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« on: October 03, 2011, 09:07:13 pm »
Let's say you have gardens and embargo in the set. The four plausible enablers of a gardens rush (I would put Market, Hoard as mid or late game gardens, and card such as hamlet and pawn are not enough for rushing) would be Workshop, Ironworks, Woodcutter, and Baron. It's debatable whether the $4s can actually be used effectively on their own.
Anyways, if it is the case that you are gardens rushing with the first two, then embargo may work to your benefit:
Obviously one may choose to embargo $5-8 kingdom cards (and gold and province), but perhaps the most important to embargo may be gardens.
Because your opponent will presumably get less gardens, and is aiming for a cleaner deck, they will be slowed down by garden buys much more than you will, especially if you are using workshops or ironworks as the primary way to get gardens. Moreover if you (or they) have played more than one embargo you may be able to count on curses being emptied if they do choose to buy gardens.
The opponent's usage of embargo might be workshops, coppers, or estates.
The first is not too effective, since you can just gain them with workshops.
The second one is more problematic, since you may not want to take on a large amount of curses early on. In that case it is probably best to not buy coppers, and count cards near the end.
The third is also not so effective. If the opponent does it late game you may have bought enough estates that a couple of curses will not affect much; if they do it early game then you might switch to buying embargoes, which should lead to a fast three pile ending (gardens, embargoes, curses). Of course, they could embargo the embargoes...
I haven't tested this out, unfortunately. Thoughts?
