, it doesn't always ultimately have much impact on the end result. If both players are building a strong engine with lots of gains, the game is likely at risk at ending on 3 piles before Gardens gets the opportunity to grow very large.

Ultimately, Gardens always needs to be considered, but its slow scaling often stops it from being little more than a slightly cheaper Duchy.

#23: Library

Library is what is called a "draw-to-X" card. It draws until you have 7 cards in hand. As far as draw-to-X goes, this number is quite high. From a 5 card starting hand, it will draw 3 cards, like Smithy.

The problem with draw-to-X is that it does not stack. Successive plays of Smithies keep drawing cards, while successive plays of Library will achieve little without lowering the amount of cards in your hand first. This requires a deck composition focused around achieving this; without it you have a soft limit placed on how good your turns can be.

Typically you are looking for a way to get coins from Action cards, such as Festival. These can be played from your hand to reduce handsize before playing another Library to draw back up. Treasures are usually particularly bad with draw-to-X as you can't play them until the buy phase. If the action cards cost an action, like Miltiia, then you become very reliant on drawing villages early, as drawing them late will leave unplayed action cards still in your hand when you need to play your next Library, reducing the amount of cards you draw.

Library offers a unique effect of letting you skip past action cards you don't want to draw right now. If your deck is solely action cards, this lets you setup a perfect draw of exactly the cards you want. But this usually does not last, as at some point you need to buy Victory cards, and then skipping past action cards makes you more likely to draw those victory cards, which are not what you want. It has some value in not drawing action cards dead if your turn was a dud anyway.

Library is very expensive for what is a worse type of draw, and its peers in other expansions are either much cheaper for only a slight reduction in number of cards drawn, or offer substantially better side benefits. The base game in particularly is filled with draw cards, making it hard to justify in base-only. It has some niche application as a soft counter to Militia if you can draw it early enough in your turn.

#24: Harbinger

When you play Harbinger, you draw a card first, and then get the option to topdeck a card from your discard. This means that you need another card if you want to draw the topdecked card this turn.

Harbinger's biggest issue is that you need to have cards in your discard pile in order for its effect to work. Even then, you need a card you actually want to topdeck, and not just all those Coppers and Estates you discarded with Cellar. The strongest decks try to draw all their cards every turn, resulting in a new shuffle when drawing your starting hand, consistently leaving you with no discard pile.

Adding a Harbinger to your deck doesn't hurt, in the sense that the +1 Card and +1 Action causes it to simply replace itself, but if you are not topdecking a card then it is actually doing nothing, similar to if you had simply never gained it at all.

Harbinger works best on slow-cycling decks, so you can repeatedly pull a high value card like an attack or a Gold multiple times across a single shuffle. Even in this case, having the Harbinger appear too early or too late in the shuffle can still leave you without any cards in your discard pile.

#25: Mine

Mine improves your treasures. Typically it is changing a Copper to a Silver or a Silver to a Gold, but expansions can add more treasures to the kingdom that are valid targets. Unfortunately most of these cost 4 or 5 coins, which are not ideal costs for Mine although it still works.

Considering the basic case, improving one of the basic treasures to the next step up adds 1 coin of economy to your deck. This is similar to using Workshop to gain a Merchant, however the Workshop costs much less and can be used to gain other, more powerful cards too. It also compares unfavourably to Bandit, which adds 3 coins of economy to your deck each play.

Mine's biggest disadvantage is its reliance on having low cost treasures, it is common to trash all your starting Coppers and find other sources of economy such as action cards, which renders Mine useless, or you have a reduced number of treasures, limiting its total impact. If you cannot trash your starting Coppers, then it provides a way to not have to add more treasures to your deck so you can cycle your deck as effectively as possible, however decks with no trashing struggle to cycle quickly to play Mine often enough.

Mine does provide a substantial increase to the cost of cards in your deck, which is nice for Remodel, upgrading Silvers to Golds so they can be turned directly into Provinces. It also gets more valuable when playing with Platinum from the Prosperity expansion, as this offers a 2-coin improvement when upgrading your Golds into Platinums over the usual 1 coin.

Ultimately Mine is one of the weakest cards in Dominion, its effect is slow and reliant on having treasures, while its 5-coin cost puts it in high competition with much stronger cards.

#26: Bureaucrat

Silver is not a good card. It is often necessary to gain one or two in order to reach the important 5-coin price point, but otherwise it is very mediocre value. It's not very often you want to gain SIlver in large quantities, it isn't good enough to consistently reach 8-coin hands for Province and gets in the way of drawing your other cards.

Bureaucrat is a Silver gainer, which often isn't what you want. Even worse, it topdecks the SIlver, which in many cases is the worst place to put it, as not only do you not get to play it this turn without other cards to draw it, but being in your starting hand next turn can get in the way of starting your engine. For example, if it pushed a Village out of your starting hand, then you might simply dud your turn.

It offers a potential attack that in theory can be quite good, forcing your opponent to draw a useless Victory card a second time, and this attack stacks. However, Estates are usually the highest priority cards to remove from your deck, and you typically don't add more Victory cards until quite late. This means, for most games, most of the time in that game is spent in a state where the attack cannot possibly work. Even when they do have Victory cards, the attack still misses often anyway.

Bureaucrat is an attack card that attacks yourself harder than it attacks your opponent, and is simply one of the worst cards in all of Dominion, and easily the worst in the base game.

[kings789987]

IRL OR PLAYING ON STEAM, card like Chapel and witch take all the fun out of the game.they are by far the best card in the base game .opening 2/5 with one of these make most game lame. you can try to beat them with different builds. 9 time out of 10 u will lose by a lot. i play with the gentlemen agreement if i open 5 i will never by witch first 2 turns.

[J-Hymz]

As a fairly new player of Dominion, this article helped a lot.
Hell, Bureaucrat used to be my favorite card lol.
Thanks, author!