Farmers' Market

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Farmers' Market
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Gathering
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Empires
Illustrator(s)	Ryan Laukat
Card text
+1 Buy If there are 4  or more on the Farmers' Market pile, take them and trash this. Otherwise, add 1  to the pile and then + per 1  on the pile.

Farmers' Market is an Action-Gathering card from Empires. It is a +Buy card that Gathers   tokens and gives + for the first four out of five times played, whether by you or another player; it then trashes itself on the fifth play, and collects the Gathered  . It is thus a one-shot if played when there are 4  on its Supply pile.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• The first time this is played, it produces + (and +1 Buy), the next time +, then +, then +, then the next time the player takes the 4  (and gets no +), then the next time it is back to +.
• This still functions if the Farmers' Market pile is empty.

Other Rules Clarifications

• If you gain this from Black Market, or when it's set aside with Way of the Mouse, there is no Farmers' Market pile. This means no   tokens will accumulate, and you won't get any ; the card does nothing but +1 Buy.
• If you play this with an Command variant, the Farmers' Market will fail to trash itself, but you still take 4 .

Strategy

Preview Analysis

Original article by AdamH

You may or may not already know this from other previews, so let's talk about the Gathering type. Some cards can put   tokens on their supply piles, and then somehow you get those tokens. That's what Gathering cards do. Also, the wording about "4   or more": as of right now I don't know of a way to get more than 4   on the pile, but who knows, maybe it could come up in the future...

Let's do the "easy" comparison first: you play Farmers' Market five times, you get a total of , 5 buys, and 4  tokens. This comes out to an average of a card that looks like this:

Average Farmers' Market: Action
+1 Buy
+
+0.8  tokens

Once you play this five times, trash it.

This looks like a pretty favorable comparison to Monument until you get to that last part, especially considering this guy only costs . Still, seems like a pretty solid card without even considering that it becomes very important when it's the only +Buy on the board -- it's like a Woodcutter/Monument mix, priced pretty competitively, but you have to re-buy it if you play it too much. I don't think the spiky distribution of money counts against it all that much. Let's put this in perspective, though, comparing favorably to Woodcutter and Monument is something many Dominion cards do quite easily, so that doesn't mean FM is a top-tier card in terms of power level (it isn't) -- the fact that it's pretty slow is something important to keep in mind.

And I should say that almost all of the time, you're going to want those points, getting the points is way, way better than getting money and the exceptions to this are rare.

Strategy:

Any time a card provides another way to score points, you have to figure out how many points you can score using that card, and how much time/work it will take to score those points (oh man you've already seen quite a lot of that in the previews and it's one of my favorite things about this set). We know that you can get up to 40  tokens with Farmers' Market, which is enough to offset a 6-2 Province deficit. That's a lot of points, and even better, they're   tokens which are way better than green cards. The potential of this card is huge. It even becomes infinite with Rogue or Graverobber on the board.

But you're not guaranteed to get all of those points: any of your opponents could hit the   jackpot after you've put all that hard work into getting those tokens on the pile. There's a dance to be danced to make sure you're getting more   tokens than your opponent. Let's say that together you run the pile and get all 40  available, if you get 6 of those jackpots, that's an 8  swing you have, it's more than a Province, that's a big deal. If you don't run the pile you can look at it like every time you manufacture a way to get those   for yourself, you got 4  on your opponent, and every time you snipe one from your opponent, it's an 8  swing. Of course this is the most optimistic way to look at it in terms of points, but considering the potential of the card when uncontested or contested poorly is very important.

So what is this dance and how do you do it? Let's talk about the one-card kingdom of Farmers' Market: Certainly you get them, and it's just like any other non-drawing terminal, you want to play it a lot of turns but not have them collide. There's not much you can do here other than just get more of them to try playing FM more than your opponent, but there's a lot of luck involved here.

What about the case where there are no villages and you can somewhat reliably play Farmers' Market once per turn? The hilarious thing is that the right thing to do is to have the card in your deck, but don't play it if you think your opponent can get the   on the following turn. So you can end up with this card in your deck that you have just for the threat of playing it. Good times, huh? In any case, it's certainly an opportunity to outwit your opponent. I should also say that in games with more than 2 players, something similar to this strategy ends up being good a lot of the time, where you don't play your Farmers' Markets unless you can get the VP that turn and/or it's far enough away that your control becomes too little to matter.

In some cases the buy is just more important than all of this hullabaloo, so you play it anyways, but I'd say this happens more in the late game and I wouldn't make a habit out of doing this.

Then there are the games when you can play multiple Farmers' Markets in a turn. You've got this terminal payload card that adds a new phase to the game where you're building up longer than normal because you get these   tokens in the process. The trick to dancing here is all about pile control, but this time you're controlling the number of   tokens on the pile and not necessarily the number of cards in the pile. You'll have to keep track of how many FMs your opponent can play on a turn and try to build your deck so you can play more than them -- doing this gives you the trick of leaving the   on the pile at juuuust the right amount where your opponent can't collect   on their turn, but they also can't stop you from collecting on your next turn. Shutting them out like this is a big deal.

In this case, when you're looking for the best synergies, you find cards that work well with all kinds of terminal payload cards, so King's Court, Royal Carriage, and Throne Room are the stars of the show, though they don't actually increase the total number of   you can get from Farmers' Markets in one game, sadly.

The neat thing, though, is that it actually plays nice with other terminal payload cards, since the Farmers' Markets will eventually go away and in the process they give you money and buys, which can be used to buy the terminal payload cards you can replace them with. For this reason, it is often good to get Farmers' Markets in the early-to-mid game as you're still building your deck, before going on to whatever other payload there is. Maybe you just want to replace it with terminal draw because you're greening. Maybe the other terminal payload is so strong that the points from FM are just too slow to compete so you skip it. Or maybe the other terminal payload helps you build up faster early and can win you the village split (being faster than a Woodcutter isn't terribly difficult to do).

So that's Farmers' Market. It gives you   and it gives you a buy, which make it very important on a lot of boards, despite its slower tempo.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Buy If there are 4  or more on the Farmers' Market Supply pile, take them and trash this. Otherwise, add 1  to the pile and then + per 1  on the pile.	Empires	June 2016
		+1 Buy If there are 4  or more on the Farmers' Market pile, take them and trash this. Otherwise, add 1  to the pile and then + per 1  on the pile.	Empires (2021 printing)

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Boerenmarkt			+1 Aanschaf Als er 4 of meer   op de Boerenmarktvoorraadstapel liggen, neem ze allemaal en vernietig deze Boerenmarkt. Zo niet, voeg dan 1  aan de stapel toe en daarna + per 1  op de stapel.	(2016)
Finnish	Maalaismarkkinat (lit. country fair)
French	Marché agricole
German	Bauernmarkt			+1 Kauf Falls 4 -Marker oder mehr auf dem Bauern­markt-Vorrats­stapel liegen, nimm die Marker und entsorge diese Karte. Ansonsten lege 1 -Marker auf den Stapel. + pro -Marker auf dem Stapel.	(2016)
	Bauernmarkt			+1 Kauf Wenn 4  oder mehr auf dem Bauern­markt-Vorrats­stapel liegen, nimm die Marker und entsorge diese Karte. Ansonsten lege 1  auf den Stapel und dann: + pro 1  auf dem Stapel.	2. Edition (2021)
	Bauernmarkt			+1 Kauf Wenn 4  oder mehr auf dem Bauern­markt-Stapel liegen, nimm die Marker und entsorge diese Karte. Ansonsten lege 1  auf den Stapel und dann: + pro 1  auf dem Stapel.
Japanese	農家の市場 (pron. nōka no ichiba)			+1 購入 農家の市場の山の上に4 以上ある場合、 をすべて得てこれを廃棄する。 それ以外の場合、農家の市場の山の上に1 追加し、その後、 山の上の1 につき+。
Polish	Targ rolny			+1 zakup Jeżeli na stosie Targu rolnego leżą 4  lub więcej, weź je i wyrzuć tę kartę na śmietnisko. W przeciwnym wypadku dołóż 1  na stos Targu rolnego, a następnie + za każdy 1  na tym stosie.	(2017)
Russian	Фермерский Рынок (pron. fyermyerskiy rynok)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

At first you got the   and trashed it at the same time you got the +. That was too big of a pay-off, so I separated out the  . Before Farmers' Market I briefly tried an Explorer variant that increased in ala Farmers' Market.

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

Relevant outtakes

In the same vein as Farmers' Market, I tried a Warehouse. You draw N cards then discard N, N being the number of tokens on the pile. And could optionally trash it to take the  . Farmers' Market made the concept work.

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

Donald X.'s opinion

It's the only +Buy, and you're like, ugh, okay. And then have to get another because maybe the first one will vanish on you. It's good though, I mean it creates this mini-game you may not want to play, where you want to be the one getting the big payoffs and how do you manage that exactly, but those big payoffs are worth getting. If someone else gets it, well, at least put some fear into them with your own copy.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, $3 Cost Card Rankings Bottom Half

Apostrophe

It's a living language. My research at the time indicated that it was more common to put the apostrophe where I did. People do it both ways though. I should say, all three ways, the third being no apostrophe. Same with Farmers' Market, where I saw the apostrophe more in that position, though you see it plenty as Farmer's Market. If I were doing it all again I would be more likely to change Farmers' Market than Worker's Village.

I can repeat, I did research. What you are calling non-standard, my research showed as more common.

Highly-codified is for the birds. Language prescriptivism is evil and stupid. What people do is correct.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, 2021