Jack of All Trades
(→Synergies/Combos) |
(→Synergies/Combos) |
||
Line 27: | Line 27: | ||
=== Synergies/Combos === | === Synergies/Combos === | ||
* {{Card|Hamlet}}, {{Card|Market}}, {{Card|Fishing Village}}, {{Card|Festival}}, {{Card|Lighthouse}}, or {{Card|Treasury}}: non-terminals that either disappear from your hand or provide some other meaningful benefit AND do not increase your hand size. The key here really is the {{Cost|5}} cards, since you don’t really want Silver but you can’t afford Gold. Most of the {{Cost|5}} cards will hurt, but some won’t get in the way. | * {{Card|Hamlet}}, {{Card|Market}}, {{Card|Fishing Village}}, {{Card|Festival}}, {{Card|Lighthouse}}, or {{Card|Treasury}}: non-terminals that either disappear from your hand or provide some other meaningful benefit AND do not increase your hand size. The key here really is the {{Cost|5}} cards, since you don’t really want Silver but you can’t afford Gold. Most of the {{Cost|5}} cards will hurt, but some won’t get in the way. | ||
+ | * {{Card|Venture}}, as it can be bought for {{Cost|5}} and tends to be almost as good as {{Card|Gold}} in Jack decks. | ||
* Sifters | * Sifters | ||
* Another copy of Jack | * Another copy of Jack |
Revision as of 22:43, 5 January 2013
Jack of all Trades | |
---|---|
Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Action |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | [[]] |
Illustrator(s) | Kieron O'Gorman |
Card text | |
Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; discard it or put it back. Draw until you have 5 cards in your hand. You may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure. |
Jack of all Trades is a card which truly lives up to its name. It is a trasher, a gainer, and it is a source of terminal card draw. Jack is arguably most popular because of its strong Big Money baseline in Province games, but its flexibility allows it to play a part in many engine strategies as well. It is also a strong defense against many Attacks; Donald X. Vaccarino describes it as an "after-the-fact Moat".
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
This card does four separate things, in the order listed; you do all of them (the last one is optional). First, gain a Silver from the Supply, putting it into your discard pile. If there are no Silvers left in the Supply, you do not gain one. Second, look at the top card of your deck, and either discard it or put it back on top. If there are no cards left in your deck, shuffle your discard pile to get a card to look at (this will shuffle in the Silver you just gained). If there are still not cards, you do not look at one. Third, draw cards until you have at least five cards in hand. If you already have five or more cards in hand, you do not draw any cards. If there are not enough cards left to draw between your deck and discard pile, just draw what you can. Fourth, you may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure card. Cards with two types, one of which is Treasure, are Treasure.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
Original article by theory
Jack of all Trades shares characteristics with many cards. It has Library‘s ability to replenish your hand after you get hit with Militia — but, befitting its name, isn’t great at it. It spies, it trashes, it gains you Treasure, but does none of those as well as other cards.
And yet it doesn’t need to. As it turns out, the card Jack is most similar to is Envoy, because like Envoy, all you need is Jack (two to be precise), and you’ve got an engine that beats pretty much every bad strategy out there. But unlike Envoy/Big Money, DoubleJack/Big Money crushes attacks. Sea Hag? Trash the Curse. Discard attacks like Militia or Ghost Ship? Draw back up. Rabble? Chuck the Victory card. And all throughout it’s gaining Silver. Attacks barely matter at all to DoubleJack: in the simulators, it obliterates Sea Hag/Big Money and DoubleMilitia, solidly beats Chapel/Witch and Chapel/Mountebank, and goes toe-to-toe with DoubleMountebank and DoubleWitch.
DoubleJack threatens something that no other mindless Big Money bot threatened before: an engine viable enough to beat attacks. The cruelest part about this is that like Envoy/Big Money, you can’t add anything to DoubleJack. Maybe Hamlet, or Treasury, or a few other cards would help the engine, but just about everything else you can think of only gums up the engine. So it’s not even like you can use it as a launching pad onto other strategies; you’re playing suboptimally if you do. Zzz.
DoubleJack isn’t unbeatable. It fares poorly against mega-turn decks, and in multiplayer games, you aren’t going to get far with it with three Mountebanks pounding you in between each of your turns. But it raises the Big Money baseline in an unprecedented way: it’s not significantly faster than Smithy/Big Money, but it sure is a lot harder to stop.
The real lesson to be learned here is that being able to do multiple things at once in the early game is really, really helpful. Masquerade is the top card in the game because it improves your buying power AND thins your deck. Only the truly insane single-use cards (Chapel, Sea Hag) can compete with cards that accomplish multiple early game objectives. And Jack does it all: it trashes, it gives you a full turn, and it adds in a Silver for good measure. On a mediocre board, there’s not much that can stop two Jacks of All Trades.
Synergies/Combos
- Hamlet, Market, Fishing Village, Festival, Lighthouse, or Treasury: non-terminals that either disappear from your hand or provide some other meaningful benefit AND do not increase your hand size. The key here really is the cards, since you don’t really want Silver but you can’t afford Gold. Most of the cards will hurt, but some won’t get in the way.
- Venture, as it can be bought for and tends to be almost as good as Gold in Jack decks.
- Sifters
- Another copy of Jack
Antisynergies
- Multiplayer games
- Caravan, Laboratory, Hunting Party other handsize-increasers (oddly enough)
- Very strong, very fast combinations
- Mega-turn strategies such as Combo: Native Village and Bridge
- Colony games hurt, but do not completely cripple DoubleJack
Trivia
Secret History