What are the strongest cards in Dominion Prosperity? We designed an experiment to answer this question, which we call Dominion Ultimate. In this post we explain our experiment and share what we found to be the best cards in Dominion Prosperity.
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How to find the strongest cards in Dominion?
To find out what cards are the strongest in Dominion, we came up with an experiment: Dominion Ultimate. Normally Dominion is played with ten kingdom cards, but in Dominion Ultimate we play with all cards of an expansion (we would include multiple expansions if we had a bigger table, but for now we started with Prosperity because it’s our favorite Dominion expansion).
In Dominion Ultimate, all cards have to compete with one another, and the strongest cards in Dominion Ultimate are simply the strongest cards in the set.
The two strongest cards in Dominion Prosperity
We ran our Dominion Ultimate experiment multiple times now with the Prosperity expansion. We tried out several different strategies and card combinations that we knew to be powerful. But, it seems that the card combination that dominates all others is King’s court with Mountebank.
King’s court with Mountebank is extremely powerful because your opponent receives three Curses and three Coppers in one turn. Six bad cards ruin a deck completely, especially if the deck isn’t very big yet. Therefore, even getting hit with King’s court Mountebank only once is very hard to come back from. Moreover, hitting your opponent with this combination slows him down so much, that you will have all the time in the world to keep hitting him with it until his deck is mostly Coppers and Curses.
Some of the other card combinations we tried have stronger end game effects. But, these strategies just had no time to get going against King’s Court with Mountebank, because they got their deck filled with Copper and Curses long before the end game. Setting up the card combo
After we found that King’s Court with Mountebank is the strongest card combination, we wanted to discover the quickest way to get these cards. Again, we played Dominion Ultimate (thus including all cards of the expansion in our game simultaneously), to find the absolute quickest way to obtain the combo.
We found that we use Quarry because it discounts both King’s court and Mountebank. This helps to obtain King’s Court and Mountebank quickly. We simultaneously use Forge and Mint to thin our deck so than we have a higher likelihood to draw King’s court and Mountebank in the same hand once we have obtained them.
We are sure that there is room for improvement in our setup whence we include cards from other expansions. Certainly Chapel is a more efficient way to thin our deck than using Forge and Mint.
Conclusion
The strongest cards of Dominion Prosperity are thus King’s Court and Mountebank, but Quarry is indispensable in setting up this combo quickly. It surprised us that Quarry is as strong as it is.
We are soon going to use the Dominion Ultimate framework to find out what the strongest cards are in <the other Dominion expansions. We might even try to combine different expansions into an even bigger ultimate session (but this may be too many cards to wrap our heads around all the possibilities).
We encourage everyone to try out Dominion Ultimate! It is a slightly overwhelming, but very interesting game mode and it offers endless room for improvement!