Great example, thx. It also shows, how effective Tacticians can be in dealing even more damage.
Still, I wonder why you went for cutpurse before the sea hag. Could you please explain this move to me?
You want to Curse-flood your opponent either
before his deck has become trim/strong enough to draw its trasher each turn, or
after it has grown so bloated again that it no longer does. Immediately past the early game there can be this period during which you're able to deal with the Curses at the rate you receive them, but this extends neither to the early game itself (early Curses much delay you getting beyond it in the first place) nor necessarily to the late mid-game and beyond, especially not when someone thoughtlessly starts to green.
When I bought the Cutpurse, my opponent had a relatively trim deck and was still building, so getting a Sea Hag at this point would have been a mistake. Moreover, I was still building the engine myself, and for that I really needed more virtual coin, as a provider of which Cutpurse is better than a third Steward because it would either do some harm or provide me information.
Only after my opponent "revealed his hand" by going heavily for green and thus bloating his deck did I get the Hag. If he had kept building, I would have kept seeing Sea Hag as just a possible tool for future use.
Btw: I have been paralyzed about doubleWitch and WitchChapel being equally fine strategies. I thought ChapelWitch to be superior, but the simulations proves both to be about equally strong (in big money). In genral, I'm overestimating trashing, I fear.
No, I'm close to 100% sure you're underestimating trashing because all but a handful of players do, and it's pretty much impossible to overestimate without believing something as evidently retarded as that deliberately trashing your key cards without any gain whatsoever is a good thing. Incidentally, two weeks ago in a moment of weakness I succumbed to the silly thought "Apprentice is too slow as a Copper trasher"; fortunately Stef was there to show me
the way back to sanity.
What you're vastly overestimating, however, is the relevance Big Money has to... basically anything. The only reason Big Money is such a prominent concept is that it's easy to understand, easy to discuss and easy to program. It's always available as an option but very rarely any good, it's an edge case in the strategic landscape, and perhaps that explains this forum's obsession with it best.
Chapel is one of the strongest cards in the game. Chapel-Witch-BM being on par with Double-Witch-BM doesn't imply that Chapel is weak, it's a consequence of BM in general and Chapel-BM in particular being awful. Chapel-Witch-Engine should crush Double-Witch-BM for all reasonable and most unreasonable implementations of Engine.
I also wonder, if you have Witch and Chapel in hand in turn 3/4, which of those would you play? With three coppers, I would tend to pülay the witch and get a silver, otherwise I would tend to trash the remaining cards and hope to get the witch played more often.
Always play the Chapel. In the early game trashing should have priority over anything else, and this is all the more true when it concerns your first Chapel turn. Removing three junk cards from your own deck is far more valuable than adding one to your opponent's.
