Embassy

Embassy
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Hinterlands
Illustrator(s)	Marco Morte
Card text
+5 Cards Discard 3 cards. When you gain this, each other player gains a Silver.

Embassy is an Action card from Hinterlands. Its draw-five-discard-three effect offers lots of terminal sifting and cycling for your deck but only increases your handsize by one.

It was removed from the second edition of Hinterlands.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• The Silvers come from the Supply and are put into discard piles.
• Gaining them is not optional for the other players.
• If there are not enough Silvers left to go around, deal them out in turn order, starting with the player whose turn it is.

Strategy

Before it was removed, Embassy was an occasionally useful draw card. Although Embassy provides terminal draw, it is relatively weak for this purpose because it only increases your hand size by one; at , it is very expensive, with a commensurately high opportunity cost, for a card that only generates as much net draw as Moat. This means it compares poorly to other terminal draw cards such as Smithy or Wild Hunt, and is often inadequate if you need draw for an engine. Instead, Embassy is much more commonly useful as a terminal sifter with a fairly large search space. While a copy or two can be a useful supplement to other forms of draw in an engine, you need village support to play any Actions drawn. money strategies do not have this problem and thus work well with Embassy, as you can simply sift to and play your best Treasures.

In money strategies, Embassy’s strong sifting enables you to skip past junk and somewhat reliably find your best Treasures, with the small increase in hand size often enough to allow you to afford Province. Due to this sifting, unlike other money strategies that focus on increasing the average money density of your entire deck, Embassy-based strategies focus more on finding your Embassy reliably and adding cards to hit with your best six cards out of nine. These two factors lead to two different classes of synergies:

1. Embassy works well with effects that can help you cycle to it or otherwise find it. As you likely cannot use Action cards for this purpose given Embassy would draw them dead, these usually take other forms; Star Chart and Crop Rotation are both effective examples. If such options are not available, simply adding multiple copies of Embassy can make it more likely that you find a copy at the top of the shuffle.
2. Adding high-value Treasures such as Gold is more important than thinning your least productive cards (Estates). As a non-playable card that is best when discarded, Tunnel can be useful to add large amounts of Gold to your deck as payload. Other useful non-Action effects that can allow you to gain Treasures include Lucky Coin and Delve.

In an engine, if you have an especially large amount of junk to sift past, Embassy's overall effect may sometimes even be better than a more efficient terminal draw effect: seeing more cards may allow you to find more of the ones you want to play in comparison to just increasing your hand size without sifting. Embassy can also work well with Village Green: you can React Village Green after finding and discarding it with Embassy to both draw an additional card and play a village, which solves the two main weaknesses of Embassy as a primary source of draw. Embassy also works in other situations where you benefit from discarding cards, such as by depositing them in your discard pile to trash them with Doctor or Sentry.

Embassy's on-gain effect is usually not very important, although it can be a small benefit or detriment, depending on the impact of the Silver on your opponents' decks. If the effect on their payload is significant and the opportunity cost of gaining a Silver is high, e.g. in a single-gain Kingdom, Embassy's effect can be beneficial to your opponent. If Silver is not a desirable card because the extra is not worth the impact on deck control of adding an extra stop card, gaining Embassy can act somewhat like a weak one-shot junking attack, although this is usually not impactful enough to significantly influence your decision on whether to buy it.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		+5 Cards Discard 3 cards. When you gain this, each other player gains a Silver.	Hinterlands	October 2011
		+5 Cards Discard 3 cards. When you gain this, each other player gains a Silver.	Hinterlands (2016 printing)	December 2016

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Vyslanectví
Dutch	Ambassade
Finnish	Lähetystö
French	Ambassade
German	Botschaft			+5 Karten Lege 3 deiner Handkarten ab. Wenn du diese Karte nimmst, nimmt jeder Mitspieler ein Silber.	(2019)
Italian	Diplomatico (lit. diplomat)
Japanese	大使館 (pron. taishikan)			+5 カードを引く 3枚捨て札にする。 これを獲得するとき、他のプレイヤーは全員、銀貨1枚を獲得する。
Russian	Посольство (pron. posol'stvo)
Spanish	Embajada

Trivia

Official card art.

Theme

Ambassadors work in embassies.

The name is obv. just about how the other players get a Silver.

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

Secret History

I had had "draw five discard three" in Prosperity a long time ago. It had been too strong, but it didn't seem like it needed much to make it acceptable, so a when-gain penalty was a good fit. Giving the other players a Silver doesn't matter much in the long run, but on turn one it's significant.

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

Being too strong in multiplayer

Embassy makes the game more about luck by making skill less relevant; I don't need to do anything clever, I can just buy Embassy. The tricky things you can do may be competitive, but they don't just beat up the Embassy guy. In multiplayer it's magnified; I always remember that game from a few years back where three people had turn one Embassy. My buys went Embassy, nothing, Embassy, Province, Province, Province, Province. I did not learn anything about whatever we were playtesting.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The swingiest card ever

Second Edition removal

Embassy is dull but okay; it lost out on numbers. It was a borderline card that people really didn't need to exist.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Hinterlands 2E Preview 1