I recently hosted my 20th in-person Dominion tournament near Cincinnati, OH. Scheduling for this one was a bit more difficult and we had some last-minute cancellations, but we still had ten people compete for the title of tournament champion and for the first time in a while we have a new winner! This was only Ben’s second tournament (he cashed in the first); it’s refreshing to see some new folks make their mark so quickly, so congratulations to Ben! Congratulations to Jonathan and Ryan who also cashed.

The spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms used is available here and here are the final standings of the tournament:

1. Ben
2. Jonathan H
3. Ryan
4. John P
T5. Charlotte
T5. Jake
T7. Shaila
T7. Jeremy
T7. Nathan
10. Michael

I’d now like to talk about the designed kingdoms for the final stage of the tournament; it’s likely that these will be the last ones designed without the upcoming expansion Arcana. I’m glad I had a chance to get through the last of my finalized ideas without the new set; most of what I have on the ideas list are not completed kingdoms, so hopefully the next tournament will feature some cool new ideas from the new set. I was pretty happy with these ones though

Finals Kingdom: Governor, Flagship, Merchant Camp, Experiment, Throne Room, Tactician, Advisor, Anvil, Leprechaun, Forager; Friendly (Governor), Way of the Owl — A few different ideas at play here. First, the possibility to get many Wishes in one turn using Throne Room and Flagship on Leprechaun. Second, the explosive nature of the payload with multiple Thrones and the passive trickle of Governors into the deck. And third, the ability to play multiple Tacticians in one turn using Thrones and Way of the Owl. With Forager potentially representing huge payload, the extra draw has the ability to not only provide a lot of consistency to the deck, but take a load off of Governor so it can focus on Gold gaining and remodeling. Unfortunately neither player in this game went for Tactician, but in playtesting I found it to be quite good (it was one of the things I designed the kingdom around so I kind of wanted it to be that way).

Third Place Kingdom: Laboratory, Sacrifice, Develop, Lighthouse, Clerk, Alchemist, Vault, Tunnel, Nobles, Blockade; Invasion — This kingdom is all about Invasion, an event that rarely has so many of the things it does be relevant. Loot as the only +Buy is a bit scary to put in a kingdom, but in my playtesting I never felt hurt by missing a +Buy even when my first two Loots didn’t give it, partially because so many of the Loots that don’t give +Buy are quite good here (they all make good Develop food) and you’re usually just getting an Invasion for the first few $10+ turns anyways. Sacrifice and Develop work well on the Duchies to keep deck control if needed, and are cards you probably already have in the deck by that point, and Alchemist serves as a second stack of Labs that you can grab with Invasion without putting a Potion in your deck. I put Vault/Tunnel in partially as a distraction but also as a nice efficient way to build payload — depending on how my early-game Develops lined up I sometimes made use of that.

Semifinals Kingdom 1: Native Village, Ronin, Wheelwright, Vampire, Crucible, Silk Merchant, Rustic Village, Conspirator, Bank, Importer; Sickness, Fellowship of Scribes — Covid is coming and you need to have a plan. The trashing is too slow to deal with the Curses, but luckily we have Ronin. Ronin is the best card out there for giving consistency to draw-to-X decks and it’s important here, even though there are other tools as well. In the endgame this deck looks like a big pile of cards with just about everything in it, but it functions quite well and is pretty fun to play. Just make sure to get your boosters people.

Semifinals Kingdom 2: Procession, Rats, Amulet, Seer, Rope, Library, Skirmisher, Courier, Shop, Sycophant; Advance, Way of the Monkey, Order of Astrologers — Procession and Rats, what’s not to love? Actually, it’s very good here — with Advance to get rid of extra Rats and Monkey to make it pretty easy to control the number of Rats in your deck, it’s actually a pretty solid core of the deck. In my playtesting, Rope ended up not even being necessary. Past that, Procession can make the entire composition of your deck change violently over the course of one turn, with lots of tools for an easy pivot to different forms of deck control and payload. Seer with a Silver flood from Amulet can be viable, transitions into and out of draw-to-X with Library are also viable, and everyone’s favorite — the Rats autopile! In the game that was played, one player had drawn their deck and had a very big turn with low piles, but was just short of finding a win that turn. They lost on the next turn, but after the game there was some discussion and there was a forced win available with a Rats autopile.

…

The tournament was fun, people had fun, and that’s a good thing. But I can’t help but think there was a way that more people could have had fun. Lots of people wanted to go and weren’t able to, which I was aware of… when I started trying to schedule the tournament. There just wasn’t any time that worked for most people. I normally set a date 3 months before the tournament, but I’m thinking shortly after this post I’ll be setting a date for the Fall 2026 tournament.

One other thing I wanted to talk about was the tournament matchmaking script — I recently made some changes to add a feature where it would actively try and prevent the case where the same player ends up in multiple 3P games if the tournament has an odd number of people. There’s still a small improvement I want to make before I publish it, and when that happens I’ll edit this post with a link to the scripts.

The winner of this tournament was Nathan, who went undefeated; this marks his second consecutive win and fourth overall win at my tournaments! Will anyone be able to take him down? Congratulations to Nathan and also to the other players who cashed: Nick, Ben, and Jake!

I’ve been teaching my 7-year-old son how to play Dominion recently, which means I’ve been playing a lot more Dominion recently than I have in a while. Because of this, I ended up with a lot more than four designed kingdoms for this tournament, which ended up being a good thing. For the first time in 19 tournaments, we had a tie game in the bracket stage of the tournament: the only way to resolve this is to have a tiebreaker game immediately, which meant I had to draw on one of my backup designed kingdoms for that tiebreaker game.

Another piece of drama that happened was that after two rounds, my matchmaking script started behaving inappropriately. I couldn’t diagnose the issue immediately, so I had to perform the matchmaking for the last two Swiss rounds by hand. After spending some more time with the script, I figured out that the issue was that I had left some debug prints in after adding a feature to the script, which was adding a lot of time to the process. I have removed those debug prints and added a bit of pruning to the algorithm to improve its performance, and updated versions of those scripts have been pushed to the fileshare where I host them.

As always, the spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms used for the tournament can be found here and I’ll post the final standings of the tournament below:

1. Nathan
2. Nick
3. Ben
4. Jake
T5. Behram
T5. Isaac
T5. Michael
T5. Jonathan H
9. Charlotte
T10. Ariel
T10. John P
T10. Shaila
T10. Stephen
T14. Robert
T14. Ryan
16. Mark
17. Jeremy


Now, I’d like to discuss the designed kingdoms used for this kingdom, along with the extra Tiebreaker kingdom (which was designed).

Tiebreaker Kingdom: King’s Court, Stowaway, Cutthroat, Duke, Alley, Monkey, Improve, Tools, Samurai, Duplicate; Credit, Inherited (Stowaway) — The idea behind this was to have no trashing with Loots as big payload, but King’s Court finds a way to still be effective by using duration draw. Monkey and Stowaway are good enough when King’s Courted to have some very good turns, and while the deck is a bit clumsy to set up it was still good enough to be worth going for. The reason I wasn’t super enthusiastic about using this kingdom is because during playtesting I found out that it’s possible to play a King’s Court from hand and choose a Shadow card from deck to play as the target. While this makes the deck more reliable and easier to set up, it wasn’t the vision I had for this kingdom, and simply removing Alley wasn’t what I wanted to do with it. It’s possible that with more playtesting I could have found something else to do that more specifically fit the vision I had for this kingdom, but it played fine as-is so I had it as my backup kingdom and it ended up being used. A nice trick at the end of the game is to King’s Court an Improve and turn three of your King’s Courts into Provinces

Designed Kingdom 1: Advisor, Cemetery, Coven, King’s Cache, Swap, Flag Bearer, Caravan, Taskmaster, Mapmaker, Falconer; Dominate, Nearby (Swap) — I disallowed 5/2 openings on this kingdom. Dominate lurks so there is big incentive to build, but building this deck has you jumping through a few hoops to make it happen. There are a ton of synergies for building this deck at each stage that are meant to sort of compete with each other to figure out what’s best for your situation — I wanted it to feel tactical in nature where with certain draws you might favor a different way of building the deck.

Do you build a deck without villages or do you use Taskmaster? It’s possible to play lots of Falconers and even Mapmakers without using Taskmasters — if you Swap and gain a Falconer to hand, you can immediately play that Falconer by reacting to gaining itself; with lots of Swaps in the deck you can swap in and out of various “temporary” cards like Flag Bearer, Mapmaker/Cemetery, Coven, and even Advisor depending on how thin you are. If you err too far on the side of deck control you can buy two King’s Caches and quickly gain three Silvers with Falconer for a quick shot of payload.

Designed Kingdom 2: Crystal Ball, Wharf, Treasurer, Oasis, Faithful Hound, Scavenger, Trader, Snake Witch, Pirate, Forager; Plan, Way of the Turtle, Colony/Platinum — I disallowed 5/2 openings on this kingdom as well. You might look at this board and think that there is no village, so Wharf can’t be that good, right? But Crystal Ball and Way of the Turtle together will easily fulfill all of your village needs. A Plan/Oasis opening here is sort of obvious to me, and after that I think you want one or two more Oases and ALL of the Crystal Balls (probably a Pirate as your first $5 to help with that). and the deck comes together so nicely that it just feels really fun to play.

Designed Kingdom 3: Forts, Destrier, Ducat, Steward, Cabin Boy, Guide, Wishing Well, Ratcatcher, Harbinger, Mystic; Exploration, Reckless (Guide) — This kingdom came from two different ideas I had and smooshed together. Call me crazy, but I think Tent is a powerhouse here: OK more like Hill Fort and Garrison, but a Tent/Exploration opening guarantees (I think) a path where you can get two Garrisons somewhat quickly, and then focus down the Hill Forts until they’re gone, and once you have a Reckless Guide or two in the deck, you can gain lots of helpful cards to get you to the point where you’re as thin as you want to be, and drawing as much as you want to be as well. If the opponent doesn’t contest the Hill Forts immediately, it’s possible to get Destriers to be super-cheap with Ducats and Hill Fort gains and the game can get somewhat out of control, so I think the Tent opening to at least have some control over that is potentially very important.

Designed Kingdom 4: Storyteller, Barbarian, Mountain Shrine, Magnate, Horn of Plenty, Charm, Inventor, Fortune Hunter, Crypt, Courtyard; Enlightenment, Expedition — You might look at this kingdom too and think that there is no village, or maybe that you don’t need one, but Enlightenment with Storyteller gives you plenty of actions to use a Magnate or two for draw, which enables a Horn of Plenty megaturn that would maybe be theoretically possible without it, but would take so much longer. A cute interaction is that while you may not really need to thin your Coppers because they’ll eventually be cantrips anyways, if there is one in the trash then Mountain Shrine draws cards because Copper is an Action and it’s in the trash!

I’m really glad so many people made the trip to play in this tournament, I’m hopeful that we’ll have strong attendance for the foreseeable future and I can keep putting these on. The next tournament I host in Spring 2026 will be my 20th in-person tournament, while this one marked 10 years since my first one. It’s been a journey to get here, but the real reward is the friendships we made along the way! No really, the people who come to these keep doing so because of that, and I’m grateful that it doesn’t seem to be ending any time soon.

Here are the standings for the tournament:

 1. Nathan
 2. Michael
 3. Ryan
 4. Charlotte
T5. Jonathan
T5. Behram
T5. Stephen
T5. Robert
T9. Josh
T9. John
T9. Kevin
12. Dan

This tournament was the first one with the newest expansion, Rising Sun, and with that came a fresh inspiration for the designed kingdoms. In addition to that, I’ve been looking at previous tournament attendance and it’s seeming unlikely at this point that we’ll have more than 16 players; this gives me the knowledge that there will probably be four players left going into the elimination bracket, meaning that I can design kingdoms with the intent to use them for semi-final games and then finals, and third-place match. As always, here’s a link to the spreadsheet that contains all of the prepared kingdoms for this tournament, including the extra kingdoms that didn’t get used.

And now, I’ll go into some more detail about the designed kingdoms I used, and my thoughts on what would happen…

Semifinal kingdom 1: Exorcist, Cemetery, Fairgrounds, Devil’s Workshop, Rice, Gondola, Collection, Scepter, Crystal Ball, Coin of the Realm; Way of the Mouse (Black Market), Shelters

Black Market Deck: Apprentice, Black Cat, Catacombs, Council Room, Crew, Envoy, Frigate, Guard Dog, Haunted Woods, Highwayman, Journeyman, Library, Magnate, Mapmaker, Margrave, Masquerade, Militia, Monkey, Ninja, Old Witch, Patrol, Pilgrim, Rabble, Rice Broker, Ronin, Scholar, Sea Witch, Sheepdog, Smithy, Stowaway, Torturer, Wharf, Witch’s Hut

The two semifinal kingdoms were based around the idea that I wanted to try some things I said I would never do. Most of the reasons I am against Black Market and Divine Wind in tournament kingdoms is because of the extra setup complications, but I decided to put in the extra work to provide a more “unique” experience and try to make kingdoms that still rewarded good play and good adaptation to the game situation in spite of the chaotic nature of both of those card-shaped objects.

With that said, the trick to this one is that there’s Way of the Mouse as Black Market, but there are no action cards in the supply. You do start the game with a Necropolis, and you can get Imps and Will-o-Wisps from the Night cards in the supply, and of course once you play a Black Market and get an action card from there, you’ll have lots of access to the Black Market deck. The contents of the Black Market deck are mostly homogeneous, in that if you looked at three cards from that deck you’ll pretty much always find a card or two that draws, most of them being terminal draw. With this knowledge, you still get a lot of the “fun” from Black Market but you’re able to pretty reliably plan around what you’re to get and when you want to access that draw.

Personally, I’d open with a $5 hand, using Necropolis as Black Market, and try to get a big draw card to setup a Cemetery turn, then get a Devil’s Workshop to enable it. From there I load up on Coins of the Realm and Black Market cards that I balance between draw and payload (more Black Markets). Things change slightly if I find something from the BM deck that trashes but the overall plan is not super different.

If I had it to do again, I probably wouldn’t include Fairgrounds. It fits with the theme of the kingdom, but the game took a very long time and I think cutting Fairgrounds would have helped with that.

Semifinal kingdom 2: Mountain Shrine, Witch, Acting Troupe, Hunting Grounds, Swashbuckler, Relic, Fool’s Gold, Samurai, Craftsman, Fortune Hunter; Divine Wind, Save

Divine Wind kingdom: Worker’s Village, Village, Mining Village, Bazaar, Fishing Village, Fortress, Wandering Minstrel, Port, Mountain Village, Walled Village; Dominate

The contents of the Divine Wind kingdom were not known to the players, but I figured there would be some speculation on what would or wouldn’t be in there. Importantly, there are no +Buy in the main kingdom and there is in the Divine Wind kingdom, so the fact that the Divine Wind kingdom is ten villages is (in my opinion) a mostly irrelevant way to troll the players a bit. Sure the village effect is welcome, and if you suspect there will be better villages than Acting Troupe in the Divine Wind kingdom, you may prioritize the terminal draw you see in the main kingdom, which both players did to an extent. I also think that grabbing Fool’s Golds on lower-money turns from the main kingdom will have value and I’d like to think I’d be doing that.

But the intent with the Divine Wind kingdom was to try and use the extra effects of the villages there to make turns capable of hitting Dominate once deck control is achieved. It’s meant to put the players in an awkward situation and force them to make the best of it.

Finals kingdom: Tragic Hero, Bank, Lurker, Blockade, Treasure Map, Baron, Bandit, Artisan, Pendant, Cabin Boy; Way of the Turtle, Alliance

The theme for this and the third-place kingdom is a bit more mechanical, in that I think the best strategy for both kingdoms at a certain point is to sacrifice your current turns to save up for a huge turn that effectively wins you the game. In this case, with Way of the Turtle being the only village, from very early on in the game it’s important to make use of your terminal space because it becomes the limiting factor in how long it takes to pop off. Tragic Hero and Bank is a very potent payload and Lurker (along with Way of the Turtle to help) can let you add Tragic Heroes to your deck through gaining them directly or through Artisan plays as well. There are enough tools here to really boost your chances of never wasting an action.

Treasure Map can be fun with Way of the Turtle, but I don’t think it’s particularly good here. There should be plenty of payload for that big turn as long as you have enough draw to draw some of the Banks you gain from trashing Tragic Heroes along the way.

Third-place kingdom: Kitsune, Aristocrat, Bridge, Marauder, Overlord, Sycophant, Bureaucrat, Scavenger, Merchant, Menagerie; Biding Time, Gang of Pickpockets

It’s important to note that the triggers for Gang of Pickpockets and adding cards back to hand with Biding Time are both start-of-turn effects, which means you can choose to have Gang of Pickpockets go first. With a 5/2 opening possible here, a Kitsune/Overlord opening seems pretty clear (with the possible exception of some tactical Overlord-As-Menagerie plays), and I expect the Curses to be handed out pretty quickly. The first few turns are relatively simple, junking quickly and picking up another Overlord or two, but after the Prophecy is triggered, I think that Coppers should very rarely be played — you want Biding Time to act as your deck control, and if you think about paying $1 to “thin a Copper from your deck” it’s very frequently worth it.

The next several turns are likely spent playing only Overlords and Kitsunes, and when the Curses run out I think there is value in Overlord-as-Marauder — Spoils is very efficient payload and the junking, while not debilitating, does slow opponents down. The goal is to wait until most of the deck is in hand through Biding Time and add a single Aristocrat and several Bridges to the deck, you’ll probably want to have a 2-3 Bridge turn to pick up the rest of your payload, then just pass turns until you have enough payload to get 6 or more Provinces in a turn. You can use your Overlords as Aristocrats if you need more actions, or Bridges for payload.

Dominion is a game that’s been out there for a long time, it could almost legally be an adult! I’ve noticed that there are fewer new faces at the tournaments, but as long as people still come, I’ll keep hosting them. I’m sure well get to 20 soon, and hopefully we’ll have many more after that.

As always, here’s the link to the spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms for this tournament, including the ones that weren’t used. Due to health issues I wasn’t able to put in the effort I normally would into playtesting designed kingdoms, so the kingdoms for the finals don’t have the same “devious” nature or don’t strive to promote a certain strategy through my normal balancing approach. I still think they were interesting, and the kingdoms overall in this tournament still had that “thinky” or “crunchy” feel like normal, though.

Here are the overall standings for the tournament:

1. Behram
2. John P
3. Nathan
4. Michael
T5. Charlotte
T5. Stephen
T5. Robert
T8. Nick
T9. Jonathan H
10. Isaac

I’d like to discuss a couple of the more interesting kingdoms here, but I want to include one of the randomly generated boards instead of just talking about the finals kingdoms.

Finals Table 2: Treasury, Trader, Artisan, Fishing Village, Outpost, Longship, Mine, Procession, Siren, Church; Pious (Procession), Way of the Squirrel: The errata to Procession hits hard here, as it no longer works on duration cards, which make up half of the board here. It certainly makes Procession worse than it would be without the errata, but I still think it’s very good here. All of the draw here is at the start of your turn (or the end of the previous turn), which makes Outpost extremely good, but it makes gain-and-play with Procession a lot more difficult — gaining to hand with Artisan is the way to go here for sure, as Treasury after Procession gains just doesn’t seem as strong. When building, the focus is just on having as much deck control as possible so you can reliably get a Province on your main turn and your Outpost turn, but if you get ahead of the opponent on junking and thinning you can even add in lots of Duchy gains with Artisan on top of it.

Table 1: Cavalry, Feodum, Warehouse, Fortress, Cargo Ship, Forager, Upgrade, Mining Road, Necromancer, Vineyard; Orchard, Mountain Pass: This one was played four times and each time the landscape of the game was very different, but not because of the landscapes. Oh I crack myself up. The draw here is pretty limited, with only Cavalry/Horse as sustainable draw, and Zombie Apprentice which can only be used once per turn. But sometimes it isn’t limited, because someone trashes a Horse for some reason. The contents of the trash in this game ended up determining so much about what can be done in terms of draw. Mining Road was pretty important here as it allows for a quick pivot into Vineyards, and the Necromancer and Cavalry piles both ran low in every game, but some games were draw-light while others had plenty of Horses in the trash. Even Mountain Pass ended up being interesting, as in one game the Provinces hadn’t been touched when piles were low, and on the last turn of the game when Vineyards were emptied, Mountain Pass was a liability because the opponent could name 40 debt first and guarantee themselves 8VP. There were just a lot of unique situations in this game and even though many of the games on this board went up to time, I wanted to keep it in because it was so cool.

Table 2: Mill, Mint, Merchant Camp, Lighthouse, Royal Blacksmith, Treasure Map, Scavenger, Town, Recruiter, Hunter; Tireless (Scavenger), Baths: So there’s a perfectly reasonable deck you can build here with draw, trashing, +Buy, almost everything you could want except for an attack. But you can also build a sort of golden deck with Merchant Camp and Tireless Scavengers. It’s slightly more complicated than just shoving three Scavengers in the deck because they end up on top of your deck at the end of the turn, so you do need to add more actual cards to your deck before you can Province every turn, but you can consistently Province starting as early as turn 9, which puts a very aggressive clock on any other strategy you might want to attempt. Only one player attempted to build this deck, but couldn’t get it consistent enough to win.

That’s about all I have to write about this tournament. I’m looking forward to hosting more of these every six months!

The other players who cashed were Ben and Nathan, both former champions. Behram also won the trophy match against me, making him only the second person out of nine to do so!

I’d say the highlight of this tournament was the finals match, which was very tense; I’ll discuss more details below while discussing the kingdom itself. Here’s a link to the spreadsheet which contains all of the kingdoms used in this tournament, including all the backup kingdoms that weren’t used. And below are the complete standings for the tournament:

  1. Behram
  2. Ben
  3. Nathan
  4. Steveie
  5. Robert
 T6. Charlotte
 T6. Nick
 T6. Michael
 T6. John
 T6. Jacob M
 T6. Jake S
T12. Kim
T12. Ryan
T12. Jim
T12. Stephen
 16. Megan

Now I’ll talk briefly about the kingdoms used in the semifinals and the finals/third place match; as usual they were designed by me:

Semifinals kingdom 1: Tide Pools, Outpost, Contract, Witch, Cemetery, Bishop, Supplies, Pawn, Council Room, Enlarge, Save, Crafters’ Guild: The idea for this one initially was just to make Tide Pools good without Guide, which IMO is a tall order. The main thing I started with was just Outpost — play all your Tide Pools and then an Outpost and just forfeit your Outpost turn. Outpost is probably the second best synergy for Tide Pools and the nice thing is that you get to shuffle all your Tide Pools back into your deck for all of your “functional” turns. I thought Contract as the only village would be nice awkward thing to put with that. But wait once you have Contract you can discard your hand and then play your Contracted card and have a functional Outpost turn! And so I decided to throw in a couple of other things you can do at the start of your turn before discarding on top of that, with Enlarge and Save but also kind of Bishop as well (if you have multiple Contracts you can Bishop something before discarding then draw after). Tide Pools ends up being pretty good here and I believe in the semifinal match, the person who had more Tide Pools won the game

Semifinals kingdom 2: Frigate, Capital City, Lookout, Old Witch, Messenger, Tunnel, Hamlet, Jack of All Trades, Procession, Marquis, Wall, Ritual: I love Frigate. I know most people don’t but I sure do. Wall too <3 I just wanted a really crunchy board that involved them both: junking with Old Witch and decent gainers with Jack and Tunnel oppose Wall, and making sure you have Frigate coverage at all times can really hurt your opponent. The player who knows the best way to prioritize and time all of these things according to what their opponent is doing has a big edge here. In my opinion, this board was just fun to play and had lots of crunchy decisions. Don’t you agree?

Third place match kingdom: Charlatan, Silver Mine, Magnate, Bazaar, Church, Jewelled Egg, Courier, Menagerie, Oasis, Inspiring(Gladiator), Capitalism, Colonies: I had two ideas here based around Capitalism. The first was just to make Magnate better by making most things in your deck into treasures. The second one is a soft spot I have for playing most of your turns in your Buy phase using Capitalism as your main village, but having it also work on deck control cards in a meaningful way. Yes Bazaar is here and you can build a good deck with it, but from my playtesting, you can do much better by just skipping it. Using Oasis and Courier you can play action cards from your hand that aren’t made into treasures with Capitalism, this includes Church, Menagerie, and more Magnates. You also have Inspiring treasure-Gladiators (and even Inspiring Fortunes!) to help out, and Silver Mine can just gain you the card you need to make all of this work. The result is a deck just full of good cards that can have really big turns. I enjoyed the interactions with Menagerie here the most, as there can be crunchy decisions over whether you hold your extra Coppers to make Magnates better, or play them to activate your Menagerie. This board will make you think very hard about the order you play your Treasures in!

Finals match kingdom: Sleigh, Hermit, Improve, Storeroom, Stowaway, Taskmaster, Ranger, Weaver, Secret Passage, Smithy, Stampede, Fountain, Shelters: This one received the most playtesting and resulted in the most tense game of the tournament in my opinion. This kingdom started out as two different ideas: the first one is a deck where Taskmaster was the only (sustainable) village but the only $5 card is Duchy (plus there’s no Copper-trashing), and the second was a Stampede/Storeroom deck. Putting the two ideas into one kingdom and tweaking the enablers for each deck allowed for some pretty interesting matchups. A lot of playtesting and tweaking was done to get the decks pretty equal to the point where I’m pretty confident that there’s a certain dynamic here. The Taskmaster deck is stronger than the Stampede/Storeroom deck, but if the Stampede/Storeroom deck aims to empty Duchies before going for Provinces, it can win.

In the finals match, both players committed to the Taskmaster deck and the Duchies were gone very quickly. With both decks over-terminaled, Behram was able to build towards the Stampede/Storeroom deck which proved to be the better pivot (as opposed to what I think was a more Madman-focused plan) and this gave him a convincing win.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who showed up — most people who come to my tournaments drive quite a ways to do so and that’s not lost on me. If you’d like to stay up-to-date on in-person Dominion events near the Midwest, USA area, check out this Facebook group. Hope to see you this fall!

On Saturday, October 7, 2023 I held my 15th Dominion tournament with physical cards near Cincinnati, OH. We had a turnout of 14 people and there was some pretty steep competition there, but at the end we had our winner, my fellow podcast host, Jake Schwartz!

Along with Jake as the champion, we had Jacob in second place with his first tournament appearance (yes it was an all-Jacob finals) and Nathan, a two-time champion of my tournaments in third place, all of them cashed in the tournament. Highlights from the tournament were the tiebreaker before the finals, where we had five tied players competing for four spots in the finals, and also the trophy match where I improved my trophy match record to 7-1 with a stylish Embargoed-Curse pileout.

We had 14 players turn out for the tournament this time, which is probably due to the fact that I definitely didn’t promote this tournament as heavily as I have for some of my other tournaments in the past. It’s no secret that I haven’t been playing online Dominion recently, which mean I just haven’t been playing as much Dominion as I used to. A bit sad, but that’s likely to change when the Temple Gates Games app becomes public, which will definitely happen, RIGHT?

Here’s a link to the spreadsheet containing all of the kingdoms I used for this tournament, plus all of the backup kingdoms that never got used. I’ll discuss the designed kingdoms here.

Finals Kingdom 1: Emissary, Ironmonger, Horn of Plenty, Overlord, Silver Mine, Remodel, Upgrade, Oasis, Altar, Augurs, Band of Nomads, Way of the Rat

So the idea behind this kingdom is a Horn of Plenty megaturn, but the draw being Emissary/Ironmonger makes things a bit more interesting because it’s hard to have enough action density to be able to draw consistently. You would prefer to have a relatively thin deck here, one that can use Overlord’s flexibility to keep your turns going and get a stack of favor tokens by playing Overlord-as-Emissary at the right times. Way of the Rat helps a lot with getting lots of Overlords so this becomes very fast to build. The big trick, though, is that Band of Nomads is more than just a way to desperately draw cards to keep your turn alive — if you’ve drawn your deck and you play a Horn of Plenty to gain another Horn, you can use a favor to draw that Horn and still play it that turn. The first player to put themselves in this situation and notice what they can do can deny Horns to their opponent, which effectively ends the game

Finals Kingdom 2: Broker, Hunting Grounds, Swap, Merchant Guild, Improve, Magpie, Cauldron, Counterfeit, Sea Chart, Cellar, Borrow, Gang of Pickpockets

Broker is the only village, and the good draw and the good payload here is all terminal, so that’s the awkwardness of this kingdom. But the draw and payload is good enough that you want to go for it, and there are plenty of ways to build a reliable and sustainable deck and keep enough Broker Food in your deck to make it happen. Having lots of Swaps can ensure you always have a Broker in hand when you need it without having too many, and you can Swap Magpies back into the supply and re-gain them that same turn without too much trouble.

Finals Kingdom 3: Monkey, Tireless (First Mate), Merchant, Steward, Market, Ironworks, Underling, Skirmisher, Treasure Map, Monument, Tireless, City-State

There’s a deck here that can play a LOT of Monuments pretty quickly, but First Mate is the only village and it’s a significant part of the draw as well. Fortunately, you can make the deck very consistent and still build aggressively towards payload because of the synergy between the Tireless ability of First Mate and Monkey, ensuring that you will always start your hand with at least one First Mate and potentially all of them. There are some other cute tricks you can do with Treasure Map and City-State but I’m not sure it measures up to the deck that can play so many Monuments every turn.

Finals Kingdom 4: Shepherd, City Quarter, Odysseys, King’s Cache, Animal Fair, Corsair, Merchant Camp, Sheepdog, Fisherman, Camel Train, Way of the Mule

So there’s no trashing here, and the draw is mostly Shepherd and City Quarter, which would both struggle here because Shepherd only works well when there’s other draw, and City Quarter really wants good action density. But you can gain enough of it using Camel Train and Sunken Treasure (with King’s Cache if you need it) that it all works out. You need to go heavy on the gains here because the only +Buy is Animal Fair, but once the City Quarters empty you end up having super explosive turns and your deck ends up being more consistent than you might expect given that there is zero trashing. The components here are pretty weak and don’t necessarily have the best synergy, but you can just shove so many Action cards into the deck that it eventually works out in spite of that.

So that’s my write-up for this tournament. It really was great to see everyone who showed up and even if I play zero games of Dominion in the next six months, I’ll definitely be running another one of these in the Spring of 2024, so keep your eyes open for that. You can stay up-to-date on Dominion events in the Midwest, USA by following this Facebook group.

A write-up of the recent IRL tournament I hosted should be coming soon, but if there are any broken links, images, or anything else with the blog, please contact me. I think I got everything but there’s just a lot of content here so I can’t really be sure. Thanks for your patience and I hope I don’t have to deal with this again.

Quartermaster is almost always a must-buy as long as there is anything halfway decent to gain for $4 or less, and if not, just gaining Silvers is still pretty powerful. Much of the time you will want two Quartermasters and will want to put cards into your hand pretty often, but don’t forget that you can gain Estates and never put them in your deck. Quartermaster has extra synergy with any victory card that it can gain, just for the sheer amount of points that don’t make your deck worse, but Cemetery is probably the most powerful of these.

Frigate’s attack is absolutely devastating to almost any deck you can build in Dominion, but it hits the most powerful decks the hardest: the ones that draw a lot of cards. Drawing your deck is usually not going to be possible when Frigate’s attack is being played on you consistently, so unless you have some amazing defense, you’re probably going to be playing a Money Density deck. Fortunately, money density doesn’t mind throwing in three or four of these to shut down any decks with more ambitions.

Frigate is the only attack in Dominion that completely shapes the game in this way; it gives you an attack that money density barely cares about, which completely shuts down decks that try to draw cards.

Going back to your Action phase is extremely good when you can use it to play actions that you might have drawn dead, this is most of what makes Villa so good. Launch is more accessible at the $3 price point than any other way of returning to your Action phase, and gives you a card and a buy on top of that.

While this doesn’t have the synergy with gainers and cost reduction that Villa has, it does draw a card and still has the terminal draw and draw-to-X synergies.