Horn of Plenty

Horn of Plenty
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Treasure
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Cornucopia & Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Alayna Danner
Card text
Gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play (counting this). If it's a Victory card, trash this.

Horn of Plenty is a Treasure from Cornucopia & Guilds. Instead of producing +, Horn of Plenty is a gainer. It allows you to gain a card with a cost of up to for each different card you have in play, thus rewarding you for playing a variety of cards.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• This is a Treasure worth ; you play it in your Buy phase, but do not get any for playing it.
• However, when you play it, you gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play. For example, if you have 5 differently named cards in play, you gain a card costing up to .
• This counts itself, other played Treasures, played Actions, and any Duration cards (such as Caravan from Dominion: Seaside) played on your previous turn.
• It only counts cards currently in play, not ones that were in play but left; for example if you played a Pillage (from Dominion: Dark Ages) this turn, you will have trashed it, so it will not count for Horn of Plenty.
• If the card you gain is a Victory card, trash Horn of Plenty.
• You do not have to play Horn of Plenty, and you choose the order that you play Treasures.
• You do not trash Horn of Plenty if you gain a Victory card some other way while it's in play (such as by buying one).

Strategy

Horn of Plenty is a powerful and often centralising form of payload, as it enables building towards a Province-emptying megaturn in many Kingdoms. In games where this is not possible, Horn is significantly less important but can still play a role as a useful gainer.

The ideal Horn of Plenty megaturn is one in which you can draw and play at least eight unique cards and enough Horns to gain all eight Provinces. In practice, winning with a megaturn of this type usually doesn’t require you to play eight Horns: you’re likely to be able to buy at least one Province in addition to those you can gain with Horns, and you may only need to gain five or six in total to seal the win. Regardless, the Kingdom needs to offer two main ingredients to make this type of strategy viable:

1. eight unique cards that you can get into play; and
2. sufficient deck control to reliably draw and play the large number of stop cards involved (particularly the Horns of Plenty themselves).

If necessary, at least four of your unique cards can be Treasures (the three basic Treasures, plus Horn), so at a bare minimum the first criterion can be met with only four unique Action cards. Therefore, in practice, the limiting factor in determining whether the megaturn is possible is more likely to be the strength of the deck control than the availability of unique cards. Thinning and draw are particularly important, and some village support may be required as well. However, it is also occasionally difficult or impossible to set up this type of megaturn even with plenty of draw, e.g. if the Kingdom cards are mostly terminals, with a lack of cantrips or non-terminal draw. One-shot cards that don’t remain in play, such as Acting Troupe, can also make it more difficult to get enough uniques; however, one-shot forms of draw (e.g. Stampede or Sinister Plot) can be very useful facilitators of a Horn megaturn despite not contributing to your count of unique cards.

Building towards a Horn megaturn usually involves establishing deck control and then starting to gain Horns that you can use to gain more Horns, alongside any further draw and unique cards that you need. It can be important to win the Horn split, although usually not at the expense of being able to draw and play the Horns that you have. In terms of timing, once you have the capacity to take a few Provinces by trashing your Horns, it's often important to consider whether your opponent is also capable of doing so next turn, especially in a mirror. Particularly if this is the case, it can sometimes be advisable to cash in your Horns earlier than you might execute certain other forms of megaturn. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Unlike most forms of megaturn, executing one revolving around Horn doesn’t substantially hurt your ability to draw next turn, unless that relies specifically on Treasures (e.g. with Stables), since you remove a stop card in Horn for every Victory card that you gain in this manner.
2. The one-shot nature of Horn of Plenty when you use it to gain Victory cards makes catching up via a source of   other than Province less viable than usual: Horns are likely to make up most of your payload, and trashing them for e.g. Duchies will severely damage your ability to gain Provinces.

Thus, even if you can’t empty the Provinces, there is a good chance you’ll still be able to draw well enough to finish the job next turn, and taking most of them can put your opponent in a difficult position in which they're forced to use their payload sub-optimally. Given that Horn is a strong gainer, it’s also not unusual to instead end the game via a three-pile ending (usually involving Horn, non-terminal draw, and some other pile) before reaching the point at which you can empty the Provinces.

Good support for Horn includes effects that allow you to play it more, gain copies more quickly, or use it for gain-and-play. For example, Crown allows you to play a single Horn multiple times, which can relieve pressure on the Horn split. Treasure gainers such as Mint are also useful, as they can free up your Horn plays to gain cards other than Horns; Treasurer is notable as a response to an opponent who greens early, since it can retrieve Horns from the trash. Ways to play Treasures during your Action phase, e.g. Storyteller, are the most common way to enable gain-and-play with Horns. Finally, Specialist is a powerful synergy, as it plays all three of these roles: using it to play Horn potentially allows you to gain-and-play two cards, and the option to use Specialist's gaining ability means that one of these can be an additional Horn even if you don't have five unique cards in play.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		When you play this, gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play, counting this. If it's a Victory card, trash this.	Cornucopia	June 2011
		When you play this, gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play (counting this). If it's a Victory card, trash this.	Guilds & Cornucopia (2017 printing)	March 2018
		Gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play (counting this). If it's a Victory card, trash this.	2022 Wording change Cornucopia & Guilds (Second Edition)	June 29, 2022 March 2024

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Roh hojnosti
Dutch	Hoorn des overvloeds
Finnish	Runsaudensarvi
French	Corne d'abondance			Quand vous jouez cette carte, recevez une carte coûtant jusqu'à par carte en jeu de nom différent (y compris cette carte). Si la carte reçue est une carte Victoire, écartez cette carte.
German	Füllhorn			Nimm dir eine Karte, die bis zu pro Karte mit unter­schied­lichem Namen im Spiel kostet (diese einge­schlossen). Wenn du dir eine Punktekarte nimmst: Entsorge das Füllhorn.	(2011)
	Füllhorn			Wenn du diese Karte ausspielst, nimm eine Karte, die maximal pro Karte mit unter­schied­lichem Namen, die du im Spiel hast, kostet (inklusive dieser Karte). Wenn sie eine Punktekarte ist, entsorge diese Karte (das Füllhorn).	(2019)
	Füllhorn			Nimm eine Karte, die bis zu pro Karte mit unter­schied­lichem Namen, die du im Spiel hast, kostet (inklusive dieser Karte). Wenn sie eine Punktekarte ist, entsorge diese Karte (das Füllhorn).
Italian	Cornucopia
Japanese	豊穣の角笛 (pron. hōjō no tsunobue, lit. horn of good harvest)			コストが、(これも含のた)場のカード1種類につき以下の、カード1枚を獲得する。それが勝利点カードの場合、これを廃棄する。
Polish	Róg Obfitości			Kiedy w fazie kupna zagrasz tę kartę, dodaj kartę o maksymalnym koszcie za każdą twoją kartę w grze o innym tytule, wliczając też Róg Obfitości. Jeśli dodasz kartę Zwycięstwa wyrzuć tę kartę na śmietnisko.	(2011) BARD translation error: "When you play this in your buy phase…"
Russian	Рог Изобилия (pron. rog izobiliya)
Spanish	Cornucopia

Trivia

Official card art.

Horn of Plenty was the first Treasure card that never produces any amount of spendable money.

Secret History

Long ago, Intrigue had a card that read, "+ per Action card you've played this turn." It cost . This was popular with a certain kind of player. But many games it was useless - you needed a bunch of pieces to put together this puzzle - and then some games it was unbeatable. You would get staggering amounts of out of it, with +buys from something to make them count. Some people defended it, but I killed it. I could always try to fix it up later; there was no reason to give Intrigue a broken/useless card. Intrigue got Conspirator instead, which has a hint of the original premise.

I tried a new version in a later set: "+2 Actions +1 Buy. While this is in play, when you play another Action card, +." For . The idea was to provide some of what you needed with the original card, so that it was playable in more games, while weakening it in the games where it was good. You've got extra actions and a +buy up front... but it doesn't count Actions already played, only ones played after it. You can't draw your whole deck and finally draw it and play it and yeeha. Anyway this too was broken. I tried several things, including a version that only counted differently named cards. Eventually I gave up on it.

The solution in the end was to make it a Workshop variant. You don't get to combine the money with your other money. It doesn't use up your buy though. To be good enough and not fluctuate too much, it had to count your treasures too. At first it was an action with an effect delayed until the end of your buy phase, but I turned it into a treasure worth . Some people just liked that there was a treasure worth , I don't know what to tell you. So it doesn't use an action, and works with treasures naturally. This version was still sometimes too strong, so it got the "trash it if gained VP" clause.

I had called the treasure version Produce, which was a cute pun which would be lost in foreign versions. Cornucopia seemed like a good name for it, so I took that name off of a Prosperity card (Royal Seal). Then Jay preferred that name for the expansion, which I'd been calling Harvest Festival, so I had to rename this again. I called it Horn of Plenty, which is not only a synonym for Cornucopia, it's a literal translation of it. Once again creating trouble for translators.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Cornucopia Cards, June 2011

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