Pearl Diver

Pearl Diver
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Seaside
Illustrator(s)	Maura Kalusky
Card text
+1 Card +1 Action Look at the bottom card of your deck. You may put it on top.

Pearl Diver is an Action card from Seaside. It is a cantrip, meaning that it gives both +1 Card and +1 Action; it rarely hurts to have it in your deck, but its ability to move cards from the bottom of your deck to the top rarely helps very much either.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• Draw a card before you look at the bottom card of your deck.
• If placing the card on top of your deck, be sure not to look at the next card on the bottom of your deck while moving the card.
• If you have no cards left when it's time to look at the bottom, you shuffle first.

Strategy Article

Written by Seprix

Pearl Diver is a sad Dominion card that is sometimes not even better than nothing. It is one of the worst $2 cost Dominion cards in the entire game. I will explain why.

Using Pearl Diver

Pearl Diver simply draws a card and looks at the bottom card of your deck. If it is a good card, you will top deck it. Otherwise, you will leave it on the bottom most of the time, hoping it misses the shuffle. To put simply, Pearl Diver slightly mitigates bad shuffle luck, and only sometimes. A sometimes useful trick is that if there is one card left on the deck and you play a Pearl Diver, you will shuffle to trigger the deck inspection ability. That’s about it.

Why is Pearl Diver so bad then, if it at least is a cantrip? Pearl Diver’s use often does not outweigh the cost it takes to get one. Getting nothing can be better than getting a Pearl Diver. This is not to say that you should not take a Pearl Diver when you can get one for free, but there are scenarios where taking one for free is just worse than nothing.

Suppose an opponent plays a discard attack on you, and you have Pearl Diver and some other cards in hand. You can take a gamble and hope to draw a card with Pearl Diver, or discard it instead. If you did not have Pearl Diver, you would have known what card you would have drawn anyways with the Pearl Diver, making a more effective choice as to what to discard instead. In those cases, having a Pearl Diver is worse than nothing. There are also conflicts with terminal draw.

Comparables

Ignoring Chapel, $2 cost cards in Dominion generally have some sort of use, even when they are poor. Haven sets aside a card for next turn. Pawn provides flexibility with +buy. Raze trashes and cycles at the same time. Even lowly Herbalist provides a much needed +buy sometimes, and maybe you topdeck a Fortune. Heck, you might put a copper on top to help block Masquerade!

Pearl Diver has none of these edgecase uses with its ability. There is nothing in the entire game that makes Pearl Diver's ability all that desirable.

On the bright side

Not to say Pearl diver does not have its uses. Cheap cantrips are a boon for Teacher engines, and Pearl Diver is certainly not the worst card in the $2 category for this. Pearl Diver is also an action card, which can boost Vineyards and help piledrive Peddlers, as well as activate Heralds and Scrying Pools. However, these synergies are more of an effect of Pearl Diver being a cheap cantrip or just being an Action card more than it is for Pearl Diver itself. But sometimes that is all you need to squeak out a win against an opponent.

To put this entire article into a sentence: You generally only pick up a Pearl Diver when it helps another strategy along.

Synergies/Combos

• your own Goons
• Throne Room, King's Court
• Vineyard
• Mystic
• Loan
• Native Village

Antisynergies

• Warehouse
• your opponent's Goons, Militia, etc.
• Mountebank

Alternate versions

• 

  Digital version for Dominion Online

• 

  German version

Trivia

Official card art.

In other languages

Most languages translate this card using the title of the Bizet opera, The Pearl Fishers.

• Chinese: 採珠人 (pron. cǎizhūrén)
• Czech: Lovec perel
• Dutch: Parelduiker
• Finnish: Helmenkalastaja
• French: Plongeur de perles
• German: Perlentaucher
• Italian: Pescatore di Perle
• Japanese: 真珠採り (pron. shinju-tori)
• Korean: 진주조개잡이 (pron. jinjujogaejab-i)
• Polish: Poławiacz pereł
• Russian: Ловец Жемчуга (pron. lovyets zhyemchuga)
• Spanish: Pescador de Perlas

Card Art

The art depicts playtester Wei-Hwa Huang. He won a tournament at the Gathering of Friends where being depicted was the prize.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, 'Art Trivia'

Secret History

Borrowed from a later expansion to replace Haven. Nothing changed during testing but the name.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Seaside Cards

Retrospective

Pearl Diver is not prized, but it looks reasonable to me, and as I have said many times, if I made all cards better by making them maximally complex, the game would have no players.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, What Donald X. Might Do With a Dominion Time Machine