Jack of All Trades
Jack of All Trades | |
---|---|
Info | |
Cost | |
Type(s) | Action |
Kingdom card? | Yes |
Set | Hinterlands |
Illustrator(s) | Kieron O'Gorman |
Card text | |
Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; you may discard it. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a non-Treasure card from your hand. |
Jack of All Trades is an Action card from Hinterlands. It has a collection of seemingly unrelated small effects: It is a trasher, a Silver gainer, a deck inspector, and a source of draw-to-X.
Donald X. Vaccarino has described Jack as an "after-the-fact Moat", as its various abilities allow it to mitigate many types of Attack.
FAQ
Official FAQ
- This card does four separate things, in the order listed; you do all of them (the last one is optional).
- First, gain a Silver from the Supply, putting it into your discard pile.
- Second, look at the top card of your deck, and either discard it or put it back on top.
- If this causes you to shuffle, the Silver will be shuffled in.
- Third, draw cards until you have at least five cards in hand.
- If you already have five or more cards in hand, you do not draw any cards.
- Fourth, you may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure card.
Other Rules clarifications
Strategy
Jack of All Trades is a multifaceted card with many uses. Probably the most common is getting Jack in the opening to both jumpstart your economy and trash your starting Estates. Whether Jack remains useful in the mid- or late-game depends on the Kingdom. In money strategies, you may play Jack throughout the game and even get more than one, flooding your deck with Silver to more reliably afford Gold and Province. In many engines, however, you will need to be careful to avoid stuffing your deck with too many stop cards, and may either skip Jack entirely or avoid playing it in the midgame until you achieve deck control (at which point Jack becomes an easy way to increase your payload).
Jack also functions as a defense against Attacks, countering junking attacks, handsize attacks, and top-deck attacks with various degrees of effectiveness. The Silvers also defend against many trashing attacks (which may trash Silver instead of a better card). For this reason, money strategies featuring Jack are very robust against many opposing decks, provided the Attacks can't be stacked too effectively.
Jack can occasionally be used to enable a draw-to-X engine in the absence of other draw. The challenge with this strategy is that you need to be able to reliably reduce your hand size below 5 so that Jack will draw, but you’re constantly adding Silver to your deck, which may be hard to get out of your hand. Typically, this means you need a trash-for-benefit card such as Upgrade so that you can constantly turn your Silvers into cantrips or villages while also reducing your hand size.
Jack is skippable in many engines that a) have a better way of trashing Estates, and b) have no use for the Silver (i.e. trash-for-benefit or +Buy). Jack’s trashing is not thinning as you always gain a Silver, replacing whatever card you trash, so engines with Jack will need to use other cards to improve their deck control.
External strategy articles
Note: Article(s) below are by individual authors and may not represent the community's current views on cards, but may provide more in-depth information or give historical perspective. Caveat emptor.
- article by theory (Dec 2011)
- article by HiveMindEmulator (May 2012)
- article by AdamH (March 2014)
Versions
English versions
Digital | Text | Release | Date | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; discard it or put it back. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a card from your hand that is not a Treasure. |
Hinterlands | October 2011 | ||
Gain a Silver. Look at the top card of your deck; you may discard it. Draw until you have 5 cards in hand. You may trash a non-Treasure card from your hand. |
Hinterlands (2016 printing) | December 2016 |
Other language versions
Trivia
For the second edition, the word "all" in the name became capitalized, where it was not before.
Theme
Secret History