Peasant

Peasant
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Traveller
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Adventures
Illustrator(s)	Harald Lieske
Card text
+1 Buy + When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Soldier.

Peasant is an Action-Traveller card from Adventures. A simple +Buy card on play, it is the first in a line of five cards, some of which are extremely strong. It can be exchanged for a Soldier when discarded from play.

Peasant is the first step in its line of Travellers: Peasant - Soldier - Fugitive - Disciple - Teacher.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• See the section on Travellers.
• When you play Peasant, you get +1 Buy and +.
• When you discard it from play, you may return it to its pile and take a Soldier, putting it into your discard pile.

Strategy

The Peasant line of Travellers provides numerous strong effects which can enable powerful engines, and is thus often centralizing. It's almost always a priority to advance one or more Peasants to the very strong cards higher up the line: Disciple can be used to amplify your best cards and build your deck rapidly, while Teacher can provide crucial missing engine components, especially draw, if the Kingdom options are otherwise missing or weak.

Given the importance of advancing up the line, Peasant is typically a key purchase in the opening, after which it's generally a priority to draw and play your Travellers and manage your shuffles accordingly. Fast cycling of your deck using sifters such as Warehouse can be a strong option for this, while good deck control via thinning and draw can similarly speed up advancement. It is worth noting, however, that terminal draw, can be somewhat difficult to use, as drawing a Traveller dead can slow your advancement by an entire reshuffle. For similar reasons, it’s more important than usual to use deck tracking and pay attention to the timing of your reshuffles, because triggering one with a Traveller in play will cause it to miss that shuffle. Finally, deck ordering effects such as Star Chart can be highly beneficial in making sure that you can find your Travellers quickly.

Although advancing your Travellers up the Peasant line is a high priority, it's typically important to also give consideration to the other cards with which you build your deck in the process, since they will interact heavily with the later Travellers. In particular, both Disciple and Teacher need targets in order to be effective: Disciple ideally needs to collide with cards you want to play and gain in bulk, while the value of tokens from Teacher is greater the more copies you have of the target.

When exchanging your Travellers, it’s a good idea to pay attention to the net change to your deck. For example, exchanging for Soldier means you lose a source of +Buy, while exchanging for Fugitive can mean you have less payload and more terminal space. Most importantly, exchanging for Teacher causes you to lose out on the explosive power of Disciple, with no compensation until you can call your Teacher a minimum of two turns later. Because this change is usually small and advancing your Travellers is such an important goal, you usually won’t skip an exchange because the short-term impact is negative. One way that you can mitigate this, however, is by having multiple Travellers at different stages. If, for example, you have a Fugitive and a Disciple, exchanging both will set you up to use Teacher without losing access to Disciple.

Peasant

Peasant itself is a weak terminal payload card that generally has a low impact on play. However, it plays a crucial role in offering access to the rest of the cards in the line. Therefore, not only is Peasant typically a strong choice in the opening, gaining additional copies can also be a good move throughout the game: after providing an immediate injection of +Buy, they can be advanced to produce extra Soldiers or Disciples. Occasionally, if there's no better source of +Buy, it's also beneficial to keep a few Peasants for this purpose.

Because both Peasant and Soldier are terminal and you will often want to have multiple Travellers in progress at once, your early terminal space will often be in high demand, and opening with another non-Peasant terminal is very likely to cause an early terminal collision. The most common effect of this is to make a non-terminal thinner (e.g. Forager) more attractive than a terminal one that is usually stronger (e.g. Steward).

Sometimes there will be ways to play the Peasant you opened with more quickly than usual. For example, you can use topdecking effects such as Travelling Fair or Trappers' Lodge, or trigger shorter shuffles containing the Peasant via effects such as Night Watchman or Doctor’s overpay.

Soldier

Soldier is a discard attack and terminal payload card whose value scales up rapidly with the number of other Attacks you can play. In most cases, its primary relevance is as a step towards Disciple or Teacher, with the providing a useful but relatively minor boost to your turn in the process. The attack is not particularly strong in the early game, as your opponent is likely to be able to discard a low-value card (often an Estate); and even if they can’t, this means their starting hand is probably strong enough to weather the loss of a single card.

In certain Kingdoms, however, Soldier's interaction with other Attacks (including other copies of itself) means that it can function as payload that is worth building your deck around. Doing so requires the ability to play a large number of Attacks, which can be difficult, especially if they use up your terminal space. Thus, the most likely types of card to make this approach viable are:

1. Non-terminal Attacks, such as Urchin and Scrying Pool;
2. Attacks that also function as terminal draw (e.g. Rabble), enabling you to make dual use of the terminal space.

Under these circumstances, each Soldier you play can generate a very large amount of , with every additional copy also generating more than the last. When Soldier payload is viable, it’s usually best to advance your first few Travellers as usual to build up your deck, then add several extra copies of Peasant in the midgame with the goal of keeping them at the Soldier stage.

Fugitive

Fugitive offers a somewhat useful sifting effect. While this effect is non-terminal, maintains your hand size, and provides potentially useful cycling, Fugitive is usually the least impactful card in the Peasant line. Although Fugitive can help both with advancing Travellers more quickly and with aligning Disciple with good targets, it is rarely worthwhile to keep a copy for extended periods: usually you will advance them as quickly as possible, and sometimes you may prefer to keep Soldiers rather than advancing them to this stage.

Disciple

Disciple is an exceptionally strong card, acting as both a Throne Room variant and an Action card gainer. Its power lies in the fact that not only are these each very strong effects in their own right, but targeting the same card with both of them also functions as a major boost to your deck’s capabilities. For example, if you’re struggling to draw your deck, using Disciple on a draw card will substantially improve your chance of doing so both this turn and on future turns. Getting access to Disciple (preferably to multiple copies) is often the primary reason to buy and advance Peasants.

Disciple’s Action card gaining is a critical aspect of the Peasant line in a number of ways. It can greatly improve your deck's long-term performance by adding more strong engine pieces or payload; as its gaining is unrestricted by price, these may be expensive Action cards, including those costing (like Scrying Pool) or (like City Quarter). Importantly, it is among the game’s strongest sources of gain-and-play, allowing the output of your deck to increase rapidly when you use it to gain strong payload cards and often creating significant pile pressure. This feature often means that by the time you have a couple of Disciples, the game is likely to be close to ending. Therefore, as well as considering the strongest Disciple targets for your own turn, it’s important to pay close attention to your opponent’s potential gains to ensure that your own Disciple gaining doesn’t leave them with an opportunity to pile out.

Like other Throne Room effects, Disciple is flexible in its ability to provide terminal space, draw, and payload, provided that you can collide it with a suitable target. If you have sufficiently strong deck control, this is usually easy to achieve and highly impactful, but sometimes you may have to evaluate double-playing a suboptimal card to continue your turn against gaining a copy of your strongest card. For example, if the only Actions in your starting hand are a Caravan and a Disciple, you may want to Disciple the Caravan, even though doing so may cause you to lose out on playing that Disciple next turn (due to Throning a Duration).

If the end of the game isn’t imminent and you anticipate that advancing a Disciple to Teacher will pay off (or if you have a Teacher already), it may be valuable to target your Disciple gains specifically to add extra copies of Action cards that you plan to enhance with bonus tokens.

Teacher

Because the bonus tokens it provides are very powerful, Teacher has extremely strong potential to enable building an engine or to significantly enhance an already-functioning deck. In particular, the +Card token can be critical in a Kingdom that otherwise offers no draw, while the +Action token can be used to create powerful non-terminal draw or greatly increase the number of terminal cards that you can play. Despite this potential, there are two primary issues with Teacher:

1. It is slow to improve your deck, since it can be played at most every other turn and provides no benefit until your next turn. These downsides are heavily exacerbated by the fact that you have to sacrifice a high-tempo Disciple in order to obtain a Teacher.
2. It is terminal, and replaces a village in Disciple. For this reason, adding a Teacher to your deck can significantly reduce your terminal space in the short term.

If there is no other way to draw, placing Teacher tokens to enable draw is likely to be a high priority. Otherwise, whether and when to exchange a Disciple for a Teacher and how to use the tokens can sometimes be a more situational decision that depends on how close the game is to ending, the extent to which you can benefit from the tokens, and whether your deck has the draw and terminal space to play Teacher quickly even after losing a Disciple.

It’s often the case that your first goal with Teacher is to create efficient non-terminal draw. This means either adding the +Action token to a terminal draw card such as Smithy or adding the +Card token to a cantrip or non-terminal draw card. The second method is often preferable, because cantrips are often cheap and easier to use in the earlier stages of the game before you can use the tokens.

If you have no problems drawing your deck or get to use your Teacher a second time, you often want to use it to provide better payload. In decks with strong terminal payload such as Bridge, this often means adding the +Action token to enable playing more payload. In other contexts, this can mean adding the +Buy token or + token. In general, you should aim to place these tokens on the cards you have the most copies of, as this maximizes the improvement to your deck. Occasionally, however, it will be stronger to place your tokens on a less prevalent card if doing so will improve your reliability. For example, placing the +Action token on a cantrip you have many copies of may maximize the number of terminals you can play if you draw your deck, but placing the +Action token directly on a payload card will ensure that you are able to play them whenever you draw them, even if you fail to draw and play every copy of the cantrip.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Buy + When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Soldier.	Adventures	April 2015
		+1 Buy + When you discard this from play, you may exchange it for a Soldier.	Adventures (2017 printing)	August 2017

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Boer			+1 Aanschaf + Als je deze kaart vanuit het spel aflegt, mag je deze tegen een Landknecht ruilen.	(2015)
Finnish	Maalainen
French	Paysan
German	Kleinbauer			+1 Kauf + Ist diese Karte im Spiel, darfst du sie gegen einen Soldaten eintauschen anstatt sie abzulegen.	(2015)
	Kleinbauer			+1 Kauf + Wenn du diese Karte aus dem Spiel ablegst, darfst du sie in einen Soldaten eintauschen.	(Nachdruck 2021)
Japanese	農民 (pron. nōmin, lit. farmer)			+1 購入 + これを場から捨て札にするとき、これを兵士と交換してもよい。
Polish	Chłop				Although Polish version is not released, this card is referred to in the Polish version of Empires rulebook
Russian	Крестьянин (pron. kryest'yanin)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Peasant complements Page with + +1 Buy. It was + at first (no buy) but that was cwazy.

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

Theme

The Peasant is some kind of Woodcutter or something; the Soldier works better with others fighting on his side; the Fugitive is on the run; the Disciple learns from example; the Teacher teaches cards to be better. And then there's the whole thing together, the guy going through life.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.

Donald X.'s opinion

Donald X. has stated that, in the latter stages of playtesting, he avoids playing with powerful cards in previous expansions (such as Donate), because they make it harder for him to learn about new cards.

For me Peasant is good times, that I don't get to have that often because I'm always playtesting and it looms over the game too large.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, 2019