Fool's Gold
| Fool's Gold | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Info | |
| Cost |
 |
| Type(s) | Treasure - Reaction |
| Kingdom card? | Yes |
| Set |
Hinterlands |
| Illustrator(s) | Ryan Laukat |
| Card text | |
If this is the first time you played a Fool's Gold this turn, this is worth  , otherwise it's worth  .When another player gains a Province, you may trash this from your hand. If you do, gain a Gold, putting it on your deck. | |
Fool's Gold is a Treasure-Reaction from Hinterlands. It is the only card with this typing. Despite only costing 
, Fool's Gold is a card which gets progressively more powerful the more you can get. As such, games often result in a race to get the most.
FAQ
Official FAQ
- This is both a Treasure and a Reaction. It can be played in your buy phase like other Treasures.
- When you play it, it is worth if this is the first time you played a Fool's Gold this turn, and otherwise it is worth . So if you play three Fool's Golds in the same turn, the first is worth , the second is worth , and the third is worth .
- Fool's Gold is also a Reaction. When another player gains a Province, you may trash Fool's Gold from your hand; if you do, you gain a Gold from the Supply, putting it on top of your deck rather than into your discard pile.
- If there are no cards in your deck, the Gold becomes the only card in your deck.
- If there are no Gold cards left in the Supply, you do not gain one, but can still trash Fool's Gold.
- This Reaction is only usable when another player gains a Province, not you. It is usable whether a Province was gained due to being bought, or gained some other way.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
Originally posted by A_S00 on the forum
Fool's Gold is pretty good. And, like Minions, Hunting Parties, and sex, the more of it you have, the better it gets. Play one FG in a turn, and it's a Copper. Play two, and each one is a Silver-and-a-half. Play three, and each one is a Gold. Play four or more, and they're better than Gold. Pretty snazzy for a card.
It should follow from the above that you want to buy as many copies of Fool's Gold as possible. And, indeed, you can do worse than buying nothing else: Big Money Ultimate on Geronimoo's simulator loses to an equivalent strategy that just buys Fool's Gold instead of Gold and Silver 25%-67%. The Fool's Gold strategy averages 4 Provinces in 15.5 turns. But sometimes (a lot of the time), you can do even better.
What does Fool's Gold like?
There are three things that Fool's Gold loves almost as much as other Fool's Gold, and sometimes it's worth dipping out of Fool's Gold to pick up one or more of them. Those three things are:
- Trashing: The less cards you have in your deck that aren't Fool's Gold, the higher your chance of drawing lots of Fool's Gold at once. Thus, Fool's Gold loves trashers (but only some...more on this later).
- Card Drawing: The more cards you have in your hand, the more of them are likely to be Fool's Gold. Thus, Fool's Gold loves drawing cards.
- +Buy (or gain): The only thing better than buying a Fool's Gold every turn is buying more than one Fool's Gold every turn. This accelerates your game if you're going for it and your opponent is ignoring it, and gives you the chance at a favorable split if you end up racing for the Fool's Golds. Plus, this will give you a chance at double Province or Province/Duchy turns in the late game, which can easily spell the difference between a win and a loss. Thus, Fool's Gold loves +buy.
Even better than getting just one of those, though, is getting multiple. So, with that in mind, let's consider some specific cards that go well with Fool's Gold.
Mint: A special case for a 
/ opening split, Mint/Fool's Gold is currently the 6th best opening, according to the councilroom.com rankings. Mint's on-buy effect provides excellent trashing, and its on-play effect then goes on to effectively provide +buy, getting you lots of Fool's Gold fast. It's probably not worth picking up later unless you get a lucky 5-Copper hand (don't trash any Fool's Gold for it).
Council Room: Huge draw and +buy to go with it. Council Room/Fool's Gold is an excellent opening if you're lucky enough to get a / split, but even if you're not, picking one up with your first hand is worth it. Buying a single Council Room as soon as possible increases Fool's Gold's margin over BMU to a whopping 90%-7%, and beats Fool's Gold head-on 71%-23%. It also beats the optimized Council Room bot 76%-19%.
Margrave: Card drawing, +buy, and an attack to boot. Smells like victory. Like Council Room, Margrave is worth picking up with your first hand even if you don't get a / split. One of these babies will let Fool's Gold beat BMU 92%-5%, and beats straight Fool's Gold 69%-25%.
Salvager: A trasher tailor-made for Fool's Gold. Get rid of your Estates and Coppers, accelerate your Fool's Gold purchasing with +$ and +buy, then have the option to rush the end game by trashing Provinces if you get ahead (doubly beneficial to a Fool's Gold deck, since Fool's Gold hates greening). Buying a single Salvager on turn 1/2 increases Fool's Gold's margin over BMU to 81%-16%, and beats straight Fool's Gold head-on 60%-37%.
Remodel: Plays somewhat like Salvager. Remodel Estates and Coppers into Fool's Golds, late-game Remodel Golds into Provinces or Provinces into more Provinces.
Spice Merchant: In mirror match-ups, ends up being a slightly less good version of Salvager in Fool's Gold games, but still worth picking up if it's the best option on the board. If your opponent ignores Fool's Gold, it's even better. You can use the +$/+buy option early to pick up extra Fool's Golds, or the +cards option if you get an unlucky hand like 2xFG, 1xC, Spice Merchant, Province, hoping to draw an extra Fool's Gold. Picking up a Spice Merchant as an opening increases Fool's Gold's margin over BMU to 86%-10%, and beats Fool's Gold head-on 54%-37%.
Masquerade: Gives a little card drawing, along with light trashing. Masquerade is a good card, and its strengths line right up with what Fool's Gold likes, so no surprise that they go well together. Masquerade/Fool's Gold beats BMU 81%-15%, and beats straight Fool's Gold 57%-38%. It also beats the optimized Masquerade bot 55%-39%.
Bridge: Gives +buy for cheap. The cost reduction also minimizes the chance of unlucky turns where you get your +buy but don't have enough money in hand to buy two Fool's Gold (a problem with some of the weaker +buy cards), and gives you a decent shot at double Province or Province/Duchy turns late game (FG/FG/FG/C/Bridge is P/D, FG/FG/FG/FG/Bridge is P/P). Buying an opening Bridge bumps up the margin against BMU to 88%-9%, and beats straight Fool's Gold 67%-27%. Also beats the optimized Bridge bot 83%-13%.
Envoy: It's good for BMU, and it's good for Fool's Gold. It beats BMU 76%-18%, straight Fool's Gold 50%-4-%, and the optimized Envoy bot 51%-41%.
Smithy: No surprises here. Beats BMU 78%-18%, Fool's Gold 55%-36%, and the optimized Smithy bot 53%-38%.
Thief: An interesting case, and one of the few types of games in which the card is actually useful. In a mirror match-up, Thief acts as +buy, letting you pick up extra copies of Fool's Gold, while killing your opponent's copies (of course, you still run the risk of getting unlucky and just trashing his Copper for him). With a single Thief as an opener, it beats straight Fool's Gold 63%-30%, but it's worse against BMU than straight Fool's Gold is (though it still wins 64%-29%).
Nomad Camp: A Nomad Camp buy on turn 1 can get you a +buy and two Fool's Golds in your deck before your first reshuffle.
What doesn't Fool's Gold like?
As good a card as Fool's Gold is, there's a number of things that don't go along with it very well. Some of them are expected, but some are surprising (at least to me). Here are a few of them:
Cursing attacks: Just like having less crap in your deck makes you more likely to draw your Fool's Golds together, having more crap makes you less likely to do so. Thus, if you're going to be eating a lot of Curses, you should probably stick to Gold and Silver which at least retain their value in crappy hands, rather than turning into so much Copper. Mountebank is the worst of the lot, of course, since it gives you two cards that aren't Fool's Gold every time you get hit. When Cursers are on the board, I'd probably just avoid Fool's Gold altogether.
Fast megaturns: Fool's Gold strategies can be pretty fast...but not necessarily the fastest thing on the board. If you think your opponent can probably pull off some kind of King's Court/Bridge monstrosity on turn 12, you should probably try and contest him on those grounds, rather than plodding along with your Fool's Gold strategy.
Chapel: Despite my assertion above that Fool's Gold loves trashing, it turns out not to get along with the king of trashers, Chapel. Straight Fool's Gold beats Chapel/Fool's Gold 59%-38%. Without any +buy to make up the turn you lose buying Chapel, you're probably only going to end up with 4 Fool's Gold in your deck when they run out, and with no Copper to back them up, that's not going to stand up to any greening whatsoever. It may be viable to work Chapel into a Fool's Gold strategy that also gets some +cards from somewhere, but I suspect that's going to be too slow and lose the Fool's Gold race in a mirror.
Moneylender, Steward: Good as these cards are, they both fall prey to the same problem as Chapel. If you waste a turn buying them, you lose the Fool's Gold race, and the deck thinning and + they provide isn't enough to make up the difference.
Other stuff
Should I buy Gold and Silver after the Fool's Gold runs out?
In a word, yes. It's not going to matter against a player who's not going Fool's Gold (by the time they run out, you're going to be buying Provinces and Duchies anyway), but in a mirror match-up, a player who buys Gold and Silver after the Fool's Gold runs out beats one who doesn't 85%-10%. Just do it.
When should I trash my Fool's Gold to top-deck a Gold?
I have no idea. Geronimoo's simulator doesn't have a way of controlling the bot's behavior for this, and I don't know my way around rspeer's well enough to answer this question with it. However, there are a couple things I think are probably important when deciding whether or not to trash:
- Can you already buy a Province? If so, don't trash.
- How did the Fool's Gold split go? The better it went for you (the more Fool's Golds you got), the less you should be inclined to trash.
- Do you have more than one Fool's Gold in hand right now? If so, probably don't trash.
- Given what you know about what's left in your deck, are top-decked Golds likely to let you buy a Province next turn? If yes, might be a good idea to trash.
- Is the game far enough from over that a VP card next turn is as good as one this turn, or are you really down to the wire? If the former, you might consider trashing; if the latter, probably best to just buy buy buy.
Should I try and incorporate Fool's Gold into engines?
This is a tricky question, and in my experience, the answer is generally "no." It's easy to see why you would want to: Fool's Gold rewards big hands with lots of buys, and the best way to get that is a big, fancy engine. The problem is, fancy engines take time to set up, and Fool's Gold is always a limited resource. So, if you try to get your engine set up first, your opponent has time to buy up all the Fool's Gold, making your ability to draw your whole deck useless. On the other hand, if you buy up the Fool's Gold first, you've probably spent enough turns on that race that it's too late to start building an engine; your opponent already has enough Fool's Golds to be buying Provinces.
There may well be some exceptions to this, but in my experience, Fool's Gold and engines don't mix especially well.
The cases where they do mix are when you don't need Fool's Gold, specifically; you've built an engine that draws your whole deck and now you want to add some buying power, and two Fool's Golds are worth for and two buys. If the Fool's Golds weren't there you'd have just built the same engine but rounded it off with a Death Cart, or Poor House, or a Throne Room with a terminal Silver, or just a few more expensive Treasures; using two FGs might save you a turn compared to buying two Golds.
Synergies/Combos
Antisynergies
- Cursing attacks
- Trashing (if it doesn't give +buy, and if your opponent is also going for FG)
- Fancy engines
Trivia
Secret History
per copy you had, on a version of Ill-Gotten Gains. It needed a tortured wording to have it be that if you played three you got 
for each, since you play them one at a time. Bill Barksdale suggested having it be and then , which was much simpler. It's stronger when you have just two, and weaker when you have more than three, but that all worked out. Meanwhile the bottom started on a card in a later set, and bopped around a little before ending up here. At one point the Gold didn't go on top of your deck, but it's so late, it has to go there.
