http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160603/log.0.1464918655452.txt
You cannot play this Alchemist/Stables draw your deck thing and keep 7 Coppers while there's a Spice Merchant on the board. Get one over the 1st or 2nd Potion. On turn 19 you take a Duchy but there's no close 3 pile, you still aren't drawing your deck consistently and you haven't even bought a Province yet. Then you just keep greening aggressively which makes all your Lab variants awful. You can beat him with Province points, but you have to be able to buy Provinces consistently first.
ok, thanks for taking a look at these! i'm never clear on what to do with stables, because in the past i've trashed too much copper and gotten dead hands from that. i think part of it was also that in these junking games where you can't clean up the junk so well, i lose a lot when i focus on trashing copper and building; an opponent who just buys 50 silvers and duchies tends to beat me. if something like sea hag or mountebank is on the board, i've developed this habit of just rushing duchies and trying to end the game before my opponent gets provinces. it wins much more often than not in my normal ranked games, so i keep doing it.
i guess here the difference is the nonterminal draw being so strong, making it easier to get rid of the curses?
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160603/log.0.1464917761875.txt
Can't say I care much for the Ghost Ship, I like his Haggler a lot more. The attack hurts some, but between Vagrant/Cart/SP there's a lot here to mitigate it. Presence of Vagrant makes the Haggler pretty safe and then of course you can keep feeding in Cartographers and Markets as you buy Provinces. Not a fan of either player's Duchess buy, yours is a little better than his. Do not buy a Duchy turn 18, the game is not ending and you aren't even behind in points, get a Cartographer. Again, you start scrambling for points while there's a stack of Provinces waiting for some guy with a nice consistent deck to pick them up.
yep, you've caught on to another little habit of mine. i practically ALWAYS get ghost ship in the first 2 shuffles, because that early it seems like the best attack in the game to me...and the early game is supposed to be more important than the late-game, no? i guess here the main issue is that the counters are so cheap, which isn't normally the case.
also, i honestly forgot that haggler lets you get $2s with scrying pools. =P
re: greening, i get really scared of someone with all 8 gardens. like, there's no way i can get all the provinces before they end the game, right? and i figure i would need more points than provinces to beat that. this is something i don't have much experience with, as we tend to mirror gardens or both ignore it.
EDIT: regarding your other post...i'm really more interested in psychological things beyond the game itself. i'll sound like Legendary Game Designer David Sirlin for a second here, but i've long viewed competitive games as tests of ideologies and a way to prepare you for bigger things in real life. if i lose, it must be that my core ideology was weaker on some level.
that's why i try to go into these big questions from individual games. well that, and i'm used to a scene where 2-out-of-3 is supposed to tell you who the better player is; if it doesn't, people there think it means the game is too random/scrubby and badly designed. intellectually i know that's probably wrong, but it's hard to shake that!
