Gainer
A gainer is any card which allows you to gain cards without buying them. The simplest example is Workshop. They often work well with Gardens strategies, as they allow you to gain more cards than you have buys. They can also be useful for picking up engine components, especially cheap ones.
Cards that allow you to trash one card and gain another, like Remodel, are usually considered to be in a separate category from gainers, since they don't increase your deck size. However, they can sometimes have similar functions for gaining engine components or accelerating a three-pile ending.
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Types of gainers
Workshop variants
These cards let you gain cards up to a particular maximum cost. Most of them work well in combinations with cards like Highway, which will let you gain more expensive cards than you usually can.
- Dominion: Workshop
- Intrigue: Ironworks
- Seaside: Smugglers
- Alchemy: University
- Cornucopia: Horn of Plenty
- Dark Ages: Hermit, Armory, Dame Natalie
- Graverobber and Rogue can gain cards from the Trash instead of the supply.
- Altar sits on the border between a gainer and a remodeler; like remodelers it makes you trash a card as well as gain one, but unlike remodelers the cost of the card gained is independent of the card trashed.
(Feast gains a card, but as a one-shot it acts more as a temporary replacement than a gainer. If you play Throne Room, Procession or King's Court on it, it acts more like a gainer.)
On-buy gainers
These cards resemble the above in gaining cards up to a particular cost, but do so while in play when you buy another card, rather than when you play the gainer itself.
Silver gainers
Since Silver is present in every game, and is almost always a useful card but rarely super-powerful, there are several cards that use gaining Silver as a decent but not overpowered bonus.
- Dominion: Bureaucrat
- Intrigue: Trading Post
- Seaside: Explorer
- Cornucopia: Trusty Steed
- Hinterlands: Jack of all Trades, Trader
- Dark Ages: Squire
- Dark Ages: Feodum has an on-trash Silver-gaining effect
- Guilds: Masterpiece has an on-buy Silver-gaining effect
Embassy, from Hinterlands, distributes Silver to your opponents when you gain it.
Other treasure gainers
These cards can be used to gain other Treasures—some specifically Copper, Gold, or Spoils; others whatever Treasure happens to be available.
- Dominion: Thief
- Seaside: Treasure Map, Explorer
- Prosperity: Mint, Hoard
- Cornucopia: Bag of Gold
- Hinterlands: Tunnel, Noble Brigand, Ill-Gotten Gains
- Promo: Governor
- Dark Ages: Beggar, Market Square, Marauder, Bandit Camp, Count, Pillage
- Guilds: Soothsayer
- Adventures: Hero
- Dark Ages: Sir Vander gains a Gold when trashed
Other specific-card gainers
- Intrigue: Baron—can gain an Estate
- Cornucopia: Followers—gains an Estate
- Cornucopia: Tournament—can gain a Duchy or a Prize
- Cornucopia: Jester—can gain whatever card is on top of the opponent's deck
- Dark Ages: Count—can gain a Duchy and/or a Copper
- Dark Ages: Rats—gains additional copies of Rats
- Adventures: Magpie—gains additional copies of Magpie
When gain/buy/trash gainers
- Hinterlands: Border Village - gains a cheaper card when gained
- Hinterlands: Duchess - allows you to gain itself when you gain a Duchy
- Hinterlands: Cache - comes with two Coppers when gained
- Dark Ages: Squire - gains an Attack card when trashed
- Dark Ages: Death Cart - gains two Ruins when gained
- Dark Ages: Catacombs - gains a cheaper card when trashed
- Dark Ages: Hunting Grounds - gains a Duchy or three Estates when trashed
- Guilds: Stonemason - can gain two Action cards when bought