Oracle

Oracle
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Jessi J
Card text
Each player (including you) reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, and discards them or puts them back, your choice (they choose the order). Then, +2 Cards.

Oracle is an Action-Attack from first edition of Hinterlands. It combines terminal draw, sifting, and a mild attack.

It was removed from the second edition of Hinterlands and replaced with Witch's Hut which also offers draw, sifting, and an attack.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• First, each player, including you, reveals the top two cards of their deck, and either discards both of them or puts both of them back on top, your choice.
• A player putting the cards back puts them back in any order they choose, and without needing to reveal that order.
• Then, you draw two cards.
• So if you put back the cards you revealed, you will draw them.

Other Rules clarifications

• Although in most cases, the order you put your 2 cards back won't matter, it does matter when you aren't drawing 2 cards (either because of your -1 Card token, or Way of the Chameleon).
• Despite what the FAQ says, when players return their 2 cards on top of their deck, that order is public knowledge.

Strategy

Before it was removed, Oracle was a weak terminal draw card with a sifting effect and a low-impact deck inspection attack. Because it only draws two cards and needs village support, Oracle is very inefficient as a primary source of draw, comparable to Moat. Although its sifting effect can increase the reliability of your deck and allows you to cycle through it more quickly, these bonuses are usually not enough to overcome the fact that Oracle is half as efficient as cards such as Smithy in converting terminal space into hand size: Oracle increases your hand size by only one, while Smithy increases it by two. As such, Oracle is skippable more often than not, though its bonuses combined with its low price can make a copy or two occasionally worth using as a supplement to other sources of draw if you have an excess of terminal space. If terminal space is especially abundant, as may be the case with Champion or Lost Arts, Oracle can be viable as your primary source of draw.

Because of its sifting ability, Oracle can sometimes be a reasonable choice in the opening if your other opening purchase is a card that it can't draw dead, such as Silver or Exorcist. With such an opening, you have a high chance of cycling through your entire deck over the course of turns 3 and 4 and the increased hand size lets you hit price points more easily. However, Oracle is poorly suited to finding key Action cards (such as Travellers or Attacks), as it's likely to either draw them dead or discard them from the shuffle. Therefore, its sifting ability is less relevant outside these specific circumstances and generally functions as more of a small bonus to the draw effect.

There are a few minor considerations to deciding whether or not to discard with Oracle.

• Generally, your two goals are to continue drawing through your deck and to make sure important cards do not miss the shuffle. These goals can conflict, as the former means that you’ll want to discard stop cards and junk in order to find your draw cards, while the latter means you may not want to discard important payload cards if you will not be able to draw back around to them.
• In order to know which cards you might draw instead, it’s a good idea to be deck tracking. Doing so will allow you to judge whether the revealed cards are better or worse than what you might draw otherwise.
• If the cards you would discard and the cards you would draw otherwise are roughly equal, discarding the first two cards gives you some cycling, which is usually a net positive. For example, if your remaining drawpile consists solely of four Coppers, it’s a good idea to discard before drawing.
• These points are inverted when you are deciding whether your opponent should discard. You’ll generally want to topdeck their junk, make their strongest cards miss the shuffle, and avoid giving them free cycling.

Because Oracle can both reveal and discard cards, it synergizes with the on-reveal effect of Patron as well as on-discard Reactions like Village Green and Tunnel. It is worth noting that these can be activated by both your own and your opponent's Oracles, and this may mitigate or invert any harm that Oracle’s attack would have caused.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.

• WanderingWinder's 2012 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Each player (including you) reveals the top 2 cards of his deck, and you choose one: either he discards them or he puts them back on top in an order he chooses. +2 Cards	Hinterlands	October 2011
		Each player (including you) reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, and discards them or puts them back, your choice. They choose the order to return them. Afterwards, you draw 2 cards.	Hinterlands (2016 printing)	December 2016
		Each player (including you) reveals the top 2 cards of their deck, and discards them or puts them back, your choice (they choose the order). Then, +2 Cards.	Hinterlands (2020 printing)	October 2020

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Věštírna
Dutch	Orakel
Finnish	Oraakkeli
French	Oracle			Chaque joueur (vous compris) dévoile les deux premières cartes de sa pioche et les défausse ou les replace (votre choix). S'il doit les replacer, il choisit l'ordre. Ensuite, piochez 2 cartes.
	Oracle			Chaque joueur (vous compris) dévoile les deux premières cartes de sa pioche et, selon votre choix, les défausse ou les replace dans l'ordre de son choix. Ensuite, +2 Cartes.
German	Orakel			Jeder Spieler (auch du selbst) muss die obersten 2 Karten von seinem Nachziehstapel aufdecken. Du entscheidest, ob er beide Karten ablegen oder (in der von ihm bestimmten Reihenfolge) zurück auf seinen Nachziehstapel legen muss. +2 Karten	(2011)
	Orakel			Jeder Spieler (auch du) deckt die obersten 2 Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf und legt sie nach deiner Wahl ab oder in einer Reihenfolge seiner Wahl zurück. Danach ziehst du 2 Karten.	(2019)
	Orakel			Jeder Spieler (du eingeschlossen) deckt die obersten beiden Karten seines Nachziehstapels auf und legt sie ab oder zurück, nach deiner Wahl. Jeder Spieler legt die Karten in der Reihenfolge seiner Wahl zurück. Du erhältst +2 Karten.
Italian	Oracolo
Japanese	神託 (pron. shintaku)			他のプレイヤーは全員、山札の上から2枚を公開し、あなたの選択により、それらを捨て札にするか自分の好きな順番で山札に戻す。その後、あなたは+2 カードを引く。
Polish	Wyrocznia				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Оракул (pron. orakul)
Spanish	Oráculo

Trivia

Official card art.

Theme

The original Spy was Spy, but often this kind of effect corresponds to seeing the future.

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

Secret History

Originally there was a card that had you look at your top two, trash them or discard them or leave them, then draw two. It was too strong, so I axed the trashing and made it a Spy-like attack. At first that had you always pick one for them to discard, putting the other back, but I found it less oppressive when they had to leave both or discard both. I tried a few when-gain triggers on this card - there was one that trashed a card from your hand when you gained it, one that Navigator'd once, and one that Chancellor'd. The Chancellor thing was cute, but made the card too attractive just for the when-gain - meaning, people bought it for that, then happened to be attacking you. The attack was just too annoying to have people buying it when they didn't really mean it.

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

Oracle also had a when-gain trashing ability once. It was a tough ability to balance; trashing cards is so good that you would tend to buy the card for its when-gain and then randomly have whatever it was in your deck. Anyway none of these cards worked out.

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

Wording

Without your -1 Card token or Way of the Chameleon, it doesn't matter how you put your own 2 cards back. When Donald X. was asked why Oracle still lets you order them, he said:

It's just something that had to happen. We have to either let you pick the order, or specify the order. If we specify the order then you need to keep track of the order. And the order doesn't matter. So you get to pick. If it didn't affect all players, it would just have you either put the cards into your hand, or discard them and draw 2, like Catacombs does. But since it hits everyone this was the simplest wording.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Oracle Drawing Order

In 2016, Oracle got changed to "draw 2 cards," and then it got changed back to +2 Cards in 2020.

Cards that draw cards should all say +1 Card, to avoid confusion with Way of the Chameleon. Some cards reveal cards and then put them into your hand, which feels like drawing but can't be +1 Card. But just a few cards e.g. Oracle got changed when the wordings got fixed up everywhere, just to have a more natural wording. Oops, Way of the Chameleon. Most printed copies of those cards have the +Cards wording, and the intention is to go back to it. I don't want to look through all the cards now to be more definitive; maybe there's an important exception. But.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, 2020

Retrospective

Donald X. has stopped playtesting with Oracle.

I hate Oracle. Just, way to ruin a playtest. Are you trying to find out how good Sheep is, oh I make you discard it this shuffle, oh again on the next shuffle, you are learning nothing about Sheep this game. It's slow too. And some games it's your weak draw, and you buy them up, and then we endlessly sit through them resolving and flipping over Sheep. Man.

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

Second Edition removal

Oracle isn't weak or strong really, but it's crazy slow. It's the bane of playtesting; they endlessly flip over the card you actually wanted to playtest. I haven't played with it in years, except for one game to make sure I really wanted to get rid of it. I did.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Hinterlands 2E Preview 1

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