Wine Merchant

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Wine Merchant
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Reserve
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Adventures
Illustrator(s)	Eric J Carter
Card text
+1 Buy + Put this on your Tavern mat. At the end of your Buy phase, if you have at least unspent, you may discard this from your Tavern mat.

Wine Merchant is an Action-Reserve card from Adventures. It is a +Buy card that gives quite a bit of ; as a penalty for this, it sits on your Tavern mat after playing it until you end a turn with unspent.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you play this, you get +1 Buy and +, and put it on your Tavern mat.
• It stays on your mat until the end of one of your Buy phases in which you have or more that you didn't spend. At that point you can discard Wine Merchant from your mat.
• If you have multiple Wine Merchants on your mat, you don't need per Wine Merchant, just total.

Other rules clarifications

• Unlike other Reserve cards, you don't recover Wine Merchant from your Tavern mat by calling it; it goes straight to your discard pile, not your play area.
• Unplayed Treasures in your hand are not unspent ; you only get for the Treasures you play.
• After discarding Wine Merchants you can use the unspent for other effects, e.g. for Pageant.
• If you return from your Buy phase to your Action phase (e.g., with Villa or Cavalry), and you have , you may discard Wine Merchants from your Tavern mat.
• You still get the +1 Buy and + even if you are unable to move Wine Merchant to your tavern mat, such as when played by a Throne Room or command variant.

Strategy

There is no strategy article for Wine Merchant, but the card has been discussed on the forum.

Wine Merchant is a terminal payload card, that gives a lot of virtual money and +Buy, but does so at a penalty: it stays on the Tavern Mat after you play it, and you need leftover to get it back in your deck. This means that a single Wine Merchant is just a Woodcutter if you discard it from the Tavern Mat the same turn you play it. Since Woodcutter is only a card, and a weak one at that, you will need a way to make Wine Merchant more than just that if you decide to buy it. (An exception may be if you're very desperate for +Buy, like with Woodcutter itself and other weak cards such as Herbalist.)

There are two ways around Wine Merchant's drawback. The most obvious one is to use it for spiking a higher cost; this is very useful if there are strong or more cards you want in this kingdom. You can play the Wine Merchant, buy that Prince or Grand Market you really want, and use a later dud turn to get back the Wine Merchant from the Tavern Mat. This is possible, but it does give your Wine Merchants a higher chance of missing shuffles, so you might want to keep track of when a shuffle is about to happen.

The second and usually better way to use Wine Merchant is to use it in multiples. Wine Merchant's wording is such that you only need leftover to discard ANY number of them from your Tavern Mat. So, assuming you want to discard them all on the same turn you play them, one Wine Merchant only gives you , but two of them gives you , three of them , and so on. This is most feasible in big engines: if you can draw your deck with multiple actions leftover, you can use those actions to play a bunch of Wine Merchants, and go double or even triple Province.

Synergies

• Big engines with lots of villages
• Expensive and/or hard-to-get cards: Prince, Grand Market, King's Court
• Basilica, as you get 2  for having left after your Buy phase if you buy a card
• Pageant, as you can get the coffer and discard Wine Merchant with only 2 remaining
• Inheritance (requires cost reduction) lets Estates get the + and +buy without going to the reserve mat
• Overlord gets the + and +buy without going to the reserve mat

Antisynergies

• Stronger terminal payload: Goons, Bridge Troll, Merchant Guild

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date	Notes
		+1 Buy + Put this on your Tavern mat. At the end of your Buy phase, if you have at least unspent, you may discard this from your Tavern mat.	Adventures 1st Edition	April 2015
		+ +1 Buy Put this on your Tavern mat. At the end of your Buy phase, if you have at least unspent, you may discard this from your Tavern mat.	Adventures 2nd Edition	August 2017	Print version mistakenly ordered "+" before "+1 Buy".

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Wijnhandelaar			+1 Aanschaf + Leg deze kaart op je Herbergtableau. Heb je aan het einde van je aanschaffase ten minste niet besteed, dan mag je deze kaart vanaf je herbergtableau afleggen.	(2015)
Finnish	Viinikauppias				Misprint: card type is printed as Treasure, not Action.
French	Marchand de vin
German	Weinhändler			+1 Kauf + Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Wenn du am Ende deiner Kaufphase mindestens nicht ausgegeben hast, darfst du diese Karte von deinem Tableau ablegen.	(2015)
German	Weinhändler			+ +1 Kauf Lege diese Karte auf dein Wirtshaustableau. Am Ende deiner Kaufphase, wenn du mindestens nicht ausgegeben hast, darfst du diese Karte von deinem Wirtshaustableau ablegen.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Japanese	ワイン商 (pron. wain-shō)			+1 購入 + これをあなたの酒場マットの上に置く。 あなたの購入フェイズの終了時、以上未使用である場合、これを酒場マットから捨て札にしてもよい。
Polish	Sprzedawca wina				Although Polish version is not released, this card is referred to in the Polish version of Empires rulebook
Russian	Винный Торговец (pron. vinny torgovyets)

Trivia

Official card art.

In the second edition reprint, the card's "+1 Buy" was mistakenly placed beneath its "+".

Secret History

Originally it didn't give +1 Buy. I tried letting you get it back for having any unspent money, but upped it to needing .

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

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