Dominion Cards 124 - Tide Pools

[@VanDeutscheHammer]

Cool, reminds me of debt tokens but with cards.

[@Xtreme-cg8ss]

Love the guides keep up the good work!

[@jacobwansleeben]

Tide Pools is like the inverse of Tactician, where it benefits you now but hurts your next turn. Unfortunately, in this game, your next turn usually matters more than your current turn.

[@008960s]

Thoughts on using outpost and throwing the discard hand when you only have 3 to begin?

[@alexanderbrady5486]

The sheer negativity towards tide pools is odd to me. It is weak, but if Tide Pools is the only +draw on the board it is typically worth grabbing. The Tide Pool / Wharf combo seems nice, but I have found it somewhat weak in practice. A 2 card hand is still mostly a skipped turn, so you need to play multiple wharfs, which means there needs to be a villlage. But village-wharf is already a good deck. In short, wharf can mitigate tide pools's downside, but in the boards where it is possible tide pools tends to be an unnecessary detour. One thing I have found Tide Pools nice for is lining up early game combos. For example, if there is Chapel and the board is pushing you to slim the deck fast, I will try grabbing a tide pools on a 4-3 split. The tide pools makes it easier to line up the Chapels and estates on your first shuffle. Or let you spike to 6 if you need it. Then, if it doesn't fit in your target engine, you can trash it later.

[@DominionCards]

It's been long enough I've forgotten what I've said in this video, but statistics gathered have shown that Tide Pools simply isn't very strong. I don't think Wharf mitigates Tide Pool's downside, as you're still having to discard 2 cards regardless. And yeah Wharf is such a strong draw card you usually don't need Tide Pools for more draw. I'm not convinced by Tide Pools / Chapel opening. The worst case, where you play Tide Pools turn 3 and don't find Chapel, seems catastrophic. And normally with Chapel, you're expecting to not buy anything on the turns you trash, but if you use Tide Pools and Chapel together, you're not buying anything on both that turn and the next, which sounds like it slows you down a lot.

[@kylerzepa4048]

I think the only way I can get excited about this card is there something like guide. With guide I think this card is fairly strong because you can draw a lot of cards with only two guides. Without God I think of this card is worse than useless. For some thing like the last turn of the game it doesn’t give you that much value. Compare it to something like lich. Lich nets over double the amount of cards and +1 action. Lich only cost five. That might be a little bit more expensive than four but considering the amount of value that Lich gives is much better for the end of the game. And in any other case I think that this card should be and the bottom five cards in dominion. I am really unimpressed with this card. And that I would put it below where counting house was. I think that countinghouse is the code to compare the power level to. Overall 2/10

[@DominionCards]

Lich costs 6, and it requires the Wizards pile to have been rotated to the right place, and its rotator forces you to trash a card if you need to rotate the pile. Lich simply isn't an option a bunch of the time as a result. Now you might already have a Lich for its on-trash benefit, then sure I'll play it and it's much better. Tide Pools being cheap makes it significantly easier to get though, you have a lot more chances to get it and not have to give up gaining something like a Duchy instead, like you might have to with Lich. Tide Pools being worse than Counting House, there is no way that's true. Even in Seaside, Merchant Ship is clearly worse than Tide Pools, for example.

[@kylerzepa4048]

@@DominionCards by comparing it to counting house I mean that it has about as many times where it’s decent. It might have more used cases than counting house but at its worst I think it’s worse than counting house. Although at its best I think my countinghouse is much stronger than tide pools. My mistake on the cost of Lich. I haven’t played that much dominion in a while so maybe while playing with this card more my opinion will get higher. Currently I have maybe played in a kingdom with this card to her three times and never bought it once. I also think that there aren’t very many week cards in dominion anymore so this ranks fairly low. I would probably rake it bottom 10 currently but before this year it would probably be bottom 20. I’m also just confused why this week of a card would get added in a second edition. I get stuff like harbinger and secret passage Weir I did but I think those are a lot better than tide pools.

[@DominionCards]

There have been statistics gathered on hundreds of thousands of games between high level players and while obviously there is currently much less data on these new cards, the statistics so far do not provide any justification for your negative views on Tide Pools. Counting House is only gained on 7% of boards where it shows up, with Populate and Swindler being 3rd and 4th place for cards most correlated with gaining more copies of Counting House, which is hugely damning. While for Tide Pools it is gained on 60% of boards it is present. Comparisons to Secret Passage and Harbinger are more reasonable, Tide Pools is similar in the number of games it's gained compared to both of those, although in lower quantities. However the win rate for people who gain Tide Pools is more than 50% while for Secret Passage and Harbinger it's less than 50%. But the winner is much more random for Tide Pools (and we have less data) so these results aren't super reliable. I'd be fine with ranking it a little below Secret Passage, but it's definitely better than Harbinger.

[@kylerzepa4048]

@@DominionCards The only reason that I think that this card is worse than harbinger is because harbinger practically never homes you and I feel like titles can harm you a lot of the time. But again I really hope I’m wrong about this card.

[@DominionCards]

Harbinger is a cantrip which means it's rarely going to reduce your deck quality, but this is the only type of card where that's the case. All other cards have the chance to hurt your deck if gained recklessly. You're not taking into consideration enough that Harbinger is often equivalent to buying nothing at all, which is often worse than buying most other cards. Gaining Harbingers is highly correlated with losing because of this. You said yourself in an earlier comment that you've never once added a Tide Pools to your deck. Until you actually play it and see what impact it has, I don't think you get to make any claims on its effectiveness, as you're basically just making it up if have no real experience to draw from.