Dominion: Prosperity - Tips & Strategies

When you first open the box and see Peddler, you might be deceived by its crazy cost and lackluster action. Surely, a card that offers less than a Market, yet costs three coins more, cannot be worth it, right? Well, think again!
The thing is, you are looking at it the wrong way. Peddler is a card that, more often than not, you will be getting for free or almost free. With a Worker’s Village, I’ve ended up getting 4 Peddlers plus some other nice card in the same turn. But that’s just the beginning!
Now, when you got Peddler, it probably costed you 4, 2 or even 0 coins. But, in your hands, it now costs 8 again! That means it’s an ideal target for cards such as Bishop or Expand. See? You got a few cards for almost free, now you are turning them into 5 points that doesn’t clutter your deck or even a Colony 😀
Besides, Peddler helps you to end the game early, as it’s very easy to deplete its pile; and if the cards doesn’t happen to align in a nice combo, it’s still an invisible card (+1 action +1 card) that gives you plus one gold. You have to love this cute seller!

Talisman is one of the “expensive coppers” that allows you to buy one get one free. The only problem with it is that it only works on cards costing 4 or less Coin, limiting your options.

Enters Quarry, reducing the costs of all actions card by 2-coin each. With 1 Quarry and a Talisman, you can get doubles on all action cards costing 6-coin or less. With 2 Quarries and a Talisman, you can buy any Action card and get another for free, not to mention that you have already paid for 75% of it with these three cards as well.

I love forge because I can use it as an effective chapel. I buy it as soon as I can and use it to dump all of my coppers and estates, and convert them to something more useful. It’s also great for turning all your early action cards that are useless mid to late game into something more valuable and removing them from your deck (such as coppersmith). You can also plan ahead with your forges and purchase cards that you can trash to turn into Province or Colony (gold + any 5-cost card is always a great option). In the late game, forge will help you terminate the game early by forging a colony into a colony and then purchasing them. The forge didn’t net you any points, but it brings the game to a close much sooner if you’re ahead.

In my play groups, Trade Routes seem to be highly undervalued. But properly used, they allow your deck to scale up along with your opponents, while giving you important opportunities to streamline your deck.

The key to a Trade Route deck is making sure that you pick up an Estate and a Duchy as soon as humanly possible. Very quickly, your trade routes will be worth +2 Cash, while allowing you to dump out your Copper as often as you want. Once your Trade Routes are as good as Gold, you should be in good shape to start running the table, and your deck should be a lean, mean, Colony buying machine.

If you are playing Prospiside, you might be able to pair Trade Routes with Islands, and the ability to reasonably pair your Islands with extra victory point cards is perfect streamlining. Or, throw in some Forges to get rid of any action cards your deck has outgrown.

Note, the more action cards you throw in, the more you need some sort of Village. Make sure you pick up one or two before they’re gone!

Keeping this deck around 15 cards should let you rush the endgame for a win. Good luck!

I mentioned in Seaside that you can still buy cards in the Buy phase after playing Tactician, provided you played some +coin on the table in advance. It takes a little effort to pull off, but a keen player can combine this with the power of Vault to get a great point engine rolling.

This strategy benefits most from sets that include +cards and especially +actions. If you can’t get a big handful of cards and two leftover actions, this combo will not work. But if you are able to get your hand to that point, play Vault and discard all cards in hand except Tactician and one other card. With your remaining action, play Tactician and discard the last card in hand to trigger its effect. You get to spend whatever coin you built up, including the pile from Vault, and on your next turn you get 10 cards and 2 actions to start, a great beginning to another Vault/Tactician combo.

With two copies of Tactician and two or three copies of Vault, and a few other cards to build up your hand, you can get to the point where you are able to buy a Colony and start the next turn with a hand of 10, for several turns in a row!

By the time you’re playing Prosperity, you’ve likely learned that trashing your bad cards to thin your deck can be really powerful. Since Bishop can trash cards, it might look suitable for that purpose.

The problem is, Bishop allows everyone else to trash a card, too. Spending your resources to thin your deck may be good, but spending your resources to equally thin everyone’s decks is generally not so impressive. Bishop doesn’t give you any relative advantage in deck-thinning, and therefore usually should not be bought for that purpose.

Instead, the purpose of Bishop is to generate victory point tokens. And notice that it’s better than Monument at generating points only if you’re trashing a card worth at least $2.

This dramatically changes when and how you should use it.

The rules state that the same conditions for victory apply with the addition that when the Colony stack is empty, the game ends. I prefer to play where the game ends ONLY when all the Colony cards are gone. It seems a little more appropriate since there are so many hands that generate 8+ gold.

My fiance loves to create long involved action combos that everyone can oooh and ahhh at. Meanwhile i’m buying up all the gold and land that I can. I don’t remember the last time I lost a game 😉