Jack of All Trades

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 an Action card from Hinterlands. It truly lives up to its name, having a collection of seemingly unrelated small effects: it is a trasher, a Silver gainer, a deck inspector, and a source of limited terminal draw. These features allow it to be a strong defense against many Attacks; Donald X. Vaccarino describes it as an "after-the-fact Moat".

Jack is arguably most popular because of its surprisingly strong Big Money baseline in Province games: the discovery of the so-called DoubleJack strategy set a new standard for rapid simple Big Money decks, being able to get 4 provinces in about 14 turns. But its flexibility allows it to play a part in many engine strategies as well.

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 no 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.

Strategy Article

There have been multiple articles on Jack of all Trades.

• article by theory (Dec 2011)
• article by HiveMindEmulator (May 2012)
• article by AdamH (March 2014)

The article below is (an adaptation of) theory's article, because it is the most basic (the other articles assume you're familiar with "DoubleJack".)

Overview

Jack of all Trades shares characteristics with many cards, and has been described as an "after-the-fact Moat" for its ability to counter many types of attacks. 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 to counter top-deck attacks, it trashes to counter cursers, it gains you Treasure to counter trashing attacks, but does none of those as well as other cards.

DoubleJack

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 many cards to DoubleJack. Non-terminals that do not increase hand-size, like Hamlet, Treasury, or Oasis can provide a benefit, but terminals gum up the works, and anything that draws a card anti-synergizes with Jack's draw-up-to-5 feature (and thus prevents you from drawing the card that Jack leaves on top of your deck). So Jack is a strategy of its own, not a launching pad into other engines or strategies.

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.

Jack in engine games

The power of DoubleJack often leads people to believe that Jack can only be used in a Big Money context. While DoubleJack is an elite Big Money strategy, Jack can still be used as an opener to transition into an engine game. The first play or two of Jack can be looked at similar to Remodeling or Remakeing your Estates into Silvers, allowing you to spend all your turns buying Villages and Smithies and letting your buying power accumulate as your Estates go away. You still need buying power in an Engine! If your engine will include another trash-for-benefit card like Apprentice, Bishop, or Salvager, the Silvers will provide fuel.

Synergies/Combos

• Hamlet, Oasis, 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
• Feodum
• 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

Alternate versions

• 
  Digital version for Dominion Online

Trivia

Official card art.

In other languages

• Czech: Všeuměl
• Dutch: Manusje-van-alles
• Finnish: Monitaituri (lit. multi-talented)
• French: Touche-à-tout (lit. toucher of everything)
• German: Lebenskünstler (lit. life artist)
• Italian: Tuttofare (lit. handyman)
• Japanese: よろずや (pron. yorozuya, lit. handyman)
• Spanish: Chico para Todo (lit. errand boy)

Secret History

This started out in Cornucopia. The premise, which some of you may have been wondering about, was to make an after-the-fact Moat. Did they make you discard? Draw up to five. Are they giving you Curses? Trash one. Did they muck with the top of your deck? Let's just fix that. Are they trashing your cards? Well, here's a Silver. That's how they all fit together. The original version could trash any card, but that was too strong. Also it put your deck into your discard pile rather than letting you discard the top card; again, too strong. The order of abilities also changed.

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