King's Court
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!Japanese | !Japanese | ||
− | | 宮廷 (pron. ''kyūtei'', lit. ''imperial court'') || || || | + | | 宮廷 (pron. ''kyūtei'', lit. ''imperial court'') || || || 手札のアクションカード1枚を3度使用してもよい。 |
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!Polish | !Polish |
Revision as of 21:55, 21 September 2017
King's Court | |
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Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Action |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | Prosperity |
Illustrator(s) | Dennis Lohausen |
Card text | |
You may play an Action card from your hand three times. |
King's Court is an Action card from Prosperity. When played, it gives you the opportunity to play another Action card from your hand three times, like a better Throne Room. A few King's Courts can supercharge any engine and, with +Buy, enable huge game-ending turns.
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
- This is similar to Throne Room, but plays the Action three times rather than twice.
- Playing an Action card from your hand is optional.
- If you do play one, you resolve it completely, then play it a second time, then play it a third time.
- You cannot play other cards in-between (unless told to by the card, such as with King's Court itself).
- Playing Action cards with King's Court is just like playing Action cards normally, except it does not use up Action plays for the turn.
- For example if you start a turn by playing King's Court on Village, you would draw a card, get +2 Actions, draw another card, get +2 Actions again, draw a 3rd card, and get +2 Actions again, leaving you with 6 Actions.
- If you King's Court a King's Court, you may play an Action card three times, then may play another Action card three times, then may play a 3rd Action card three times; you do not play one Action card nine times.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
King's Court is probably the card that gives the very most forceful push in the direction of engines, and may be the single most powerful card in the game, cost notwithstanding; its potential competition probably lies between Champion and Teacher.
Other superlatives King's Court is in the running for are the highest potential damage for relationships, the highest resign rate, the most complained about on the Forum (although it seems like we have eventually gotten over it), and the card that costs the most; sure, Bank and Forge cost , but do they do it the same way? Dubious.
The underlying theme here is that King's Court breaks Dominion, on a fundamental level. It is transcendent over its slightly grimier compatriots, Throne Room et al., in that it allows more plays of an action than cards that you have. This sort of thing allows a chain such as, with three Highways in play, KC-KC-Workshop to gain Workshop, Market, and KC, play Market to draw them again, and then play KC to repeat. This is tied in to the high resign rate—many games with gaining during the action phase can have one superhuge KC turn wherein some three-pile ending will eventually reveal itself, and well, why would you let your wretched opponent, who somehow hit twice in spite of barely getting economy, go through with it?
Indeed, that is the paradox of King's Court—well, I have to get to somehow, and usually I like to use Silver for that, but Silver is useless to me, sorta, after I get King's Courts. The advice here is, try really, really hard to use something other than Silver to get to . As in, buy Chancellor over Silver and don't look back. Silver is great to get the first King's Court, Chancellor is great for the second, third, fourth and fifth ones.
King's Court is at its most powerful with any payload card that you can benefit from playing a lot, especially ones that compound on themselves. King's Court comes to mind for that. But, well, you do need to play something with it, and perhaps the prime example is Bridge. King's Court and Bridge are made for each other—King's Court needs something to play a bunch, and Bridge gets increasingly better each sequential time you play one. But really, you don't need to think of King's Court as a combo card: its favorite card to play is King's Court, and it will always be there when King's Court is there. As long as there is an action card with at least one of money, draw, buys, or attacks, King's Court is worth considering. The real question, thus, is generally which thing you want King's Court to play a lot of. There are some boards where it is a pretty obvious choice, like, say, Bridge, but there are some boards that you just look at and you have no idea where to start. The advice for these boards is to have already gotten a lot of practice with the endgame engine scenario, and to just be good at evaluating which things like to be played a lot, more so than others.
The few types of boards where King's Court loses its appeal are usually those without any +Buys (King's Court will take a few seconds to hit, and if it can't get more than one Province a turn then one should just opt for early consistency), ones where there are no cards that give even +1 action, since it is necessary to draw two King's Courts in hand to get anything going, which is not impossible but definitely much less consistent, and ones where there is plenty of junk around and little way to get rid of it, since King's Court is an expensive Confusion when it doesn't have something else to play. That said, in this game from the championship match of Season 12 of the Dominion League, Stef beats Mic Q, turn 31, in a King's Court superduperturn, and that board had all those issues.
Here is a graph detailing the strength of King's Court as a function of how many of them you have.
The y-axis is on a log scale, I should have mentioned that. Having a lot of King's Courts is pretty good.
It should be noted that King's Court can only multiply on-play abilities, not abilities that trigger, for example, while a card is in play (such as Highway's cost-reduction), or when it leaves play (such as Herbalist's treasure-saving). This is why Bridge is the only cost-reducer that works well with King's Court.
Additionally, using a King's Court on a Duration card causes the King's Court to stay in play as long as its Duration target does, potentially depriving you of the ability to play it as often (although this cost is often worth paying, depending on the Duration card in question). This can be particularly relevant when setting up King's Court chains, since it matters which specific King's Court played which cards: King's Court-King's Court-Smithy-Smithy-King's Court-Merchant Ship-Merchant Ship-Merchant Ship gives you one more King's Court in your deck next turn than King's Court-King's Court-King's Court-Smithy-Smithy-Merchant Ship-Merchant Ship-Merchant Ship.
In spite of all I have typed, at some point it has likely become clear that the Court just doesn't have much all-encompassing advice. Although there is luck associated with buying it and lining it up with actions early on, in the King's Court, the better player will quite often emerge the victor. This is because King's Court games force many times more decisions, both strategical and tactical, and they do so in a very different framework than the average game; in order to win a King's Court game one must thoroughly understand what the transposed goals are and have a rigorous approach to the potential payload. Happy hunting!
Synergies/Combos
- Combo: King's Court and Bridge
- Wharf
- Any source of +Buy, to make use of huge King's Court turns
- Colony games, where even without +Buy an engine will beat Big Money
- Any engine
- Scheme
- Pirate Ship
- Torturer: Absolutely devastates an opponent's turn or clogs them with curses or both.
- Saboteur: example t17
- Unbounded desire for wealth and power
Antisynergies
- Mountebank's junk makes it difficult to connect King's Court with good actions. Of course, the first player to King's Court a Mountebank will probably be able to keep doing it more often than the guy on the other side...
- Games with no +Buy
- Rushes
- Cards whose primary abilities either are not on-play abilities or aren't terribly useful when repeated multiple times in a row (e.g., draw-to-X, most handsize attacks, etc.) tend to make poor King's Court targets.
Versions
English versions
Digital | Text | Release | Date | |
---|---|---|---|---|
You may choose an Action card in your hand. Play it three times. | Prosperity 1st Edition | October 2010 | ||
You may play an Action card from your hand three times. | Prosperity 2nd Edition | February 2017 |
Other language versions
Trivia
Secret History