On Dominion (the game) and Team Making
Dominion is card game where there are a bunch of different kinds of cards. Some cards let you draw more cards, some cards can be played with other effects (such as making you discard two of your cards or eliminate some a number of cards from your deck), some cards are worth currency that can be used to purchase more cards. Some cards are more powerful than others and the objective is assemble a deck of cards that allow you to win the game.
Turns out, in Dominion, one effective strategy is to build a “lean deck” - a set of cards where the average quality of card is very high. If, for example, every card in my deck lets me draw two more cards then no matter what my hand is, I will be able to draw my whole deck. Now if interspersed there were many cards that did nothing at all then I might not be able to do anything with my hand depending on which cards I start with. Lean decks are effective because each card synergizes well with the others and there aren’t a lot of useless cards around to get in the way of that synergy. Plus this efficiency in your deck let’s you quickly acquire more useful cards without wasting time or turns shuffling through the less useful cards.
One way to make a strong team is to have a lean deck. You want to have a high density of quality cards that synergize well together and you want to remove the less useful elements to promote efficiency.
A lean deck is also more likely to stay a lean deck even as the deck grows whereas a deck with lots of extra stuff in it tends to continue bloat out. Lean decks are also smaller and more predictable because it’s easier to know everything that’s going on. There is less information of a higher quality in the systems. If I only have 8 cards I can memorize the whole deck but if I have 50 then it’s anyone guess what’s going on.
There is no such thing as a silver bullet and lean deck isn’t always the right approach in Dominion or in building teams. I do think that no matter what, you want to think a lot about the cards you’re adding to the deck, what they do, how and if they synergize. But, for some situations, the power of a good lean deck is incredibly effective and awesome to behold.
