Horn of Plenty
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Horn of Plenty | |
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Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Treasure |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | Cornucopia |
Illustrator(s) | Alayna Lemmer |
Card text | |
When you play this, gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play (counting this). If it's a Victory card, trash this. |
Horn of Plenty is a Treasure from Cornucopia. Instead of producing + as other Treasure cards do, however, Horn of Plenty is a gainer. It allows you to gain a card with a cost of up to for each different card you have in play, thus rewarding you for playing a variety of cards.
Contents |
FAQ
Official FAQ
- This is a Treasure worth ; you play it in your Buy phase, but do not get any for playing it.
- However, when you play it, you gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play. For example, if you have 5 differently named cards in play, you gain a card costing up to .
- This counts itself, other played Treasures, played Actions, and any Duration cards (such as Caravan from Dominion: Seaside) played on your previous turn.
- It only counts cards currently in play, not ones that were in play but left; for example if you played a Pillage (from Dominion: Dark Ages) this turn, you will have trashed it, so it will not count for Horn of Plenty.
- If the card you gain is a Victory card, trash Horn of Plenty.
- You do not have to play Horn of Plenty, and you choose the order that you play Treasures.
- You do not trash Horn of Plenty if you gain a Victory card some other way while it's in play (such as by buying one).
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy Article
There isn't a Horn of Plenty strategy article. Better players than I should improve this section, for I do not claim to understand Horn of Plenty play particularly well, and I know it's a tricky card.
Horn of Plenty can be one of the more difficult cards to use effectively. In a typical deck, it is not strong enough to be worth the opportunity cost of . Because it provides no coin, in the absence of sufficient variety to reliably gain cost cards or higher, it leaves you gaining low-cost cards that you may not want in your deck, and can be weaker than a Silver, sort of like a finicky Workshop that can be played without an action.
In order to get sufficient variety to make Horn of Plenty strong enough to be worth buying, it is usually necessary to have either cards giving +Actions, or alt treasure. A board full of terminal actions will favor Big Money or VP Rush strategies, neither of which synergize well with Horn of Plenty. Boards with a diversity of villages, especially those at different price points, work best.
Horn of Plenty works best with engines, but requires a certain type of engine, and sometimes requires slightly different strategies for constructing the engine. Single-card engines like Minion or Laboratory are less suited to Horn of Plenty than ones relying on multiple cards. Optimal Horn of Plenty strategies usually involve using Horn of Plenty both for engine construction and for gaining VP in the endgame. With many engines, it is easy to get 3-5 different cards in play - Village, Smithy, Copper, Silver, and Horn of Plenty is already 5 different cards, allowing you to gain even pricier engine components. In this manner, Horn of Plenty can be used like an Ironworks which takes more setup but can gain better cards. In the endgame, you can trash your Horns of Plenty either for Provinces (if you have enough unique cards to play) or for Duchies.
It is possible to build engines based around Horn of Plenty and a megaturn:
- Using Horn of Plenty, you build an engine that draws your whole deck
- You use Horn of Plenty to gain even more Horns of Plenty
- On your last turn, you play 8 different cards and cash in your Horns of Plenty for Provinces, ending the game.
Hunting Party synergizes well with Horn of Plenty, even though the two cards compete with each other as cost cards. Hunting party is a strong card on its own, but it is also guaranteed to draw a card that you do not have in your hand, thus increasing the value of each Horn of Plenty played after it. Hunting party is also a card that you benefit greatly from having multiple copies of, making it a good target to pick up with the Horn of Plenty once you get to 5 unique cards in play.
Horn of Plenty does not work well with Alt-VP, for the obvious reason that it is trashed if used to gain VP-Actions, and also because any pure VP that you draw gain cannot contribute to cards in play. However, some boards with Alt-VP can still have viable Horn of Plenty strategies: you can use coin to buy cards like Harem, Great Hall, or Nobles, which can provide variety to fuel using the Horn of Plenty's to pick up other cards or gain provinces. Although VP Rush strategies like Gardens or Silk Road do not work well with this card, Fairgrounds does, because both cards like variety, but also because Fairgrounds is a target for gaining in quantity in the endgame, rather than a card that you want to rush buying or gaining early on. Fairgrounds strategies are often more viable with Horn of Plenty on the board, because Horn of Plenty can be used to gain sufficient variety in the deck without using buy's.
Synergies/Combos
- Games with Shelters give you a free Necropolis which can increase the value of Horn of Plenty.
- Horn of Plenty can gain cheap villages which can power a variety of terminals
- Menagerie, Fairgrounds, and Harvest also reward the variety that Horn of Plenty encourages.
- Combo: Horn of Plenty and Mandarin
- Black Market and Storyteller allow you to play Horn of Plenty in your Action Phase, enabling Gain-and-play.
- Hunting Party
Antisynergies
- Big Money
- Alt-VP, including hybrid VP like Great Hall, Nobles, or Harem, but especially VP Rush strategies like Gardens or Silk Road
Versions
English versions
Digital | Text | Release | Date | |
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When you play this, gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play, counting this. If it's a Victory card, trash this. |
Cornucopia 1st Edition | June 2011 | ||
When you play this, gain a card costing up to per differently named card you have in play (counting this). If it's a Victory card, trash this. | Cornucopia 2nd Edition | March 2018 |
Other language versions
Trivia
Horn of Plenty is the only Treasure card that never produces any amount of spendable money.
Secret History
I tried a new version in a later set: "+2 Actions +1 Buy. While this is in play, when you play another Action card, +." For . The idea was to provide some of what you needed with the original card, so that it was playable in more games, while weakening it in the games where it was good. You've got extra actions and a +buy up front... but it doesn't count Actions already played, only ones played after it. You can't draw your whole deck and finally draw it and play it and yeeha. Anyway this too was broken. I tried several things, including a version that only counted differently named cards. Eventually I gave up on it.
The solution in the end was to make it a Workshop variant. You don't get to combine the money with your other money. It doesn't use up your buy though. To be good enough and not fluctuate too much, it had to count your treasures too. At first it was an action with an effect delayed until the end of your buy phase, but I turned it into a treasure worth . Some people just liked that there was a treasure worth , I don't know what to tell you. So it doesn't use an action, and works with treasures naturally. This version was still sometimes too strong, so it got the "trash it if gained VP" clause.
I had called the treasure version Produce, which was a cute pun which would be lost in foreign versions. Cornucopia seemed like a good name for it, so I took that name off of a Prosperity card (Royal Seal). Then Jay preferred that name for the expansion, which I'd been calling Harvest Festival, so I had to rename this again. I called it Horn of Plenty, which is not only a synonym for Cornucopia, it's a literal translation of it. Once again creating trouble for translators.