How can I minimize Black Market set up and clean up time?

Question

The Black Market (promotional) card requires considerable set up time.

From description:

Before the game, make a Black Market deck out of one copy of each Kingdom card not in the supply.

There are a few ways to approach this:

1) Follow directions literally: take 1 of the 10 cards from each Kindom. For those with several expansions, this would involve drawing over 100 cards, and even more time consuming, putting away these cards when the game is over. Depending on the number of expansions, this could add anywhere between 3 and 15 minutes overhead per game.

2) When we first got the card we used it a lot. So to save time, we did not put away the extra card - instead we always kept a single card out for each Kingdom. This saves on put away, but when setting up the game you have to find the 10 cards for the game (whether or not Black Market is used), which adds 3-4 minutes to every game.

3) An idea we'll soon try: Use the randomizer cards for the Black Market deck, removing the 10 cards in play (which is especially easy if you randomized Kingdoms for a given game, as you already have the cards out). Then, each time a Kingdom is purchased from the Black Market, the regular card is pulled and placed into the purchaser's discard pile, while the randomizer card is removed from the play area (The back of Randomizer cards are a darker shade of blue so that's why you don't want them mixed in with the regular cards).

(1) is too tedious and we'll never do it. (2) was doable but still a bit of chore. I suspect (3) will be best though we haven't tried it yet.

On the other hand, perhaps Dominion players have come up with better methods?

Obviously this is not an issue with online or other form of electronic play, but I'd like to know about the best way to minimize Black Market set up and clean up time with regular play.

Answer 1

Here's an option used by Donald X. Vaccarino. Instead of using the normal randomizer cards, take one card from each kingdom stack and use those for randomizer cards. When you're doing normal randomization, just add the chosen cards to their respective kingdom stacks, and after the game, take one card from each stack to add back to the new randomizers.

Then, when you play Black Market games, you will have a ready-made Black Market deck! The 10 cards in the kingdom will already be out of the randomizer deck, and the backs are the normal backs so you don't have to pull cards from the box like you do with your option 3.

Donald X. Vaccarino talks about this method here.

Answer 2

You already kind of mentioned it in your question, but the randomiser cards are definitely the way to go. If you're like me, you store them together as one deck, separate from the cards that make up the kingdom supply.

I tend not to use the randomiser cards to generate the supply, but it would be pretty trivial to draw a replacement if you ever draw a card that is already in the supply. Obviously, if you do use them to set up, just don't add them back into the Black Market pile before play.

Since the randomisers also have different backs, it should go without saying that you cannot use the randomiser itself to add to your deck, but you should take a "normal" copy of the card when you decide what to buy.

Answer 3

Some randomizer apps have an electronic solution for this that works with tabletop play, but most of them have some lag when new expansions come out.

Answer 4

With this new, free web-based program, you can create and use your Black Market deck online, only needing to fetch the physical cards when purchased, greatly simplifying game set-up and clean-up.

Answer 5

Another option is to just have a smaller Black Market deck. Each player picks 5 or so cards that aren't being used, and those become the deck. In a two player game you might want to pick 10 each.