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[WanderingWinder]

Ambassador is possibly the strongest card in the game. I think it rather clearly was pre-Hinterlands, and though it's much weaker now, it still may well be. Having said that, I am always looking for ways to avoid it... 'cause there aren't many. So it was very satisfying to do so today using the combination of: Horse Traders, Explorer, scout, Harem, and duchess... with the possible exception of HT, all cards routinely placed near the bottom for the price points. And working against 1st player advantage. And against a very good player who I can't seem to beat all that consistently. Here's the log:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201112/07/game-20111207-091034-5c379196.html

[philosophyguy]

It was an interesting game, for certain. Why not go for Lighthouses? They would have neutered the Ambassador attack just as easily, and would have allowed you to keep a thinner deck so you saw your HT more frequently.

[Toskk]

I posted about this before.. but I really don't understand the absurdly-high rating the double-Ambassador opening gets. Maybe it makes some sense when you're up against another player also using Ambassador.. but without an influx of Estates and Coppers to volley back at the opponent, I've frequently found that double Ambassador will whittle my own economy down too quickly and clog up. Plus in this case not only is his second Ambassador semi-useless, it also just increases the likelihood of you getting to use your Horse Traders (a card that imo gets underrated). Basically, it really felt like your opponent went into that game expecting a mirror double-Ambassador opening from you.. he went heavy on Lighthouses, and was pretty clearly going to attempt to win the tennis match.. which never happened.

Just to add a little math to this discussion.. the value of Horse Traders after the first reshuffle with a Horse Traders/Silver opening is:

Draw HT with zero Estates: 21.21% chance
Draw HT with one Estate: 50.91% chance
Draw HT with two or more Estates: 27.88% chance

So the coin value of Horse Traders as an opening averages out at $2.0667.. making HT definitely better than a Silver, and it trends toward a Gold as the number of Estates increase.. plus it also is +card against attacks. That's a pretty solid defense card.

[WanderingWinder]

I posted about this before.. but I really don't understand the absurdly-high rating the double-Ambassador opening gets. Maybe it makes some sense when you're up against another player also using Ambassador.. but without an influx of Estates and Coppers to volley back at the opponent, I've frequently found that double Ambassador will whittle my own economy down too quickly and clog up. Plus in this case not only is his second Ambassador semi-useless, it also just increases the likelihood of you getting to use your Horse Traders (a card that imo gets underrated). Basically, it really felt like your opponent went into that game expecting a mirror double-Ambassador opening from you.. he went heavy on Lighthouses, and was pretty clearly going to attempt to win the tennis match.. which never happened.

Just to add a little math to this discussion.. the value of Horse Traders after the first reshuffle with a Horse Traders/Silver opening is:

Draw HT with zero Estates: 21.21% chance
Draw HT with one Estate: 50.91% chance
Draw HT with two or more Estates: 27.88% chance

So the coin value of Horse Traders as an opening averages out at $2.0667.. making HT definitely better than a Silver, and it trends toward a Gold as the number of Estates increase.. plus it also is +card against attacks. That's a pretty solid defense card.

Except that you don't really want to be worrying about expectation values... you want to worry about distributions, hard numbers. Because a 6 card isn't exactly 20% better than a 5, a 5 isn't 25% better than a 4, etc. Expectation values are bad here. I ran the math on HT. It makes you less likely than silver to hit 6, a good bit more likely to hit 5 one or more times.

The lighthouses he bought weren't as defense, but rather 'cause he didn't have enough for silver.
And I also find that amb/amb is much better against players who get at least one amb themselves OR on boards with villages, where you can really pound them.

[DG]

It's not a great kingdom for double ambassador. There are no extra actions, the extra buy is on the wrong sort of cards, there are good defences with the lighthouse and horse traders, the harems help a big deck player, and there's no extra drawing to facilitate a tight deck. There might be some good partner cards for a single ambassador though.

[Geronimoo]

As DG said, if the Ambassador player just goes for big money after the ping ponging, a lot of cards will beat it. If however he can transition in some sort of engine, the advantage of the trimmed deck will be huge.

[Mean Mr Mustard]

I played a game a few days ago where my opponent opened double ambassador and I went for a silk road strategy... well that was the plan.  As it turned out I got lucky and bought 4 Golds by turn 8 and won on Provinces.

I started to write an annotated article about the match, but as I studied the log the horrible mistakes my opponent committed coupled with my near-perfect luck made it impossible to use the match as an example of a counter-Ambassador strat.  But I am still curious; how is a silk road strat vs. ambassador?  It seems that the starting cards passed over would not hurt dedicated SR/Estate/Duchy.

[Elyv]

I posted about this before.. but I really don't understand the absurdly-high rating the double-Ambassador opening gets. Maybe it makes some sense when you're up against another player also using Ambassador.. but without an influx of Estates and Coppers to volley back at the opponent, I've frequently found that double Ambassador will whittle my own economy down too quickly and clog up. Plus in this case not only is his second Ambassador semi-useless, it also just increases the likelihood of you getting to use your Horse Traders (a card that imo gets underrated).

I think what it comes down to is, even though double amb is worse than single ambassador against an opponent who isn't ambassadoring, the card is so good that you usually end up beating them anyway, and double ambassador beats single ambassador. That said, someone on this forum was advocating opening amb/silver and then getting a second ambassador on turns 3 or 4, and I've found that I actually like that more than amb/amb on most boards.

On an unrelated note, the only time I can ever remember beating ambassador with a deck full of crap was this game, where I fall behind on the ambassador war pretty quickly, and start buying green cards. I don't think my opponent played his best(if you can consistently draw your deck, it might not be time to get rid of all your coppers, for instance. Also, so many black markets), but it was still kind of cool.

[Reyk]

Congrats WW.
I agree that Double Amb wasn't a good idea. Even more so as you already gave some hint starting with Horse Traders.
I still think it would have been difficult against single Amb. Another idea for ObiWan might have been a Curse buy at turn 5 instead of the Lighthouse. But with Lighthouse on the board and without a consistent engine to draw Amb/Curse together it's probably too slow anyway.

[michaeljb]

As DG said, if the Ambassador player just goes for big money after the ping ponging, a lot of cards will beat it. If however he can transition in some sort of engine, the advantage of the trimmed deck will be huge.

Some of my favorite wins have been games where I build such a deck and come from a 4-0 or 3-0 Province deficit. Requires some particular parts to work or it can end up falling just short, but when it works out it's a blast.

[painted_cow]

This board is really not good for a good Ambassador deck. No Villages and buys. Ambassador and plain BigMoney, isnt that good. Otherwise you would have had some curses in your deck :-)

I dont like going Amb/Amb at all, without 3-cost-Villages.

[hobo386]

Just had a board similar to this with HT/Ambassador and no amazing engines.  Needless to say, after reading this I won .

Horse Traders is actually a really good counter to ambassador because it doesn't matter if you eat up all those extra estates.