Wandering Minstrel

Wandering Minstrel
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Dark Ages
Illustrator(s)	Guillaume Ducos
Card text
+1 Card +2 Actions Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Put the Action cards back in any order and discard the rest.

Wandering Minstrel is an Action card from Dark Ages. It's one of the few villages that doesn't have anything like "Village" in the name. It has a filtering ability which helps your engine continue to draw Actions.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• First draw a card, then reveal the top 3 cards of your deck, shuffling your discard pile if there are not enough cards in your deck.
• If there still are not enough after shuffling, just reveal what you can.
• Put the revealed Action cards on top of your deck in any order, and discard the other cards.
• If you didn't reveal any Action cards, no cards will be put on top.

Strategy

Wandering Minstrel is one of the strongest villages due to its sifting and deck inspection abilities, which allow you to cycle rapidly through a large amount of junk to find your Action cards more easily, or rearrange your topdecked Action cards in a favorable order when you don't have much junk to sift past.

In a deck where Wandering Minstrel's only role is to provide +Actions, it should generally be added in a similar manner to other villages, i.e. once you have some terminals in your deck that risk collision and need the extra terminal space. However, because Wandering Minstrel’s sifting is so strong, it may sometimes be useful to gain it earlier than you would other villages because it significantly accelerates cycling through your starting cards. This faster cycling is useful in conjunction with Action cards that you want to play early and often, for example Travellers (e.g. Peasant)) and Attacks (e.g. Witch). Similarly, adding more copies of Wandering Minstrel than strictly necessary for terminal space may help with deck control. Even if you have enough draw to draw your entire deck, discarding stop cards (including Victory cards once you start greening) and ordering the Action cards you will draw next increases reliability and offers more flexibility in play order. The reordering effect may also synergize with some effects that depend on the top cards of your deck such as Chariot Race or Herald.

There are a few tactical concepts to keep in mind when using Wandering Minstrel.

1. You’ll almost always want to play Wandering Minstrel before your other draw cards, to increase the chance of drawing good cards.
2. When playing with multiple Wandering Minstrels, it’s also usually a good idea to play other draw cards in between them, to fully utilize the three card search space. For example, if your first Wandering Minstrel draws a cantrip and reveals two desirable Action cards, it’s likely best to play the cantrip to draw the first Action card, then another Wandering Minstrel to draw the second and reveal the next three cards.
3. Discarding a large number of stop cards, especially weak or dead ones, creates a risk of causing an unfavorable reshuffle with those cards, especially since playing another Wandering Minstrel will trigger one if you have fewer than four cards in your deck. Thus, carefully tracking your deck and discard pile is even more important than usual.

Wandering Minstrel may be slightly less appealing if the most important cards in your deck are not Action cards. For example, the only payload available might be Treasures such as Platinum or Potion, or Cobbler might be your only gainer. It is worth noting that even if Wandering Minstrel discards those key cards, it may still be helpful in ensuring you draw your entire deck, effectively sifting your payload to the end of your shuffle. Discarding these cards with Wandering Minstrel is therefore most inconvenient if you are not drawing your entire deck, either because it’s early in the game or because the draw that would allow you to do so is unavailable, and so it can work poorly with non-Action thinners such as Bat or Counterfeit that you want to play as often as possible in the early game to get deck control. For the same reason, Wandering Minstrel is less helpful than usual if there are Action cards in your deck that you would prefer to sift past: notably, it cannot discard Ruins and can therefore be less effective against Looters than against other junking Attacks.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Card +2 Actions Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Put the Actions back on top in any order and discard the rest.	Dark Ages 1st Edition	August 2012
		+1 Card +2 Actions Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Put the Action cards back in any order and discard the rest.	Dark Ages 2nd Edition	September 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Bard (lit. bard)			+1 karta +2 akce Ukáž vrchní 3 karty svého dobíracího balíčku. Karty akcí vrať zpět v libovolném pořadi a ostatní karty odlož.
Dutch	Reizende Minstreel
Finnish	Trubaduuri (lit. troubadour)
French	Ménestrel errant
German	Barde (lit. bard)			+1 Karte +2 Aktionen Decke die obersten 3 Karten deines Nachziehstapels auf. Lege die Aktionskarten darunter in beliebiger Reihenfolge zurück und den Rest ab.	(2019)
Japanese	吟遊詩人 (pron. gin'yūshijin, lit. troubadour)			+1 カードを引く +2 アクション 山札の上から3枚を公開する。その中のアクションカードを好きな順番で山札の上に戻し、残りを捨て札にする。
Korean	방랑 시인 (pron. banglang siin, lit. vagabond poet)
Polish	Wędrowny bard				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Странствующий Бард (pron. stranstvuyushshiy bard, literally wandering bard)
Spanish	Juglar (lit. minstrel)

Trivia

Official card art.

Theme

Well he's like the pied piper. He gets all the kids to follow him, and then those kids do things for you. It's true that the flavor for "+2 actions" that most such cards use is, there are people doing things for you. Often a whole village of people, but sometimes just some Nobles. Squire and Wandering Minstrel don't fit that. Squire at one point was in part a village that only played attacks, and Wandering Minstrel at one point was a card that made +, and they kept their flavor when those parts changed.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dark Ages is the most thematic expansion?

Secret History

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

In Cornucopia I tried out a card that was +, name a type, dig for it, leave the first match on top. It would have been "strictly better" than Chancellor at (since you could name a type that wasn't in your deck), and I didn't want to charge for it or give it an awful condition specifically to make it worse than Chancellor (a card not famous for being strong). So I dropped it. I turned it into a village in Guilds, then moved it to Dark Ages, where I made it always dig for actions, with no choice. That card was a bit too strong and also slowed down games more than an ideal amount. So now it just looks at the top 3 cards and leaves the actions on top.

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