Hunting Party
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Revision as of 16:51, 1 April 2015
Hunting Party | |
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Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Action |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | Cornucopia |
Illustrator(s) | Kurt Miller |
Card text | |
+1 Card +1 Action Reveal your hand. Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal a card that isn't a duplicate of one in your hand. Put it into your hand and discard the rest. |
Hunting Party is an Action card from Cornucopia. It is similar to a Laboratory in that it will usually give you +2 Cards and +1 Action. It reinforces the variety theme of Cornucopia by making the second card be a card you don't yet have in your hand. It is regarded as a very powerful Action since it can effectively "hunt" out the valuable cards you have relatively few of in your deck while bypassing the cheap cards you have multiples of.
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
- First you draw a card and get +1 Action. Then you reveal your hand, and reveal cards from your deck until revealing one that is not a duplicate of one in your hand. A card is not a duplicate of one in your hand if it does not have the same name as any cards in your hand.
- If you run out of cards while revealing cards, shuffle your discard pile (but not the revealed cards) and keep revealing cards. If you still do not find one, just discard all of the cards revealed from your deck.
- If you do find a card not matching any cards in your hand, put it into your hand and discard the other cards revealed from your deck.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
Original article by WanderingWinder, edited by theory.
One of Cornucopia’s absolute power cards, Hunting Party can best be thought of as a Laboratory with a built-in Chancellor, Farming Village, and Demonic Tutor. It is therefore the closest that Dominion comes thus far to one card being strictly superior to another, as Hunting Party almost always outclasses Laboratory, which is a terrifying thought considering Laboratory was at one point ranked the #2 non-attack card.
In practice, a Hunting Party chain is essentially a Laboratory chain that only draws you the good cards in your deck. If you invest in enough Hunting Parties, then you will have an easy time skipping all your Coppers, Estates, and Curses on your way to consistently drawing every turn. Hunting Party is most abusive when you are set up with a single Silver, a single Gold, and a terminal Silver, since as long as you can keep playing Hunting Parties, you are basically guaranteed to consistently end up with (a Copper, a Silver, a Gold, and your +) every turn, without any need to trash. That provides a critical tempo difference over Laboratory, which cannot simply rely on a single copy of its important cards even with trashing. More importantly, Hunting Party is slowed down less by deck-greening than Laboratory; once you start drawing Provinces in your hand, your Hunting Party will skip over all the other Provinces.
Hunting Party works better with terminals than Laboratory. In many decks, you often have a critical terminal attack (Goons, Mountebank) that you want to play as often as possible. Hunting Party’s built-in deck-cycling can get that attack out of your discard and back into your hand more quickly, letting you play it more frequently. Better yet, Hunting Party synchronizes your +Actions with those terminals pretty effectively. Suppose your next 4 cards were Goons, Goons, Village, and Village. With a Laboratory, you’d draw two Goons, and be able to play only one of them. With a Hunting Party, you’d draw one Goons, skip the other one, and draw your Village. After gaining your +Actions, you can play the Goons, then hunt your other Goons down with your remaining Hunting Parties. In this way, it provides flexibility in a way that Laboratory cannot for +Actions/terminals decks.
Finally, Hunting Party works well with those spammable non-terminals that tend to require a very dense deck (Conspirator, Market). With Hunting Party, so long as you make sure to play your non-terminals in hand before your Hunting Party, you can essentially simulate a dense deck because you are constantly able to hunt down and play your non-terminals. It makes building Conspirator decks and Market decks actually viable in situations without heavy trashing.
So when is Hunting Party worse than Laboratory?
Although Hunting Party is a power card, it changes the optimal strategy considerably, and mindlessly playing it like Laboratory will often result in sub-optimal strategies. In general, Hunting Party decks tend not to benefit much from additional Golds or Platinums. These decks are also greatly harmed by the addition of unnecessary cantrips, which will get drawn by the Hunting Parties and then will draw their own card indiscriminately. Some cantrips, like Market, can help, but buy only the strongest ones and don't buy many different types if you want to reliably draw Gold. Hunting Party Decks are also harmed greatly by buying Duchies or any Alt-VP, which is important to consider because it changes the timing of the game by crippling your ability to catch up if you get behind in the Province race.
In a very trimmed deck, your Hunting Party is going to be hunting for the wrong things, since you’ll mostly be skipping over Golds and Platinums in order to hunt down that random Copper you haven’t trashed yet. And if you’re hit by a handsize attack, then you’re often forced to choose between keeping good cards in hand (and risk skipping good cards to draw into bad) or keeping bad cards in hand (and risk drawing other bad cards).
Of course, Hunting Party doesn’t work well when you need a lot of duplicate cards, like when you rely on Bank, Venture, and Coppersmith. But in practice, Hunting Party is good enough that you might as well just avoid those cards and build your deck around Hunting Party instead. Nor does Hunting Party live up to its potential if you can’t get many of them (think multiplayer); it’s still probably better than Laboratory, but it’s much harder to build abusive decks around it.
A special note about deck control: Hunting Party can create dangerous situations where your deck is entirely in the discard, usually after it tries to search for a non-duplicate card and fails. Because your discard likely consists of crap, if you play out all your Hunting Parties and then play another Action to draw a single card, you will trigger a reshuffle and create for yourself a draw deck composed entirely of crap you skipped over. The value of playing that last Market is probably not worth your next two turns being full of Copper/Estate sludge; better to just avoid triggering the reshuffle, so you can reshuffle all your Hunting Parties back into the draw deck.
Looters and ruins also devastate Hunting Party, much more than Curses: instead of having one type of junk to skip over, you now have five. Similarly, games with shelters significantly weaken Hunting Party, especially if they cannot be trashed.
Synergies/Combos
- Cheap terminal silvers: that way a chain of Hunting Parties can draw four differently-named cards (Copper, Silver, Gold, and an Action) that produce between them. Some are discussed at Combo: Hunting Party and terminal silver.
- Lack of trashing
- More Hunting Parties
- Strong attacks (e.g. Mountebank, Goons)
- Cellar, Warehouse
- Spammable nonterminals (Conspirator, Market)
Antisynergies
- Strong trashing (e.g., Chapel)
- Opponents' Swindlers, if they can give you single unwanted cards
- Opponents’ Looter attacks, Ruins
- Shelters
Trivia
In other languages
- Czech: Lovci (lit. hunters)
- Dutch: Jachtgezelschap (lit. hunt)
- Finnish: Jahti (lit. hunting)
- French: Chasseurs (lit. hunters)
- German: Treibjagd (lit. hunt; originally called Jagdgesellschaft, hunting party)
- Italian: Battuta di Caccia (lit. hunt)
- Japanese: 狩猟団 (pron. shuryō-dan)
- Polish: Polowanie (lit. hunt)
- Spanish: Cacería (lit. hunting)
Secret History