Jack of All Trades

Jack of All Trades
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Kieron O'Gorman
Card text
Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; you may discard it. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a non-Treasure card from your hand.

Jack of All Trades is an Action card from Hinterlands. It has a collection of seemingly unrelated small effects: It is a trasher, a Silver gainer, a deck inspector, and a source of limited terminal draw.

Donald X. Vaccarino has described Jack as an "after-the-fact Moat", as its various abilities allow it to mitigate many types of Attack.

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.
• Second, look at the top card of your deck, and either discard it or put it back on top.
• If this causes you to shuffle, the Silver will be shuffled in.
• 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.
• Fourth, you may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure card.

Strategy

Jack of All Trades is a multifaceted card with many uses. Probably the most common is getting Jack in the opening to both jumpstart your economy and trash your starting Estates. Whether Jack remains useful in the mid- or late-game depends on the Kingdom. In money strategies, you may play Jack throughout the game and even get more than one, flooding your deck with Silver to more reliably afford Gold and Province. In many engines, however, you will need to be careful to avoid stuffing your deck with too many stop cards, and may either skip Jack entirely or avoid playing it in the midgame until you achieve deck control (at which point Jack becomes an easy way to increase your payload).

Jack also functions as a defense against Attacks, countering junking attacks, handsize attacks, and top-deck attacks with various degrees of effectiveness. The Silvers also defend against many trashing attacks (which may trash Silver instead of a better card). For this reason, money strategies featuring Jack are very robust against many opposing decks, provided the Attacks can't be stacked too effectively.

Jack can occasionally be used to enable a draw-to-X engine in the absence of other draw. The challenge with this strategy is that you need to be able to reliably reduce your hand size below 5 so that Jack will draw, but you’re constantly adding Silver to your deck, which may be hard to get out of your hand. Typically, this means you need a trash-for-benefit card such as Upgrade so that you can constantly turn your Silvers into cantrips or villages while also reducing your hand size.

Jack is skippable in many engines that a) have a better way of trashing Estates, and b) have no use for the Silver (i.e. trash-for-benefit or +Buy). Jack’s trashing is not thinning as you always gain a Silver, replacing whatever card you trash, so engines with Jack will need to use other cards to improve their deck control.

External strategy articles

Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.

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

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; discard it or put it back. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure.	Hinterlands 1st Edition	October 2011
		Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; you may discard it. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a non-Treasure card from your hand.	Hinterlands 2nd Edition	December 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Všeuměl
Dutch	Manusje-van-alles
Finnish	Monitaituri (lit. multi-talented)
French	Touche-à-tout (lit. toucher of everything)			Recevez un Argent. Consultez la carte du haut de votre pioche; vous pouvez la défausser. Piochez jusqu'à avoir 5 cartes en main. Vous pouvez écarter une carte non-Trésor de votre main.
German	Lebenskünstler (lit. life artist)			Nimm dir ein Silber. Sieh dir die oberste Karte von deinem Nachziehstapel and und entscheide, ob du die Karte ablegst oder zurück auf deinen Nachziehstapel legst. Ziehe so lange Karten nach, bis du 5 Karten auf der Hand hast. Du darfst eine Karte aus deiner Hand entsorgen, die keine Geldkarte ist.	(2011)
German	Lebenskünstler (lit. life artist)			Nimm ein Silber. Sieh die oberste Karte deines Nachziehstapels an; jene darfst du ablegen. Zieh bis du 5 Handkarten hast. Du darfst eine Nicht-Geldkarte aus deiner Hand entsorgen.	(2019)
Italian	Tuttofare (lit. handyman)
Japanese	よろずや (pron. yorozuya, lit. handyman)			銀貨1枚を獲得する。 山札の一番上のカードを見る。 それを捨て札にしてもよい。 手札が5枚になるようにカードを引く。 手札から財宝カード以外のカード1枚を廃棄してもよい。
Russian	Мастер на все Руки (pron. mastyer na vsye ruki, lit. master of all arms)
Spanish	Chico para Todo (lit. errand boy)

Trivia

Official card art.

For the second edition, the word "all" in the name became capitalized, where it was not before.

Theme

He does four things, but none exceptionally.

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

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