In Hearthstone, Yu-Gi-Oh, Magic the Gathering, or really any TCG the winner of a match is sometimes predetermined before either player has taken their first turn. Control decks are hyperspecialized to clear the tiny minions produced by an aggro deck, then grind them out with more valuable cards. Aggro decks will usually swarm the board and beat down a combo deck player before they manage to set up their combo. Combo decks tend to beat control decks, setting up a rock paper scissors like meta-game.

This meta-game has immense strategic depth. Players consider the available pool of cards, and try to craft a deck with the best possible win rate. But another player could have a better win-rate by countering the straightforwardly best looking deck. Thus players must imagine the complete distribution of decks and balance using the most powerful cards, being resistant to being countered, and trying to counter their competition. This strategic depth of the meta-game has always been my favorite part of TCGs.

Dominion is a deck-building game that distills this meta-game into the game itself. Players start out with a deck with just 7 coppers and 3 estates, but throughout the game purchase cards, adding them to their deck. Unlike a TCG where the available cards only changes every few months when a new set of cards is released, in Dominion each game has a different set of 10 available kingdom cards. Randomly selecting from over 500 available cards, means that there are well over \(10^{25}\) possible kingdoms1, each with their own strategic considerations.

Much like TCGs, strategies can be sorted into different deck archetypes2:

  • big money decks aim to buy a province each turn, by improving the money the average 5 card hand generates
  • engines optimize to draw the entire deck each turn, often buying multiple provinces in a turn
  • combos utilize unique card combinations usually culminating in a single big turn in which they end the game
  • slogs aim to slow down the game, while acquiring cards that give them a bigger advantage the longer the game lasts
  • rushes use cards that gain more cards to end the game as quickly as possible, scoring just enough points to win

Dominion’s strategic deck building decisions dominate the game from the very start. Each turn you have a 5 card hand, only shuffling new cards into your deck after having used up your entire deck. Starting from a 10 card deck, on your first turn, you already know your second hand. Because all 10 kingdom cards are visible at the start of the game with 10 copies of each, players can plan ahead to their final deck before buying a single card.

Different deck archetypes need very different cards, and often want to make very different early purchases. Hedging and buying a card that is good for multiple different plans is only useful if you actually might need to pivot based on what your opponent does. The opportunity cost of doing so is often too high to pay.

Other deck-builders fail to have this strategic depth. For example, in Slay the Spire, you only see 3 cards at a time and pick one. You don’t know what cards you’ll be able to acquire later in a run. This makes committing to a longer term strategic plan foolish, because it significantly cuts your optionality3. Instead of replicating the, any card goes, deck building of constructed TCG formats, it replicates drafting.

After creating your game plan, Dominion’s tactical gameplay is mostly mechanical. You track your deck and concretize your plan by reacting to your particular shuffle luck plus your opponents behavior. In a close game, the endgame features Dominion’s heaviest tactics, as players vie to ensure that they will be able to end the game on their turn in the lead. If you missed a good strategy, your opponent catching you off guard, it’s usually already too late to pivot.

Because winning or losing hinges on strategic deck building choices, Dominion players love to analyze kingdoms, debating at length the subtleties of different plans without even playing the game. Freed from the burden of shuffling, playing online Dominion makes it possible to play entire games in just 10-15 minutes. At least the first 3-5 minutes is spent figuring out what deck best suits the given kingdom. Dominion more than any other game rewards playing with a bird’s eye view, planning for the very end of the game, right from the start.

  1. There’s a bunch of extra selection factors: Landscape cards like Events, Landmarks, Projects, etc. plus cards that require extra cards like Young Witch which requires the selection of a bane, that make calculating the exact number fairly tedious. ↩

  2. My terminology here is borrowed from Wandering Winder’s The Five Fundamental Deck Types. Sometimes thinking in terms of these archetypes is overly restrictive, but it’s a good starting point for understanding the different strategies one might pursue in a Dominion game. ↩

  3. Because engines/combos strongly appeal to me (and often are the strongest strategies in Dominion), I usually go for silly infinite combo decks with the Silent, resetting if I don’t get the cards I need. But this is more playing a slot machine, rather than finding strategic depth in Slay the Spire. ↩