I dislike cards that encourage simple strategies (only that card+Big Money, for example). Things like Cultist, Jack of All Trades, to a lesser extent Minion (it does function with a few other Action cards).
I'm also annoyed by cards that are simply too weak to ever bother with, such as Chancellor, Thief and Scout.
Chancellor actually isn't very weak, Thief has it's place in some decks, and even Scout isn't always 'too weak to bother with.'
So, I think this is becoming a repeat of that scout article you tried to write. I'm not sure exactly where the disconnect is between what everyone else agrees to be true and what you believe about cards like these (although I'm more with you than not on Thief). I THINK it might be that you are missing the idea of opportunity cost?
So, like you keep saying things along the lines of "chancellor's power is better than a silver by itself" which is quite clearly true, but I think misses the costs of buying chancellor over, at the very worst, a silver (although on most boards there will be another 3 or 4 cost you want more than both chancellor and silver, for varying reasons. Let's walk through some of the problems of buying a chancellor instead of say, a silver.
- Problem 1: If you have any terminal draw in your deck, which you will quite often want (like, way more often than you want chancellor), you have a chance of drawing chancellor dead, lowering the value of that hand by $2.
- Problem 2: Ok, so you recognize the nice benefit that chancellor provides of cycling you quickly, so that on turn 3, when you draw Chancellor, CopperX3, Estate, you can instantly shuffle in your 5-cost you really want in your deck (and you seem to get this, which is actually one of the more tricky concepts for a lot of people to get).
But now when your Mountebank or whatever your 5 cost is collides with your Chancellor, your Chancellor is again a dead card, lowering your hand value by $2 again. In fact, this is a basic concept of not wanting terminals to collide. Unless you will never be buying another terminal in the game, you probably don't want chancellor, because, ok, so that ability he has is nice, but not as nice as that other terminal you want.
So, ok, you're aware that you might have a terminal collision so you add a couple villages to make sure that doesn't happen. Well now you've spent 3 buys on a fancy silver. Probably not the best use of buys/money.
- Problem 3: In any sort of engine board, you don't want stop cards. Chancellor is a stop card.
So the basic problem is that if you plan on having any other terminals in your deck... ever, then chancellor is probably worse for your deck than silver, because it's benefit is worse than the cost. Note that if you tweak it just a little into scavenger, it's suddenly much more useful in many more games, even at the higher cost.
But, ok, so yeah maybe the board is so weak that chancellor/big money is actually the best thing doing! It's certainly possible. So let's just see how often that happens.
Here's a list of my latest games where chancellor was on the board. Let's just see if there are any other terminals in each game that I would want in each game, which might make it so I don't buy chancellor.
Game 1 - Goons Game 2 - Butcher Game 3 - Ghost Ship Game 4 - Vault if I'm going big money, probably no terminals if I'm not. Game 5 - Goons Game 6 - Nobles/Courtyard Game 7 - Butcher Game 8 - Cutpurse Game 9 - Masquerade Game 10 - Ambassador.
I mean, are there any of these games where you'd prefer chancellor in your deck to the card listed? Mayyybe game 8? The point is, when people say chancellor is weak, they mean that when they look at a board, it takes like 1 second to be decide that chancellor is completely ignorable because there is some other terminal they want more, so chancellor is worse than silver.
The same goes with scout. Ok, so you can come up with some contrived situations where you are not SUPER unhappy to have scout in your deck. But it's very rare that there wasn't another card that you could have bought instead of scout that you want in your deck more. Hope this helps.
