Strategy question: Ordering...King's Court-Throne Room, or, TR-KC??

[santamonica811]

Yesterday, I was playing a random game against Lord Rat.  Came across something I've never seen . . . Kings Court AND Throne Room in the same deck. 

So, assuming you have both in your deck, and some other action.  Does it matter in any way if you go KC, then TR, then the action (as opposed to TR, then KC, then that action)?

My basic math tells me that 2x3 = 3x2, so it should not make any difference.  But maybe it does if you have a fistful of other actions.  Does KC first allow you to play 3 actions, with each one Throned?  Does TR first let you play only 2 actions, but each one tripled?

In real life, I can't imagine coming across this (I'd never intentionally construct a deck with both of these cards in it.).  But since it came up here . . . .

[Ranna156]

if you do a tr on a kc you essentially play 2 actions 3 times vs playing a kc on a tr where you would play 3 actions twice. All depends on your hand and what you want to do for how you decide to order it.

[Geronimoo]

Hand is KC, TR and 3 Laboratories.

KC the TR = 2 * 3 Labs = 12 cards.
TR the KC = 3 * 2 Labs + 1 Lab = 14 cards

[Watno]

I guess there are rare cases where KCing the TR is better (you want to play 3 different cards twice, for example because you need two extra buys, or you want to avoid a reshuffle), but in the majority of cases TRing the KC seems better.

[ehunt]

Here's a heuristic to analyze situations like this.

The reason King's Court is much better than Throne Room (not just 150% as good, like it might seem at first) is that King's Court creates actions from nowhere, i.e. has the effect of playing more actions than you physically should be capable of playing. What does this mean? Throne Rooming a Witch requires two cards and has the effect of playing a good action card twice; this is awesome because ordinarily it takes a Village to play two Witches, but it's not brokenly awesome. King's Courting a Witch is brokenly awesome because it gives you a "card-from-nowhere:" the physical cards King's Court and Witch are somehow worth three Witches.

No matter how many Throne Rooms you play, you always break even; there's never a card from nowhere: Throne Room Throne Room Witch Witch is an awesome play, but it's fundamentally a 4 card play.

On the other hand, King's Courting a King's Court is insanity. It creates a King's Court from nowhere, which can then create more cards from nowhere. KC KC Witch Witch Witch creates a total of 4 cards from nowhere!

If you King's Court a Throne Room, you create 1 "card from nowhere." A total of 6 actions are played, for the cost of 5 cards.
If you Throne Room a King's Court, you create 2 "cards from nowhere." A total of 6 actions are played, for the cost of 4 cards.

So you should prefer to Throne Room a King's Court.

[allanfieldhouse]

When King's Courting King's Courts, the number of (non-KC) actions you end up being able to play is: 2n-1 (where n is the number of KC you play).

The basic explanation for this is that when you're chaining them together, each additional KC uses 1 previous KC play and adds 3 new ones. 3 - 1 = 2. But the very first KC isn't as efficient, so you don't quite get double (hence the -1).