Wandering Minstrel
| Wandering Minstrel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Info | |
| Cost |
 |
| Type(s) | Action |
| Kingdom card? | Yes |
| Set |
Dark Ages |
| Illustrator(s) | Guillaume Ducos |
| Card text | |
|
+1 Card; +2 Actions Reveal the top 3 cards of your deck. Put the Actions back on top in any order and discard the rest. | |
Wandering Minstrel is an Action card from Dark Ages. It one of the few villages that doesn't have anything like "Village" in the name! It's also got some filtering ability to make sure your engine keeps drawing Actions.
FAQ
Official FAQ
- First draw a card, then reveal the top 3 cards of your deck, shuffling your discard pile if there are not enough cards in your deck. If there still are not enough after shuffling, just reveal what you can.
- Put the revealed Action cards on top of your deck in any order, and discard the other cards.
- A card with multiple types, one of which is Action, is an Action card.
- If you didn't reveal any Action cards, no cards will be put on top.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
There isn't a strategy article for Wandering Minstrel, but it seems like a reasonably straightforward village to use. It discards all your non-actions, finding you your other actions to keep your engine running. Sure, it discards Golds and Platinums and other fancy Treasures, but that's probably okay - if it helps you find more villages and smithies, you'll draw them anyway. It's best when you're aiming to draw your whole deck and really don't mind discarding even your top-notch Treasures.
On a 
/
opening, you probably shouldn't buy it right away before your first reshuffle or until you have some good actions you actually want to play with it or other engine components, such as card draw, which you need to play the actions you left on top of your deck, anyway. Otherwise, the chances that it discards your early coppers instead of the estates are a little too high to be worth it. If you draw WM and 2 or 3 or more estates on turn 3 and play the WM, there's only a small chance you draw the other action you might have bought in the opening (which will be a at best), but you'll likely discard 2 or 3 coppers and thereby reduce your next turn's buying power significantly. If you choose not to play it, you pretty much wasted a turn by reducing your buying power during this turn by at least 
.
So don't buy Wandering Minstrel too early. This should be recommended with most villages, but this one is especially trimmed to set up engines which, as is well-known, takes some time, and it might really hurt your early buying power. And of course it has no business in Big Money decks. For the former purpose, however, it excels vanilla villages (including Border Village, Fortress) by far.
Synergies/Combos
- engines which aim to draw your whole deck
Antisynergies
Trivia
In other languages
- French: Ménestrel errant
- German: Barde (lit. bard)
- Japanese: 吟遊詩人 (pron. gin'yūshijin, lit. troubadour)
- Spanish: Juglar (lit. minstrel)
Secret History
, name a type, dig for it, leave the first match on top. It would have been "strictly better" than Chancellor at (since you could name a type that wasn't in your deck), and I didn't want to charge for it or give it an awful condition specifically to make it worse than Chancellor (a card not famous for being strong). So I dropped it. I turned it into a village in Guilds, then moved it to Dark Ages, where I made it always dig for actions, with no choice. That card was a bit too strong and also slowed down games more than an ideal amount. So now it just looks at the top 3 cards and leaves the actions on top.
