When should I buy copper in Dominion?

Question

Almost every strategy I have ever read on Dominion, although disparate in many ways, unanimously agree that not only is buying copper a bad thing, but that you should do whatever is in your power to utterly destroy any that you already have in your deck.

One would think that, being both the cheapest and the most plentiful stack in the game, it would be more useful. Or useful at all, really.

With the exception of a Gardens deck, wherein stuffing your deck with as many cards as it can physically hold is considered advantageous, are there any situations where buying copper is more help than hindrance?

Answer 1

Never.

Almost never. You've got the Gardens exception in your question. That's the most common exception. I could construct a couple other contrived examples where it might be good (though there's still probably something better to do), but the real answer is never. The only good reason to have so many copper cards I can think of is to keep them getting too worn too fast if you don't use card sleeves.

--Begin Edit--

Can't believe I forgot Goons! Especially if you have multiple Goons in play, near the end of the game you should buy anything you can, including as many coppers as possible if you're out of money but still have buys. Similarly, if you're running a lot of Bishops, you can use copper as fodder for them (though here anything with value >= 2 is preferable). This (speaking of statistics) probably explains this graph. If a player is buying >10 coppers with Goons or Gardens in play, it's no surprise they're winning.

--End Edit--

Contrived Examples:

I once played a guy who opened Chapel / Silver, I opened Swindler / Silver. In the next few turns he Chapel-ed 5 coppers and bought a Village, I swindled his Silver. He had to buy a copper to afford another silver.

Sometimes, if you're drawing most of your deck and you have an old Ambassador in it, it can be fun (and obnoxious) to buy a curse to use the Ambassador on. If the curse pile is empty, copper would be the next choice for this.

You could try some strategy relying on a multiple copies of Coppersmith, Money Lender, Counting House, or even Philosopher's Stone or Bank (though in the last 2 Silver would be strictly superior). It would be hard for any of these to be competitive, but you can try.

Answer 2

Rarely. The problem with having Copper in the deck is that it takes up space and only produces $1. In a Province game, you need to generate $8 and you only start each turn with 5 cards, which means that each card needs to result in an average of $1.6 in order to afford Provinces. Figuring out the value of action cards requires a lot of math dealing with what else is in the deck, but Treasures are easy, and Copper is well below the $1.6 average.

There are exceptions. Gardens is the obvious one, although most Garden strategies will only buy Copper if they can't afford a $2 card, since the Gardens slows you down in drawing to the cards that give you extra gains/buys (like Workshop or Ironworks).

Goons is an exception. When you have multiple Goons in play, buying a Copper is worth at least 2VP. Compare that with Harem, which is worth $2 and 2VP, and costs $6 to purchase. 2 VP + $1 is a steal. Buying Copper when you only have 1 Goons in play is more situational. If you have a Watchtower in hand so you can trash the Copper, you definitely want to because it's a free VP; if you aren't going to finish cycling through your deck, you definitely buy Copper; if it's early in the game, you probably don't because buying Copper decreases the chance of being able to put together a multi-Goons turn, which is where the real VP explosion happens.

Other exceptions: Apothecary decks will usually want to buy a couple of Coppers throughout the game. Horse Traders + Duke decks only need to produce $5 consistently, which can be done with HT + 2 Coppers + whatever else, so Coppers can help that deck (although no one is certain of when the optimal time is to start purchasing Coppers). If you have a Trader in your hand (from the new Hinterlands expansion), you might choose to buy a Copper so you can trade it into a Silver, although you might not if you are trying to build a crazy engine and need your engine cards to be drawn together. Coppersmith obviously benefits from Copper, but that's a really tough engine to put together for lots of reasons.

Answer 3

shujaa's answer is quite good, and I'd chime in with a few other things:

The Apothecary/Coppersmith combo is quite dangerous, and can give you some damn big turns if you can get some other card draws and +buys into the mix.

If you're pulling most of your deck and have Moneylender or Spice Merchant, it may be worthwhile to use stray +buys on Copper just to keep them fed. Bishop too, but shujaa is right that you're better off tossing Estates or other $2 cards into that wood chipper.

If your deck is utterly polluted with Curses and Estates that you can't get rid of, it may be worth buying Coppers just to make the ghastly suck less dense. Of course, you're probably going to lose pretty hard anyway, but I prefer to go down swinging.

Answer 4

One strategy that sees a lot of play in our group when Goons is around is to use any extra buys for Coppers to get the extra points. This works best when you have other things in your deck to clear the Coppers out afterward.

We've also seen Chancellor/Counting House used rather effectively once or twice.

Answer 5

If you're playing the Golem/Counting House combo you'll want to buy 1 Copper (or 4 in a Colony game). It works like this:

Play Golem, find your single Counting House, but you find no other actions and discard the entire deck after which Counting House puts all Coppers in your hand and you buy a Province/Colony. This strategy is actually quite weak because it needs too much time to set up on average.

Answer 6

I am the furthest thing from a Dominion expert. I have no simulators, no statistical analyses, and no desire to play thousands of games just to answer this question.

But I have played more than a couple of games and I sometimes find it advantageous to buy copper. In situations where there is something consuming copper - like a Mine, or even better - a Moneylender, I frequently find myself taking a copper as the second Buy on a turn when an action has yielded an additional buy. Because I know that later on, I'll be able to use the copper to power a good ability.

It doesn't mean I take the free copper every time, but especially when the Moneylender is in the mix, I try not to run too low on them.