Farmland

Farmland
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Victory
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Eric J Carter
Card text
2  When you gain this, trash a card from your hand and gain a non-Farmland card costing exactly more than it.

Farmland is a Victory card from Hinterlands. Farmland offers fewer   than a Duchy for a higher cost, but its on-gain effect is sometimes useful in the endgame.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you gain this, whether by buying it or otherwise gaining it, you trash a card from your hand, and if you did, you gain a card from the Supply costing exactly more than the trashed card, but not another copy of Farmland.
• If there are no cards left in your hand to trash, you do not trash or gain a card, and if you trashed a card but there are no cards in the Supply costing exactly more than the trashed card, you do not gain a card.
• Use 8 copies of Farmland for games with 2 players, 12 for games with 3 or more players.

Other rules clarifications

Farmland got errata in 2022 to no longer have an on-buy trigger in order to avoid loops.

Deprecated official FAQ (2016)

When you buy this, you trash a card from your hand if able, and if you did, you gain a card from the Supply costing exactly more than the trashed card if able. If there are no cards left in your hand to trash, you do not trash or gain a card, and if you trashed a card but there are no cards in the Supply costing exactly more than the trashed card, you do not gain a card. This ability only functions when you buy Farmland, not when you gain it some other way. Use 8 copies of Farmland for games with 2 players, 12 for games with 3 or more players.

Deprecated rules clarifications (2011 2016 2020)

Revealing Trader to gain a Silver instead of a Farmland when you buy one does not prevent the on-buy effect from happening.

Strategy

Farmland is typically a low-impact Victory card that is most relevant in Kingdoms that offer limited gains and no other alt-VP. In such Kingdoms, Farmland’s 2  are more likely to matter.

Because it costs and gives less   than Duchy, Farmland is very rarely used to score without using its on-gain ability, which is a restricted trash for benefit effect. This has three use cases:

• If the game is very nearly over and you don't need your valuable cards anymore and/or need to score maximally, you can trash a Gold, Silver, or other non-scoring card in hand. Assuming you have some other source of economy, buying a Farmland and trashing that card in hand will allow you to gain 2 Victory cards at once. If you have or more in hand including a Gold, you can trash the Gold and gain a Province and a Farmland, scoring a total of 8 , as opposed to just buying the Province and scoring 6 . This can be worth it If the extra 2  is impactful and you don’t need the long-term economy. Trashing a Silver to gain a Duchy, scoring a total of 5 , is also common when Duchy dancing.
• With a junk card in hand and the best card for your deck right now costing exactly more than that junk card, Farmland can be situationally useful if you happen to generate an excess of . For example, if you urgently need a Worker's Village but have to spend and an Estate in hand, you can effectively swap the latter for Farmland while gaining the former. This might be attractive if you’ll have a use later for a junk card, including future Farmland buys or other trash-for-benefit, but usually generating that much excess is a sign of building inefficiently, or there’s a more useful option available at the higher pricepoint.
• Farmland is effectively akin to Silver for the purpose of buying Province. You only need plus a Farmland in hand to afford Province because you can buy another Farmland and trash your original Farmland, to gain Province and replace the Farmland you trashed. This can be important in an endgame in which your main concern is Provincing reliably.

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.

• Brando Commando's 2012 article

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		2  When you buy this, trash a card from your hand. Gain a card costing exactly more than the trashed card.	Hinterlands	October 2011
		2  When you buy this, trash a card from your hand and gain a card costing exactly more than it.	Hinterlands (2016 printing)	December 2016
		2  When you gain this, trash a card from your hand and gain a non-Farmland card costing exactly more than it.	Hinterlands (Second Edition)	July 2022

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Úrodná země (lit. fertile ground)
Dutch	Landbouwgrond
Finnish	Viljelysmaat
French	Terre agricole
German	Fruchtbares Land (lit. fertile land)			2  Wenn du diese Karte kaufst, entsorge eine deiner Handkarten und nimm eine Karte, die genau mehr kostet als die entsorgte Karte.	(2019)
	Fruchtbares Land (lit. fertile land)			2  Wenn du diese Karte nimmst, entsorge eine deiner Handkarten und nimm eine Karte, die genau mehr kostet als die entsorgte Karte und die kein Fruchtbares Land ist.	2. Edition (2022)
Italian	Terra Coltivata (lit. cultivated land)
Japanese	農地 (pron. nōchi)			2  これを購入するとき、手札1枚を廃棄し、それよりコストが高いカード1枚を獲得する。
Polish	Pola uprawne			2  Kiedy dodajesz tę kartę, wyrzuć na Śmietnisko kartę z ręki i dodaj kartę inną niż Pola uprawne, kosztującą dokładnie o więcej od wyrzuconej karty.	(2024)
Russian	Угодья (pron. ugod'ya)
Spanish	Tierra de Labranza

Trivia

Official card art.

Theme

Land with a suggestion of improving land. This card dates back to before there were expansions; the game was called Castle Builder, and I called this card New Wing. Then for a while it was called Hinterland, which had no special meaning relative to the functionality. Then I used that name for the expansion and had to rename it. Sure there's Alchemy / Alchemist and Cornucopia / Horn of Plenty, but Hinterlands / Hinterland, that's madness.

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

Secret History

Another very old card, from before I split Seaside and Hinterlands. Originally it triggered on gaining it. This can cause some confusing chaining - buy Farmland, trash a card costing , gain a Farmland, trash another card costing , gain a Farmland. I might have left it as when-gain anyway, just to have everything be when-gain (possibly also limiting what you could gain to non-Farmland), but Noble Brigand had to be when-buy, so there wasn't a sufficient benefit to having this be when-gain. So the less confusing when-buy prevailed.

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

Why "exactly" 2 more?

In the early days, to keep down complexity, I set myself a limit: the card text had to fit in the text box, at a particular size of a particular font. None of the original cards (25-card main set, five 20-card expansions) broke this rule. You can see the original Farmland in the Outtakes article - it's New Wing, shown at the top of the Seaside section (http://dominionstrategy.com/2013/06/24/dominion-outtakes/). The   symbol eats up a bunch of space; it just barely fit with no "up to" (and back then I didn't say "exactly," though obv. that's better for clarity). So, it didn't say "up to" just to make the text fit given this arbitrary constraint I'd chosen. Then later there was never a point where I felt unhappy with it, so it never changed.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.

2E Rewording

Lots and lots of players conflate "when you gain" with "when you buy"; for example they expect to gain two Ports when using Workshop to gain one. People who know the rules well still get tripped up by this sometimes. Then there's, when-buy is timed differently from when-gain - it happens first. This again endlessly is not something people expect, and causes weird things to happen. For example you can buy the last card of a pile with Talisman in play, gain that card with Talisman, and then fail to gain a card due to the buy itself.

It should have been that I only had when-gain from the start. And this has been clear since before Hinterlands came out. I kept when-buy because a few cards needed it to not have some other fix, and I'd already put out Mint with when-buy. I immediately regretted it, then felt for years like, oh well, that damage is done, and made more when-buy cards. Finally I stopped making them and now I'm getting rid of them.

Some people immediately feel like getting rid of when-buy is removing some important nuance or complexity. It isn't! It isn't, you heard it here. The game has so much nuance; no particular instance of it is important. And I mean the last few expansions have no when-buy; I have been on this plan for years now.

Some needed to avoid loops...Farmland loops with Fortress if you don't fix that; initially it was going to be "When you gain this other than due to a Farmland," but gaining non-Farmlands is a simpler fix.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Why of the Errata

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