Post by falkinator2000 on Aug 3, 2012 2:21:35 GMT -5
Byzantine Cistern
Site
Cost 2
1 influence
Each day players regain all their gold.
Like Harbor of Julian, I have been trying out this card in my Merchant Guild combo deck. Harbor of Julian is in there to buy time to get the combo pieces in place. Byzantine Cistern is there as an experimental booster card. The card has been performing reasonably well. It's included as a one-of, and while it is certainly tutorable (being a site AND gold), tutoring for it is generally too slow. But when the card has been good, it has been really good.
Unlike income boosters, this card gives you raw cash. If used to maximum effect, you can effectively double your income by spending all your gold right before change of day.
This is an extremely powerful effect, but it comes with certain limitations. Firstly, the card is symmetrical. This means your opponent will get access to huge amounts of gold too.
Secondly, while you can effectively double your gold gain, you can't double your gold capacity. So you can't get out more expensive cards, only more cards.
So, how do you make sure you gain the most from this card? Firstly, you need to draw more cards than your opponent. More cards means more stuff to spend your gold on. Card drawing is generally quite expensive (in-depth analysis costs 6 and nets two cards), but with Byzantine Cisterns out, this is much less of a problem.
Secondly, you need your cards to not be too expensive (in that case more income boosters would be more efficient, since these boost your max cap), but at the same time they have to impact the board. In my Merchant guild deck there are several cards in the 4-6 cost range and these seem ideal to use with the Cisterns. Usually these are cards that demand answers in some way (merchant guild, san gimignano) or improve my position significantly in other ways (in-depth ananlysis, Piri, Harbor of Julian).
Interestingly however, I have found this card to be very strong against counter decks. I was kinda surprised by this finding, but it ties neatly in to my earlier observation that the primary advantage granted by counters, is the fact that you actually spent gold to deploy the card.
Suppose we are early in the game with me at around 5 income, my opponent at or around 6 income. I have Cisterns in play, my opponent has only played income boosters/tutors. In other words, a typical Suleiman player. Now, if I launch a memory (merchant guild? Piri?) right before change of day, my opponent will typically only be able to counter right after change of day. Hereby I am the only one to get the advantage from the Byzantine Cisterns, since he was at max gold.
Then, if he chooses to counter the first card launched, he will be hard pressed to counter the next two as well. If the next two are card advantage cards (for example 2 laboratory research with Incite revolt in hand), I will suddenly be ahead. If one of them is a militia intimidation, I will have the option to play any card without fear of counters (and advancing his board position). If I only have threats, I feel bad, because my combo deck really needs a lot of pieces in place to be effective..
The card is very interesting because it rewards active as opposed to reactive playstyles. I have not had huge success with it, but it has performed well enough to get me thinking (and writing this wall of text, lol).
Has anybody else tried playing with the card? Are there obvious synergies with other cards that I am missing?
Site
Cost 2
1 influence
Each day players regain all their gold.
Like Harbor of Julian, I have been trying out this card in my Merchant Guild combo deck. Harbor of Julian is in there to buy time to get the combo pieces in place. Byzantine Cistern is there as an experimental booster card. The card has been performing reasonably well. It's included as a one-of, and while it is certainly tutorable (being a site AND gold), tutoring for it is generally too slow. But when the card has been good, it has been really good.
Unlike income boosters, this card gives you raw cash. If used to maximum effect, you can effectively double your income by spending all your gold right before change of day.
This is an extremely powerful effect, but it comes with certain limitations. Firstly, the card is symmetrical. This means your opponent will get access to huge amounts of gold too.
Secondly, while you can effectively double your gold gain, you can't double your gold capacity. So you can't get out more expensive cards, only more cards.
So, how do you make sure you gain the most from this card? Firstly, you need to draw more cards than your opponent. More cards means more stuff to spend your gold on. Card drawing is generally quite expensive (in-depth analysis costs 6 and nets two cards), but with Byzantine Cisterns out, this is much less of a problem.
Secondly, you need your cards to not be too expensive (in that case more income boosters would be more efficient, since these boost your max cap), but at the same time they have to impact the board. In my Merchant guild deck there are several cards in the 4-6 cost range and these seem ideal to use with the Cisterns. Usually these are cards that demand answers in some way (merchant guild, san gimignano) or improve my position significantly in other ways (in-depth ananlysis, Piri, Harbor of Julian).
Interestingly however, I have found this card to be very strong against counter decks. I was kinda surprised by this finding, but it ties neatly in to my earlier observation that the primary advantage granted by counters, is the fact that you actually spent gold to deploy the card.
Suppose we are early in the game with me at around 5 income, my opponent at or around 6 income. I have Cisterns in play, my opponent has only played income boosters/tutors. In other words, a typical Suleiman player. Now, if I launch a memory (merchant guild? Piri?) right before change of day, my opponent will typically only be able to counter right after change of day. Hereby I am the only one to get the advantage from the Byzantine Cisterns, since he was at max gold.
Then, if he chooses to counter the first card launched, he will be hard pressed to counter the next two as well. If the next two are card advantage cards (for example 2 laboratory research with Incite revolt in hand), I will suddenly be ahead. If one of them is a militia intimidation, I will have the option to play any card without fear of counters (and advancing his board position). If I only have threats, I feel bad, because my combo deck really needs a lot of pieces in place to be effective..
The card is very interesting because it rewards active as opposed to reactive playstyles. I have not had huge success with it, but it has performed well enough to get me thinking (and writing this wall of text, lol).
Has anybody else tried playing with the card? Are there obvious synergies with other cards that I am missing?
So black. But it does all seem to circle back in on the same few cards