Gatekeeper

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Gatekeeper
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action - Duration - Attack
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Menagerie
Illustrator(s)	Garret DeChellis
Card text
At the start of your next turn, +. Until then, when another player gains an Action or Treasure card they don't have an Exiled copy of, they Exile it.

Gatekeeper is an Action-Duration-Attack card from Menagerie. It forces other players to Exile any Action and Treasure cards they gain without already having a copy in Exile.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• While under this attack, whenever you gain an Action or Treasure that you do not have a copy of on your Exile mat, you Exile the gained card.
• Gaining a card that you do have a copy of on your Exile mat is unaffected, and lets you discard copies from your Exile mat if you want to as usual.
• Other abilities that happen when you gain a card happen at the same time, and you can only put the card on your mat if it has not moved anywhere since gaining it; so you can, for example, use a Sleigh to put a gained card into your hand, then fail to put it on your Exile mat.
• Gatekeeper only Exiles Actions and Treasures, it does not Exile, for example, Province.
• It only cares about cards in Exile, it does not care how they got there.

Official rules clarifications

• While most cards that move gained cards can "beat" Gatekeeper (like Sleigh), there are also cards that move gained cards after they have been gained (such as Replace and Summon). In these cases, Gatekeeper will be able to exile the card before you can move the card elsewhere.
• If a card is gained directly to somewhere (such as how Supplies gains a Horse onto your deck), Gatekeeper can still exile it.
• This does not lose track of a card if it never moves. So if you gain a Nomad Camp onto your deck, then revealing Watchtower to topdeck the Nomad Camp will not block Gatekeeper.
• This can exile cards if another player gains a card during the turn you play it. For example, if you Bargain and give them a Horse, their Horse will get exiled.
• The exiling effect ends instantaneously when your next turn starts; you can't choose to execute other start-of-turn abilities while your Gatekeeper's exiling ability is still in effect.

Strategy

Gatekeeper is viewed as one of the weakest cards from Menagerie. Actions costing can be very powerful, and Gatekeeper's effect is often too slow and not effective enough to be worth the opportunity cost of buying a different Action. It is strongest against cards that gain cards of different names, such as Black Market, Rewards from Joust, or Loot Gainers.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		At the start of your next turn, +. Until then, when another player gains an Action or Treasure card they don't have an Exiled copy of, they Exile it.	Menagerie	March 2020

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Dutch	Poortwachter			Aan het begin van je volgende beurt, +. Tot dan: Als een andere speler een actie- of geldkaart pakt waar- van hij geen exemplaar op zijn verbanningstableau heeft, verbant hij deze.	(2020)
German	Wache			Zu Beginn deines nächsten Zuges: +. Bis dahin: Nimmt ein Mitspieler eine Aktions- oder Geldkarte, von der er keine gleiche Karte im Exil hat, verbannt er jene.	(2020)
Japanese	門番 (pron. monban)

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

The premise remained constant. Some versions always exiled the card; you'd get back the previous one, so once you had e.g. Silver in exile, gaining Silver would work, you would just technically put one Silver into exile and discard the other one. I never liked that much, plus the card felt too oppressive, so it changed to just not working every other time. Some versions cost , but man you don't want to be under this right away.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Dominion: Menagerie

Retrospective

As a potentially really oppressive attack (and there were more oppressive playtest versions), the intention was for it to be at a below-average power level, but not so weak that you'd never play it. It's weaker than intended but also more rules-messy than I'd like. So it's not just a dud, I'd have liked to replace it anyway. Attacks are tricky. These days attacks try to skew weaker (though sometimes they're still strong). In the early days there were a bunch of strong attacks and the feedback I get is that, while some players love attacks, players in general do not enjoy e.g. discarding every turn to Militia. But I'm not trying to make attacks awful.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Interview with Donald X.