Tragic Hero

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Tragic Hero
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Nocturne
Illustrator(s)	Brian Brinlee
Card text
+3 Cards +1 Buy If you have 8 or more cards in hand (after drawing), trash this and gain a Treasure.

Tragic Hero is an Action card from Nocturne. It's a potentially one-shot terminal draw with +Buy; if you have too many cards in hand after playing it, it dies (tragically), but leaves you with a Treasure of your choice.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• First draw three cards; then, if you have eight or more cards in hand, you trash Tragic Hero and gain a Treasure.
• If you cannot trash Tragic Hero (for example if you play it twice with Throne Room and trashed it the first time), you still gain the Treasure.

Strategy

The discussion topic for Tragic Hero can be found here.

At first glance, Tragic Hero looks like a fairly weak terminal draw card, almost completely inferior to Margrave. However, it is actually pretty strong, it just requires a bit of cleverness as it carries more nuance than you'd expect. (Furthermore, the existence of Tragic Hero has made people realize how crazy Margrave really is.)

The obvious upside of Tragic Hero is that it's a terminal draw card that gives +Buy. Both of these things are very important for engines. The downside is that the Tragic Hero will die if you happen to have more than 8 cards in hand after drawing, which is the same as 6 cards before playing the card. However, this is not as bad as it sounds. As it turns out, it is often possible to use Tragic Hero in the same way you would use Draw-to-X cards, such as Library or Watchtower. You want to get rid of all of your junk cards as quickly as possible, then fill it with cards that decrease your handsize for some benefit - discard for benefit, disappearing villages, disappearing money or sifters. That way you can play multiple Tragic Heroes, drawing your deck, without ever having to trash one.

Tragic Hero has an advantage over true Draw-to-X cards, since it does actually work if you happen to get over the handsize limit, you only lose the Tragic Hero for a Treasure card. In some cases this might be worth it while you're still building; if you gain a Gold and buy a new Tragic Hero, you have saved . In other cases, similar to Mining Village, you actually want to get rid of the Tragic Hero for a Gold as long as you can draw it, because the game is almost over. Sometimes there are even better Treasures on the board than Gold, such as Horn of Plenty or Platinum. Tragic Hero can provide you with some extra payload in these cases, but it requires solid deck knowledge - if you don't know exactly what you're doing, you will be blowing up your engine without good reason. In rare cases, you could even go for a Tragic Hero megaturn, like with Madman.

In Big Money, ironically, you might actually want to trash Tragic Hero for a treasure, but you'll be unable to. Nevertheless, the vanilla effects of Tragic Hero are very strong for BM as well, so if there are no villages on the board, Tragic Hero-BM is a serious consideration.

Synergies

• Necromancer can use Tragic Hero if it's in the trash
• Lurker, Rogue and Graverobber can get Tragic Hero back from the trash
• Overlord can now play Tragic Hero without being trashed.
• Horn of Plenty, Platinum, or Bank and some way to trigger Tragic Hero to trash
• Almost anything that works well with draw-to-X works with Tragic Hero if you don't want it to blow up

Antisynergies

• Hireling, Caravan and other delayed draw will kill Tragic Hero even sooner
• Cards that rely on large handsize or card variety: Menagerie, Hunting Party, City Quarter

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+3 Cards. +1 Buy. If you have 8 or more cards in hand (after drawing), trash this and gain a Treasure.	Nocturne	November 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Tragische held
French	Héros de tragédie
German	Tragischer Held			+ 3 Karten + 1 Kauf Wenn du (nach dem Ziehen) 8 oder mehr Handkarten hast, entsorge diese Karte und nimm eine Geldkarte.
Japanese	悲劇の勇者 (pron. higeki no yūsha)			+3 カードを引く。 +1 購入。 引き終えた後、手札が8枚以上の場合、これを廃棄して財宝カード1枚を獲得する。
Polish	Tragiczny bohater				(2022)
Russian	Трагический Герой (pron. tragichyeskiy gyeroy)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

For strumphf's 2022 advent calendar, Donald X. went in-depth on the development of Tragic Hero.

I tried several cards as ways to get another use for Ghost into the set (with Haunted Mirror being the one that stuck). One of them looked like this with no +Buy and Ghost instead of a Treasure. It was fun but you got too many Ghosts. You get a Ghost and it hits another Tragic Hero and that turns it into another Ghost. I played around with wordings that made that not happen but then Haunted Mirror took over. Late in the going I had a card I wasn't confident in, and I looked for what could replace it. I tried this, only gaining Gold, and it immediately worked out. Matt suggested that it could gain any Treasure and that worked out too.

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

Further comments from Donald X.

The way Tragic Hero interacts with Throne Room is not intentional, it is random. It is "whatever it turns out to be." Throne Room was not a consideration at all. Tragic Hero has the best wording to communicate the concept of Tragic Hero, absolutely failing to care what that means for Throne Room. It could have gone either way and it would have been fine by me.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Let's Discuss Nocturne Cards: Tragic Hero

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