Governor is kind of a tricky card. It can do a lot of things, each of which also help your opponents, so it’s important to recognize when each of them are good. As a general rule:
1. You only want to use the trash option late, because the free “upgrade” for your opponent is too strong early.
2. You prefer to use the draw option when your opponents can’t take advantage of the larger handsize (i.e. you either have a hand-size reduction attack or it’s the last turn).
3. The gain a gold option is not that bad! While silver helps your opponents, in most decks it’s not even remotely as useful to them as gold is to you, because you can use the gold not only to buy stuff, but to remodel into provinces!
A great way to combine all these abilities is in combination with warehouse. The plan is to open warehouse/silver (or some good money-giving terminal, since governor and warehouse are non-terminal), adding another silver to help you buy a lot of governors, which you buy even with $6. The warehouses will help you play the governors more often to gain a lot of gold, which is the only option you should choose during the mid-game. When it starts to get toward the greening stage, you start remodeling the golds into provinces, and then on your last turn, you set up a mega-turn, using the governor draw abiltiy to draw into a huge hand, which you then shape with warehouses to allow you to remodel into multiple victory cards and buy another. You should be able to net at least 2xprovince+estate like this, and even if you give your opponents 8-card hands, they won’t get to use them if the game is over!
Warehouse is a particularly good partner for governor because the cycling helps you play the governors a lot, and because it’s really easy to put together $5 4-out-of-7-card hands with all the gold you’re gaining. And then it’s great when you have the monster-sized hand from using the draw option. But there are alternative partners. Cellar generally does the same thing but is a bit more likely to leave you with sub-$5 hands, since you can end up drawing and not discarding estates. Trashers can also have a similarly useful effect, since even though you won't see as many cards as with warehouse every turn, you’ll have less junk, which will allow you to still play the governors very often and pair them with golds late game. Adding +buy can also be nice, as you may have excess money to spend on your mega-turn, or you may find a bunch of golds with not enough governors. Even cheap terminal +buy like woodcutter is fine since governor is non-terminal.
Strong against: - trimmed decks (where the silver is disruptive)
Weak against: - terminal drawers (which become much stronger with silver)
- handsize reduction attacks (which counter warehouse and combo more strongly with governor)
Examples:Warehouse:
solitaire,
vs Governor/HP BMCellar:
vs BishopChapel:
solitaire