Merchant Camp

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Merchant Camp
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Allies
Illustrator(s)	Julien Delval
Card text
+2 Actions + When you discard this from play, you may put it onto your deck.

Merchant Camp is an Action card from Allies. It is a non-drawing village that can top-deck itself at the end of your turn—so you can keep drawing it every turn if you want to, getting a reliable source of extra Actions at the cost of slowing down your cycling.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• If you have multiple Merchant Camps in play, you can choose how many you want to put on top of your deck.

Other rules clarifications

• If you play this using a Way, or under the influence of Enchantress, you can still top-deck this when you discard it from play.

Strategy

Merchant camp is a card that almost has the effect of allowing you to change the rules of the game, which can sometimes be in your favor, other times not. It is strongest in the presence of strong terminal draw. If you continually put it back on top of your deck, it is like starting every turn with only four cards but two actions and an extra . It thus allows you to purchase a higher portion of terminal actions than would otherwise be optimal, both in engines or other strategies. The addition of + ensures that, early game, this card does not harm your buying power, but as the quality of your deck improves, the coin will tend to become weaker than average card quality. Placing merchant camp back on top of your deck continually significantly slows deck cycling, however, which can be a liability.

This card cannot combo with cards that interact with the top card of your deck, such as Wishing Well, because the wording specifies that it can only be top-decked when it is discarded "from play", which only happens during your cleanup phase, right before it will be immediately re-drawn.

Although Merchant Camp can tend to make engines slightly more reliable to start, the lack of card draw requires an adjustment of strategy, purchasing more card draw than one would with a vanilla Village, and it can also make an engine strategy less viable when the only card draw available is weaker. This is especially true if Merchant Camp is the only village available. When building an engine with it, it is usually better if you can buy only one Merchant Camp and then buy other villages that provide card draw, as there is little benefit to additional Merchant Villages, and the card draw sacrifice is significant.

In money strategies, Merchant Camp can be strong if there are strong terminal actions available, allowing the purchase of more terminal actions. As with in engines, the best actions are usually those with strong draw, as they offset the reduction in deck cycling.

Merchant camp somewhat blurs the distinction between engine and money strategies: early on, purchasing Merchant Camp with two Smithys is sufficient to draw most of your deck on most turns. With stronger draw such as Council Room or Wharf this can be even more true, and the presence of +Buy on these cards can even set up engine-like power turns where you buy two Provinces even in a deck with a single village.

A strange scenario that rarely arises but can be a winning strategy under certain circumstances, especially in a slog, is to top-deck multiple Merchant Camps: top-decking five will guarantee you can purchase a Duchy every turn without fail.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+2 Actions + When you discard this from play, you may put it onto your deck.	Allies	March 2022

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
French	Camp de Marchands			+2 Actions + Quand vous défaussez cette carte de votre zone de jeu, vous pouvez la placer sur votre pioche.
German	Händlerlager			+2 Aktionen + Wenn du diese Karte aus dem Spiel ablegst, darfst du sie auf deinen Nachziehstapel legen.

Trivia

Official card art.

Preview

Merchant Camp is a village you can have in your starting hand for the rest of the game. It doesn't draw a card, but you can't have everything.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Allies Preview 4: Recursion

Secret History

The first of the new batch of cards that survived into the set. It's an old premise, having tried out for ancient sets in other shapes. Here it is working fine. I strongly considered giving it a type and a color, to help you remember that it does something when you discard it from play. In the end, I felt like it was a great move, except that all those earlier cards (Treasury etc.) wouldn't have the new color for most people, even if future printings added it.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Dominion: Allies