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According to the Dominion Strategy wiki, Lookout doesn't go well with a Big Money strategy. Do you agree?

To clarify: I mean Big Money in a broad sense. So picking up at most a couple of cards, then focusing on money.

2 Answers 2

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I certainly agree. For the hand playing it, Lookout is a dead card. Since you're considering a Big Money (BM) strategy, the natural comparison is against Silver. The first time you play it, if you're lucky, you remove a single dead card from your deck (an Estate), you're back to where you started, and you had to play with a 4-card hand that, had you had a Silver instead, could likely have bought you a good $5 or Gold! By the time you've played the Lookout twice, it's probably turn 6-8; the game is close to half over. The Silver could have catapulted you to Gold or a good $5 twice now, and you'd have a Silver in your deck too.

Lookout is fine if the BM is flavored by Cursing, and Sea Hag in particular. In this case it removes negative points, hits more dead cards, and has a longer time to work in the more drawn-out cursing environment.

I would be very surprised if Lookout/Smithy/BM beats Smithy/BM, for the same reasons as above (and because the Smithy can draw the Lookout dead!) For Lookout to be good in the absence of Curses, you need to have an engine in mind.

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Lookout + Smithy would work better. There is little point using Lookout with no other action cards, as the +1 action is what makes lookout a good card. Generally "Big Money" means not buying any action cards, and Big Money + X means buying 1 of the X card, e.g. Big Money + Smithy. Big Money + Lookout and no other action cards therefore isn't a very good strategy, as the +action should be used with another action card! But if you are playing Lookout/Smithy you aren't really playing Big Money any more.

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  • "But if you are playing Lookout/Smithy you aren't really playing Big Money any more." I don't think this is accurate. Big Money doesn't have to mean just 0 or 1 action cards in addition to money. It just means that you are much more focused on getting money than you are on other actions cards. See this article on Big Money for more details: forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=6403.0
    – GendoIkari
    Feb 6, 2013 at 18:33

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