Masterpiece

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Masterpiece
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Treasure
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Kelli Stakenas
Card text
When you buy this, you may overpay for it. For each you overpaid, gain a Silver.

Masterpiece is a Treasure card from Guilds. It is an overpay card that can net the player a lot of Silvers.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• When you buy this, you gain a Silver for each extra you pay over the cost. For example if you buy a Masterpiece for , you will gain three Silvers.

Strategy Article

original article by werothegreat

There's a lot to be said for Silver. For a while, Silver was used as a baseline for moderate-price cards, although the "Silver test" is regarded more with scorn than anything nowadays. Silver is reliable - it adds literal buying power to your deck. Over the expansions, we've seen cards that devalue and revalue Silver - from the highs of the base set where Big Money reigned supreme, to the lows of Prosperity where Silver just couldn't cut it anymore, and back up again with Hinterlands and Dark Ages, the latter of which gave us Feodum, finally giving Silver its place in the sun - no longer just the means to gaining  , but potentially the actual   itself. Trader, Bureaucrat, Talisman - all great Feodum enablers, but all of them pale in comparison to Masterpiece.

Well, what is it?

Masterpiece is quite simple - perhaps the only simpler kingdom Treasure is Cache. When you buy Masterpiece, the number of coins you overpay is turned into the same number of Silvers for you to gain. Once it's in your deck, it's just an expensive Copper. Unlike other overpay cards which are at least sometimes worth buying for their nominal cost, Masterpiece is an idiotic purchase to make at its stated price. for a Copper? You must be out of your mind. Well, how about ? Now you're getting a Silver with your Copper, but often you'd be happy buying Silver at anyway, so what do you need this extra junk for? - now we're getting somewhere. Two Silvers for less than the price of two, and all I need to do is take a Copper with it? Not a bad deal. At and beyond you are now really starting to get your money's worth. But how often do you want an enormous pile of Silvers? In Big Money strategies, buying Masterpiece for or more can sometimes be superior to Gold, but most engines will sputter and die with that many non-drawing cards in your deck.

So how do I use it?

For BM-Terminal draw, focus on getting big Masterpiece buys. After getting your Council Room or DoubleJack, purchase a Gold on your first , and then buy one big pile of Silvers. You want the benefit of the Silvers to overpower the single "Copper" you're buying as much as possible, so aim high! Then just reel in the Provinces. The initial Gold will immensely help in fielding enough to make your Masterpiece purchase worth it. Once your deck is filled with Silvers, you can start to green earlier, as it is less likely that Victory cards will cause your deck to falter.

Other than BM kingdoms (or just plain crappy ones), Masterpiece is best in kingdoms that want lots and lots of Silver - in other words, alt-VP kingdoms. Gardens and Tower (if you can empty the Silver pile) directly benefit, and Silk Road and Duke are much helped by the influx of coin. But Feodum is the superstar here. Paying for a Masterpiece immediately raises the point value of each of your Feoda by 1  . If you take every Masterpiece (at a good price), and take, say, 36 of the 40 Silvers, you're looking at 12 point Feoda. That's DOUBLE Province, and more than Colony. With all 8 Feoda, you're looking at a maximum of 96 points. Obviously, only an idiot (or a bot) would let you take the whole Feodum and Silver piles, but even with half of each, that's still 4 6-point Feoda for a total of 24 points. Not to mention that 20 Silvers in your deck will help buying other Victory cards. A note for this strategy - it's far more important to win the Silver split than the Feodum split - better to ratchet up the Feoda you have (while increasing your buying power) than to crack down hard on the pile. Masterpiece works similarly with Tower, with the added bonus that you're not contesting a Victory card pile, just the Silvers.

Outside of alt-VP strategies and Big Money, you probably won't want to buy more than one Masterpiece. Just picking up one for - will dramatically improve your deck. And the Masterpiece itself then makes an excellent target for trash for benefit cards, such as Salvager, Apprentice, Bishop, Mine, Counterfeit, Remodel... The Silvers gained with it can also make good targets for these cards. Or you can just pass the Masterpiece to your opponent with Ambassador or Masquerade - the only useful part of the card is its on-buy overpay, which your opponent will not be able to get here. These two cards are also great for trashing away the Estates and Coppers in your starting deck, and along with Chapel, they are great companions to Masterpiece - trash away everything except your pile of Silvers, and you'll be getting Provinces quite quickly. But bear in mind that dumping a bunch of Silver into your deck will make it less likely that a trash for benefit card will line up with your Masterpiece.

Because the Masterpiece itself is just a Copper, if you're going for a TfB or Big Money strategy, you'll want to either find some way to quickly get rid of the Masterpiece, or to never gain it all together. Trader it into one more Silver, or Watchtower it into the trash. Watchtower can then dump the whole pile of Silvers on top of your deck, possibly ensuring a Province buy.

But if you're going for an engine, you may want to ignore Masterpiece entirely, particularly on boards where you're ignoring Silver anyway, such as Colony/Platinum boards, where Silver can actually be just as bad as Copper. Why would you overpay for a Masterpiece when you can get one Platinum that won't clog your Goons engine?

My opponent just bought a huge pile of Silvers with Masterpiece! What do I do?

There are a couple options. You could try to outrace them with a sleek engine that isn't clogged with Silvers. You could wait them out with a   token or Gardens strategy. You could buy your own Masterpiece! But there are direct ways to combat the pile of Silvers. Discard Attacks are the obvious route, as 3-card hands aren't very good at buying Provinces in decks with mainly Silver. General discarding Attacks like Militia or Margrave fill this role, but Treasure specific Attacks are also useful - Cutpurse more so at the beginning, to prevent your opponent from getting the Masterpiece in the first place, whereas Taxman will be useful the whole game. Even Thief is useful against a Masterpiece deck, as you are now much more likely to hit a "good" Treasure than to whiff on Copper. And, as usual, Cursers and Looters will make it much harder for your opponent to line up enough Silvers. That said, Masterpiece is actually a great defense against junking, since the influx of Silver can help compensate for the junk.

Conclusion

So Masterpiece will work in some decks, but not in others. Regardless, there's an elegance to how the card works. There's even a certain elegance to the theme of this card - you get out of it exactly what you put into it, which is the case for actual works of art. The more you put into it, the more you reap.

Synergies:

• Feodum, Gardens
• Other Alt-VP (except perhaps Fairgrounds)
• Any BM strategy
• Trash-for-benefit cards
• Heavy trashing (Chapel, Ambassador, etc)
• Watchtower/Trader

Anti-synergies:

• Engines
• Colony/Platinum

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		. When you buy this, you may overpay for it. If you do, gain a Silver per you overpaid.	Guilds 1st Edition	June 2013
		. When you buy this, you may overpay for it. For each you overpaid, gain a Silver.	Guilds 2nd Edition	March 2018

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Meesterwerk
Finnish	Mestariteos
French	Chef-d'œuvre
German	Meisterstück			Wenn du diese Karte kaufst, darfst du überzahlen. Pro , das du überzahlst, nimm ein Silber.	(2019)
Japanese	名品 (pron. meihin)			。 これを購入するとき、追加でコストを支払ってもよい。追加で払ったコストにつき銀貨1枚を獲得する。
Korean	명작 (pron. myeongjag)
Russian	Шедевр (pron. shyedyevr)

Trivia

Official card art.

If you look closely at Candlestick Maker, you'll notice the man depicted is making the candelabra depicted in Masterpiece. The cards' art share the same artist.

Secret History

This was just the most basic possible overpay. Early on Ben bought one for or so and said "achievement unlocked." It turned out to be a fine play though.

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

Retrospective

Some games it's good to get a lot of Silvers. Feodum is what you first think of. Often there are better things to do. Something has to be at the bottom.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, $3 Cost Card Rankings Bottom Half