It's cheaper anyhow

As people may know, I often quit hobbies when my friends get too good at them.

Ever since Phi introduced Dominion to me last Christmas break, I've been in love with the game. But only recently have I found out that an online client exists, and that's been what's really helpful in actually convincing people to play.

Net money spent: $0

Score!

I enjoy Dominion because it's kind of like Magic on ADD.

There are many problems with casual Magic. There's always been the disparity in how much money people are willing to spend on the game with the accordingly disparate deck power levels. The bigger problem for me is that after awhile, all the match ups between people's main decks have been played out and that's boring. At that point there's the option of spending more money to build new decks, or making terrible secondary decks with super volatile power levels. Not cool. Drafting is an option, but at that point you've committed $15 - $25 and an entire afternoon to playing Magic.

Dominion solves all of those problems: everyone shares the same card pool, you build a new deck every game, and you play. If you end up with something you hate, it's scrapped at the end of the game anyways and you're free to make something new. And having played with Desire builds before, let me assure you that building a stormy engine that cycles your deck twice over in Dominion is every bit as satisfying as resolving a lethal Brainfreeze.

Magic multiplayer has the problem of single player decks being totally unsuited for the format. Control decks with one-use spells for instance. Actually, control decks in general make people mad. Combo decks work once before people get wise and start to gang up on you. EDH is a good start, but also gets stale without fresh card infusions every so often. Emperor is one of my favourites, but having a requirement of exactly 6 people is hard. Dominion on the other hand is less confrontational, so while multiplayer changes the game dynamics, it is difficult to for people to team-up. In this sense it's more "tactically pure". People might see it as a downside, but really you still have fun interacting with friends; if I wanted to play diplomat I'd play Diplomacy. Incidentally, I can never convince people to play Diplomacy...funny that. The flexible player requirements are also a nice bonus.

Magic has terrible mana issues. You can have the right curve and land count and still run into mana screw frequently (probably 20-30% of the time). One deck primer I read specifically mentioned how to decide if you want to mulligan to 2 when you have Chalice of the Void in hand, which means that scenario can be expected to occur repeatedly within a reasonably finite amount of time. Yes, it hits everyone and, averaged out, good players will rise to the top, but it is never fun hitting your 4th land on the 8th turn. In Dominion you cycle your deck so many times and draw so often that if you have terrible economy throughout a game, it's almost certainly your own fault for building a crappy base.

Finally, it's super easy to pick up. Most everyone will fully understand the rules before the second game. So people who would never play something like Magic [1] can get right into it. Naturally, the fact that there is no capital cost for new joiners is also helpful.

That said, can I convince anyone want to buy some poker chips?

1) Not that it affects my decks at all, but post-2010 combat rules are bullshit. Everything uses the stack except combat? Stupid. Extra rules baggage.