Courtyard

Courtyard
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Intrigue
Illustrator(s)	Harald Lieske
Card text
+3 Cards Put a card from your hand on top of your deck.

Courtyard is an Action card from Intrigue. It is a soft terminal draw card; its draw equals Smithy's, but with a mandatory top-decking afterward. Though at first this looks weaker than Smithy, that's often not the case. Its ability to put a card back on top of the deck can be more powerful than keeping that card in hand, since it prevents collisions and lets you smooth out your money.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• You draw cards and add them to your hand before putting one back. The card you put on top of your deck can be any card in your new hand and doesn't have to be one of the 3 you just drew.

Strategy Article

Original article by theory

Appearances can be deceiving. Courtyard looks (and is priced as) a gimped Smithy, effectively only drawing 2 cards instead of 3. In reality, the top-decking effect makes Courtyard a far stronger card than Smithy, at least when you aren’t actually looking to draw your deck. It means any Actions that you draw dead can be placed back on top of your deck, and any incomplete combos (like Fool's Gold) can be placed back to be drawn another day. In a single-Action game, where you’ll only have a single terminal Action and several nonterminal Actions, Courtyard is far preferable to Smithy.

In many ways, Courtyard is like Haven. It smooths your turns and assists your combos so that you can draw and instead of and . Multiple Courtyards are much less useful than multiple Havens, but Courtyard makes up for its terminal-ness by drawing you to a 7 card hand first. In other words, Courtyard tends to lend itself to Big Money, while Haven lends itself to engines. This is borne out by simulator results, where Courtyard is one of the premier Big Money enablers (along with Wharf and Jack of all Trades).

Where Courtyard really excels is when you run a predominantly Big Money deck that has a few combo pieces in it. Tournament, Baron, Fool's Gold, etc. are all very strong additions to a Big Money-Courtyard deck.

Paradoxically, where Courtyard is least effective is when you actually try to use it as a Smithy. Here, you’ll just find yourself re-drawing that top-decked card over and over again, and you’re really just drawing 2 cards at a time. The point of Courtyard is not actually to draw +3 Cards; it’s the deck rearrangement and handsize increase that makes it such a strong card.

Big Money strategy

Original article by HiveMindEmulator, edited by theory

Courtyard BM is significantly stronger than Smithy BM, and in BM, the difference between and is basically nothing, since you don’t have the extra buys. So the question is how to take advantage of the ability to return a card to your deck. The most immediate benefit is that you don’t have to worry about 2 Courtyards colliding. One can just put the other back on top of the deck. This means you can, and should, buy your second Courtyard much sooner (i.e. after a single Silver), and can be much more willing to add a third (terminal) action to your deck. Having 2 Courtyards very early can be a huge advantage, since as with Smithies, when you play them, you very often find yourself able to buy Gold. Combining this with the power to put back excess money on hands where you draw to or , and you’ll find that you are able to get a huge amount of Golds early. Once you’ve racked up the Golds, it’s smooth sailing, using your Courtyards to rearrange your hands into mostly . As with Smithy, you should prefer to open Island, Jack of all Trades, or Masquerade ahead of Courtyard, delaying your first Courtyard to turn 3-4. And if you open Jack or Masquerade, you also want to delay your second Courtyard, since you already have that extra terminal.

Synergies/Combos

• Big Money
• Combo pieces, like Tournament, Baron, Fool's Gold
• Single-Action games

Antisynergies

• Engines
• Situations where you’re actually looking for +3 Cards

Trivia

Official card art.

In other languages

• Chinese: 庭院 (pron. tíngyuàn)
• Czech: Hradní nádvoří
• Dutch: Binnenplaats
• Finnish: Sisäpiha
• French: Cour
• German: Burghof
• Hungarian: Palotaudvar (lit. palace yard)
• Italian: Cortile di Campagna (lit. country courtyard)
• Japanese: 中庭 (pron. nakaniwa)
• Korean: 안마당 (pron. anmadang)
• Norwegian: Slottshage (lit. castle gardens)
• Polish: Dziedziniec
• Russian: Внутренний двор (pron. vnutryenniy dvor)
• Spanish: Patio

Secret History

Almost all of the Dominion cards, from the main set and all of the hypothetical expansions, were designed by me. Which is just the way I like it. This one was not though. In the early days of Dominion, one of my friends printed/cut/sleeved his own copy, and along the way he added like a dozen cards. I played with them and liked a few that I hadn't thought of yet, and well this is one of them. I had previously tried "+1 Action, +2 Cards, put two cards from your hand on top of your deck," but nixed that for causing too much AP. This card does cause a little AP, but is much better.

That friend by the way is Kelly Bailey, and he posts on these boards as cheepicus. Hi cheepicus.

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