Hamlet

Hamlet
Cost
Type	Action
Set/Expansion	Cornucopia
Illustrator	Kurt Miller
+1 Card +1 Action You may discard a card; if you do, +1 Action. You may discard a card; if you do, +1 Buy.

Hamlet is an Action card from Cornucopia. It is a cantrip since it gives +1 Card and +1 Action; since it can give +2 Actions in any reasonable circumstance, it is considered one of the Villages. Since it is both cheap and gives +Buy, it is considered to be one of the better Villages.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• First draw a card, and get +1 Action.
• Then you may either discard one card to get another +1 Action; or you may discard one card to get +1 Buy; or you may discard two cards and get both +1 Action and +1 Buy; or you may discard no cards at all.
• You only get the extra +1 Action or +1 Buy if you actually discarded a card for it.
• You cannot discard multiple cards to get multiple +Actions or multiple +Buys.

Strategy Article

There is no strategy article for Hamlet. However, it was mentioned in The Five Best cards, 2011 by theory and Comparing the Villages by chwhite.

A strong contender with Fishing Village and Border Village for the best of the “Villages” in the game. It doesn’t have Fishing Village’s crazy Actions, or Border Village’s free $5 card, or even the word “Village” in its name, but it does offer +Buy, a critically underrated component of an +Action/+Cards engine.

The fact that you have to discard means that Worker's Village is technically usually better, but since you’re mostly building an engine around Actions, the forced discard is rarely an issue: the whole point of Action combo engines is that you don’t need all the cards in your hand — just a few key ones. Sometimes it even works to your benefit (e.g., Tunnel, Library). The key, though, is the price: Hamlet’s price makes it easy to grab two with and two buys. And where do you get those buys from? Oh, right, the Hamlets. Self-synergy is generally a surefire recipe to the top of these rankings.

Hamlet is also perfect with draw-up-to-X engines built on Watchtower and Library. These may be excruciatingly slow to play online, since each Hamlet forces two decisions for what to discard, but can be very powerful even with low trashing, since the Hamlets can discard your Coppers and Estates and let your Libraries find your good card.

Synergies/Combos

• Most engines, since it gives +Buy
• Watchtower and Library
• Menagerie, since Hamlet can clear out duplicate cards from your hand.

Antisynergies

• Weak draw like Moat or Courtyard, since Hamlet makes you discard to get benefits.
• Discard attacks like Militia make it more difficult to start an engine with a Hamlet

Trivia

Secret History

A simple card from the hand theme days that survived unchanged.

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

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