Dominion Strategies

I haven't bought Seaside yet but the base set and Intrigue provide a variety of cards that tend to form the foundation of a winning deck.

Baron: This one's a bit of a red-herring. This card should really be viewed as an accelerator to buy an early gold and not as an engine to fill your deck with estates. In a gardens deck, it might be okay to serve the latter purpose, however.

Chapel: The quintessential "strategy". The idea is to buy silver and whittle everything else away, then buy golds and whittle the silver away, then buy nothing but provinces and gold. A deck that buys just Chapel and then proceeds to brute force the rest of the game will win relatively quickly.

Minion: My personal favorite from Intrigue. This card is best in multiples where you can play one for money then the other for the discard effect, draw new cards and hopefully play yet another. If there's virtual money in the game with +actions (i.e. Market, Festival) then it becomes very powerful. You'll find some turns later that your deck gets a little clogged so don't be afraid to drop two for money and a silver to buy a gold to keep the treasure count in your deck high.

Gardens: The other "strategy" card from the base set. This one encourages the exact opposite of Chapel. It wants a gigantic deck. Games with Gardens tend to go long and can sometimes have decks in the 40-50 card range. You want to prioritize cards that give you extra cards or multiple buys. Ironworks is fantastic for this purpose (especially in a game with Great Halls) as are Workshop, Festival, Bridge and a few others. Remember, each Garden makes a Curse 1/10th as bad so don't worry too much about them. A Cellar is a nice card to filter through the junk in your deck and an Adventurer is very nice too. Don't neglect Silver because you'll have many hands with only a couple coins and you want to be buying something with them too. A Gardens deck really needs to hit 40 to be competitive so keep that in mind and anything that slows your opponents down (or shrinks their deck if they're going gardens) is good too.

Duke: The first expansion introduced two cards that feed off of the "lesser" victory cards. I discussed Baron above but Duke is much more of a deck defining card. The optimal buying strategy for Duke is to buy some Duchies then the Dukes. Some people may wish to buy Dukes first to "stake a claim" but this is counter-productive as a player with more buying power (especially one who can make multiple buys in a turn) will buy some Duchies and really hurt you. On the other hand, if you buy the Duchies first, you get the VPs and you make Dukes much less attractive to them. Duke decks also tend to be larger so this goes hand in hand with Gardens.

Coppersmith: This feels like an engine card, especially early in the game, but I really only see it being useful in one narrow class of games. Someone is going Gardens and there's a Thief in the mix as well as some +buy card. You might be able to build a formidable deck with copper, Thief (taking their copper), Coppersmith and (say), Bridge. I don't know how well this would work but I'd be curious to see.

Those are the primary "engine" / "strategy" cards in the first two sets. There's a zillion other deck strategies that come up with the combination of card sets as well but I find that when one or more of these card sets is out there's USUALLY a winning strategy involving them.

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