Advisor

Advisor
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Alayna Danner
Card text
+1 Action Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. The player to your left chooses one of them. Discard that card and put the rest into your hand.

Advisor is an Action card from Guilds. It is a non-terminal draw card that gives an opponent the choice of which cards you draw.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• If you do not have the full three cards (after shuffling), just reveal what you can.
• No matter how many you revealed, the player to your left chooses one for you to discard, and the remaining cards go into your hand.

Strategy

Advisor is a non-terminal draw card whose strength depends on your deck composition. Since your opponent picks the card you must discard rather than put into your hand, you generally have to assume that Advisor will draw the worst available cards, while your best cards will miss the shuffle. Advisor is therefore best with a large ratio of good to bad cards in your deck. This ratio is largely dependent on the presence of thinning options (which lower the number of bad cards) and junking attacks (which raise the number of bad cards). While these restrictions can make Advisor less appealing in Kingdoms with other sources of draw such as Laboratory, its lower opportunity cost can allow it to serve in a supplementary role. Its cost also makes it a good target for Workshop variants, which can allow you to scale up your draw fairly quickly.

Because of its reliance on your deck’s composition, Advisor’s effectiveness varies over the course of the game. In the opening and early game, it is liable to cause your key cards (i.e. your early buys) to miss the shuffle, setting you back significantly. In the midgame, once you’ve thinned most of your starting cards and have added good cards, Advisor becomes much more effective, and gaining several copies of it can be a good idea. In the endgame once you’ve started greening, Advisor becomes more liable to draw junk in the form of Victory cards, meaning Advisor-heavy decks may lose even more deck control than usual in this stage of the game.

When deciding what to discard when your opponent plays Advisor there are a few points to consider:

1. In many cases, discarding draw cards is the best move because this gives you a chance of preventing your opponent from drawing their entire deck. Non-Advisor draw cards are especially good targets because another Advisor at least gives you some control over what is drawn.
2. When you assume that your opponent will be unable to draw their entire deck, it can be preferable to target other especially useful cards, such as an Attack, a Traveller, or their best payload card.
3. Generally, you will have two sources of information with which to make your decision. The first comes from carefully tracking your opponent’s deck, which lets you know what their best cards are. For example, if you know that they still need to thin to work towards deck control, denying their thinner is probably best. Alternatively, if you know your opponent is drawing with Shepherd, you may want to deny Estate rather than Copper. The second comes from your opponent’s previous Advisor plays, which give you information about the contents of your opponent’s hand. This will sometimes let you identify and deny a card that your opponent needs to fruitfully continue their turn. For example, if you know they need a village to play a terminal draw card, you should probably deny the village. As a corollary, this means it is usually best to play your Advisors early in your turn to limit your opponent’s information.

There are a few minor ways to remedy some of Advisor’s weaknesses:

• Advisor works well with ways to “convert” its hand size increases into useful cards. Cantrips, particularly in large amounts, are the most common way to do this, as your opponent does not know what they will draw (making denial of key cards more difficult). Sifters such as Warehouse are another way to replace the bad cards Advisor draws with better ones, though this is somewhat susceptible to your opponent discarding your sifters.
• It’s generally a good idea to have a way to draw cards besides Advisor, for two reasons. First, this gives you more chances to draw your key cards without giving your opponents a chance to discard them. Deck tracking can allow you to figure out the optimal play order. If, for example, the last card in your shuffle is a key card, drawing it with a cantrip is a better idea than revealing it via Advisor. Second, it is impossible to fully draw your deck with only Advisor, and so cantrips or other draw cards are necessary for overdraw.
• In some cases you can retrieve good cards from your discard pile, for example with Mountain Village.
• Advisor’s endgame struggles can be circumvented by either scoring without adding many Victory cards to your deck (perhaps by using   tokens or Exile effects), or by scoring all at once while ending the game (e.g. via a megaturn).

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.

• ednever's 2013 article
• werothegreat's 2013 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+1 Action Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. The player to your left chooses one of them. Discard that card. Put the other cards into your hand.	Guilds	June 2013
		+1 Action Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. The player to your left chooses one of them. Discard that card and put the rest into your hand.	Guilds & Cornucopia (2017 printing)	March 2018
		+1 Action Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. The player to your left chooses one of them. Discard that card and put the rest into your hand.	Cornucopia & Guilds (Second Edition)	March 2024

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Adviseur
Finnish	Neuvonantaja
French	Conseiller
German	Berater			+1 Aktion Decke die obersten 3 Karten deines Nachziehstapels auf. Dein linker Mitspieler wählt eine davon, die du ablegst. Nimm den Rest auf deine Hand.	(2019)
Japanese	助言者 (pron. jogensha)			+1 アクション 山札の上から3枚を公開する。左隣のプレイヤーはその中の1枚を選択する。あなたはそれを捨て札にし、残りを手札に加える。
Korean	고문 (pron. gomun)
Polish	Doradca				Although Polish version is not released, this name is referred to in Polish Dominion 2E rulebook.
Russian	Советник (pron. sovyetnik)

Trivia

Official card art.

This card is the source of the Bad Advisor meme.

Secret History

Envoy was an Intrigue outtake. If it hadn't been used as a promo, I would have eventually fixed it up. One day I decided, what's stopping me? The key thing was to give it +1 Action, so that you didn't just say, lol here are some actions you can't play. I originally made Advisor for Dark Ages, but moved it here because it seemed to fit with the emphasis on decisions this set has.

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

Donald X.'s opinion

I like Advisor except for how slow it can be to resolve a bunch of them. It's fine that if you're drawing your deck the choice matters less; there are still plenty of times when the choice matters.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.