A Few Acres of Snow: Deck Manipulation

We've covered most of the mechanics of A Few Acres of Snow thus far. All the ways of scoring points. All the ways of ending the game. There are a few cards available for purchase that don't help expand, develop, ambush, or raid. They don't help on defense. They don't really do anything concrete in terms of winning the game... But they're often critical in building a plan for the game. These three cards are key when it comes to manipulating the size of your deck and the cards you draw...

Home Support - Ancestral Recall is possibly the most powerful of the truly broken old school Magic cards. Drawing three cards in one card has always held a lot of appeal for me as a result in pretty much every game I've played since then. It certainly deserves a closer look. In Campaign Manager 2008 it's one of the keys to the truly abusive 'infinite' deck strategy. In Netrunner it was merely a decent card. In Netrunner you could always spend an action to draw a card and only got 4 actions per turn. Spending an action and a card for 3 cards is better than spending an action for 1 card but it wasn't overpowered. In AFAoS the home support card has the added bonus of not even taking one of your two actions! But on the other side of things you always fill your hand back up to 5 cards at the end of the turn. There are no other ways to draw cards so the best you can expect is to have a 7 card hand on your turn instead of a 5 card hand. But then if you spend 3 cards on your turn you'll only draw 1 card at the end of your turn in stead of 3. You net 2 cards right away but end up down 2 cards at the end of the turn. Since it didn't cost you an action and might give you more options that's still ok. Even better you might be able to spend more than 3 cards in your 2 actions and truly gain as a result. The French in particular want to set up a huge trader and home support can do that. It can also backfire when you end up with 7 cards without a trader and are stuck with bad actions while you try to get below a 5 card hand to draw more cards...

There's another thing to keep in mind with home support which is that the card got substantially nerfed with the version 2 rules changes. You can only reshuffle your discard pile into your deck at the end of your turn so if you only have two cards left in your deck when you play home support you only get those two cards. If you have no cards at all you can't even play it on Yucata. (It is unclear to me if that is the way it should work or not. I like the idea of being able to discard it for no action cost.) This makes home support worse if you happen to shuffle it to the bottom of your deck. You can't both get the full 3 cards out of it and reshuffle it into your deck to play it next time through. Probably you're better off just holding it until the reshuffle happens but even then you're playing your current turn with a completely dead card. Drawing it with no cards left in your deck is painful because there's no way to get around only have a 4 card hand for the turn.

Home support actually has an interesting use in a 5 card deck. It means you can buy a military card (going up to a 6 card deck) and be guaranteed to draw the military card on your next turn. (Assuming you play a card and therefore have to reshuffle at end of turn, anyway.) You'll only have one card left in your deck after drawing at the end of the turn and thanks to pigeonholes that card can't be both the military card and the home support! This is relevant because your opponent can't possibly ambush the military card if it stays in your deck. They now have to risk wasting an action to try to kill it off. And if you have a single blocker in your hand they're stuck with the choice of wasting an action, or spending two actions to kill it, or letting you play the military card next turn. All three of these options are bad for them.

Home support can be very useful in a small deck as well if you're lucky enough to keep drawing it early in the shuffle. Especially for the British who will often have a deck capable of a 6 gold merchant action if they draw up to 7 cards! Burning through your deck faster with home support can also let you redraw your best card more frequently than you 'should' be able to. (Typically if I'm doing this it's so I can keep cycling my rangers card on ambushes/raids/blocks.)

Home support does cost 5 bucks to buy so it's not a given that every deck should have one. It tends to make your draws smoother but sometimes actually makes them worse. That said, I do tend to buy one in almost every game as either side.

Governor - I think this is the single best card in the game. It looks pretty tame on the surface... You have to spend an action to buy it. You have to draw it with your bad cards at the same time. You have to spend actions to use it. And then when all is said and done you're stuck with the governor in your deck and no way to get rid of it beyond discarding it or storing it in your reserve. It does a lot of the same things the chapel does in Dominion and I can remember getting demolished on Brettspielwelt by someone who made a super thin deck with chapel. Then I remember doing the same thing to my friends. Shrinking your deck down to a size where you can guarantee what your hand will be every turn is incredibly powerful. It lets you adapt to your opponent's strategy in a single turn while they have to cycle through their entire deck 3 to 5 cards at a time until they can reshuffle their new strategy into their deck. It's even more powerful in A Few Acres of Snow since you keep the victory points for locations you own even after purging the card from your deck. And since you can build up money and save it over turns you can even get rid of your money engine but keep buying things if it really comes down to it.

I think practically every deck and every strategy wants a governor. The French military strategy is the one exception since it can actually make use of every starting card in their deck as part of their invasion plan. (The only downside is the British with precise play can always repel a French military attack...) Every British strategy needs a governor. If you're going military you have to get Pemaquid and St Mary's out of your deck as soon as possible since they don't make money or attack. If you're trying to expand then you want to purge locations after you use them to move forward. There's no sense having a 20 card deck and needing to draw 1 specific card to keep going when you can have a 10 card deck and need that same 1 card! If you're trying for a raiding plan you end up settling some truly terrible cards... You need Fort Halifax or Kennebec from which to springboard your raids but keeping a literal blank in your deck is horrible. You only want the cube in play to raid from, the card itself is a detriment and you want to purge it.

A flexible French strategy with a lot of expanding also needs a governor. You need your deck to be slim enough that you can plausibly react to the British plan. A few locations need settlers and you only have the one (Quebec) so having a thinner deck means you'll draw it more often. I've toyed with buying the second trader card and just having a huge deck but you end up losing to any sort of focused British strategy when you have a huge deck.

Intendant - This is a French only card. I don't know how I really feel about it. I rarely end up buying it and tend to regret buying it when I do. The biggest problem with it is how much it costs for the regrowth effect. 2 bucks and an action is a huge price to pay! It does have some interesting uses. You can buy a card with your first action and then immediately pick it up with your second. (Only really useful with the military leader or a raid/ambush blocker.) You could have bought a military card in a previous turn (or had a fight just end), pick up your siege artillery, and go to town with it. You can use it to run home support a second time. If the French is trying to end the game with disks it can really help to be able to recycle a settler card. It's even quite feasible to take a new location with your first action and then intendant it up as your second action. Then next turn you're ready to disk a location you didn't even have a cube in the turn before! You could also use it to quickly launch invasions. Win a fight in Pemaquid for example, and you can pick it up with your first action and launch an attack on Boston with your second. Assuming you still have military cards in your hand after winning the first siege...

A lot of those scenarios sound cool and powerful but the reality is they just never seem to come up. I've tried to set one up before only to have intendant be the last card of my deck. I ended up reshuffling the turn I drew it which meant I had intendant in my hand and no cards in my discard pile to pick up. It was terrible! Even if they do come up you need to consider if the tempo gain is actually worth it. Do you really need to invade Boston the turn you took Pemaquid? Unless the opponent is going to end the game with another end game condition you almost certainly have enough time to wait.

I had one game where I was able to home support, intendant it back, home support, and then trader for 12. That was pretty sweet. And then I reshuffled my deck and drew the intendant but not the home support or the trader and had to spend several turns discarding cards and doing nothing. That was less sweet...