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[AJD]

Obviously this combo needs some Villages to power it—ideally Fishing, but others will do in a pinch.

The gist of it is that the best time to play Masquerade is when your opponent's handsize has been hit by a Militia or variant thereof. There are two related things that can happen here:

• Your opponent discards their two worst cards in response to the attack, and thus is forced to pass you a good card when the Masquerade hits.
• Your opponent is wise to the possibility of (1), and therefore keeps a bad card in hand after the attack in order to pass to you... and may end up doing this even on turns when you don't end up playing Masquerade. On such turns, your discard attack is effectively making your opponent discard down to more like two and a half cards, rather than three, just to guard against the danger of passing you a good card if you do play Masquerade.

So why Margrave in particular? Two reasons:

• Margrave is the only hand-reduction attack that carries a large +cards for you. (Well, except Torturer; but obviously if you play Torturer on an opponent who thinks you're going to use Masquerade they'll just take the Curse.)  This has a few benefits:
  
  • You cycle your deck faster, which means your opponent is less likely to know that your Masquerade is stuck in the discard pile (and thus that it's safe to discard bad cards).
  • It means you can play Village and Margrave and then draw into your Masquerade and play that—i.e., you have a better chance of hitting the combo, rather than having to draw Village-Margrave-Masquerade in a single five-card hand.
  • On a similar note, compare the case where your discard attack is Militia: if you have two actions and Militia and Masquerade in hand, you can play Militia first and then Masquerade for the combo, but with the danger that Masquerade will dead-draw some nonterminals you'd like to play. With Margrave, your attack draws more cards than Masquerade, so you'd want to play that first anyway even without the combo.
  Ghost Ship fits this pattern to a lesser extent, since you do get +cards out of it, but your opponent top-decking a good card to dodge your Masquerade doesn't bite as much as discarding it and missing it for a whole shuffle.
• The biggest disadvantage to Margrave is that your opponent is choosing what to discard out of six cards rather than out of five. Fear of Masquerade doesn't eliminate that disadvantage relative to other discard attacks—they're still choosing their two good cards to keep out of six—but it does mitigate it a bit.

[brokoli]

I knew the militia/masquerade combo, but Margrave instead of militia is a very good idea.

[mischiefmaker]

The biggest disadvantage to Margrave is that your opponent is choosing what to discard out of six cards rather than out of five. Fear of Masquerade doesn't eliminate that disadvantage relative to other discard attacks—they're still choosing their two good cards to keep out of six—but it does mitigate it a bit.

This cuts both ways, though -- when your opponent chooses his best 3 cards out of 6 instead of 5, there's a good chance he keeps 3 great cards, instead of 2 great cards and one less-good card.

Especially when the kingdom is set up for this combo, since your opponent is likely going to try and keep Village-Margrave-something. If he has to pass you one of those, it's either the treasure that lets him do something with this turn, or it's a piece of the combo that prevents him from playing the combo on his turn.

[DsnowMan]

I thought this would be good to try on a IRL 3p board with inn, it just turned out to be annoying. You get margraved, discard down to inn,margrave & masquerade, hoping your opponenent doesn't masquerade you. Then you play inn, and have to immediately discard the two you drew. It was a bit of a slugfest.