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[philosophyguy]

One area that my play is extremely weak is spying/deck inspection abilities. I get the basics (use Navigator to discard junk hands and hurry up a reshuffle, discard your opponent's power card with a Spy, etc.), but I'm not good at valuing these abilities on a given board.

I'd like this thread to be a place for people to post feedback and/or example games of how they used spying abilities for a big edge, or how they decided that spying was/was not valuable given the specific kingdom setup. Help me learn to be a better Bond!

[jomini]

Well the big edges from spying come from conditional drawing and differential attack cards.

Start with the latter. Spies get a lot more valuable when you are going to pair them with your attack cards - namely jester and swindler. Being able to fish until you can leave something strong on top is radically powerful (the best being things like late game province -> peddler swindles or leaving top deck plat to jester). This can also be valuable for tribute where you want to leave things like islands or harems on top.

The biggie for conditional drawing is where you either only be able to draw certain cards (or card types) or where you can lace together strong cycling. For instance apothecary/spy is insanely good. Apothecary will leave up your green and actions allowing you to engineer spy sequences of: draw the card you want, discard a green (or whatever), draw, discard. Other times when you will want conditional drawing are things like scrying pool where dumping the odd treasure or green card can go a long way (also the synergy free draw of spies with SP is huge, as is the ability to churn through a long streak of killer opponent cards). Spies are also strong when you have cards with dangerous plays - upgrade being the prime example - knowing what you are going to hit can tell you when you should pass.

In general, spies get more powerful the more uneven your deck distribution. A pure silver deck gets much less benefit from spies than a deck of mixed plat and copper. High variance is good for spies. Cards that create high variance are things like KC, TR, Plat (highest variant card out there IMO), baron, etc. I'd easily say that spy is effectively +1 action +1.5 cards (given that you will play disproportionately more of your good cards and your opponent fewer, on some boards I'd even say that could go up to +1 action /+2 cards effectively).

[DG]

Jomini has some good points there so I won't repeat them. A spy becomes better if
- silver is a poor addition to your deck
- you've a better plan to gain vp other than a steady incremental purchase of treasure
- the top cards from the decks are drawn in current turns rather than subsequent turns - the spy delivers benefit sooner
- there is no way for your opponent to use bad cards for benefit (vault, cellar, trade route)
- your opponent has no defence for the top of their deck (native village) or defences generally (horse traders)
- you know which cards will be discarded and which will be kept (no point cycling your opponent's deck for free)