http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20140910/log.5136e2dee4b07cef820a1126.1410374285806.txtHamlet, Village, Horse Traders, Navigator, Pirate Ship, Spice Merchant, Spy, Governor, Junk Dealer, Forge
On this board, it's pretty obvious that mass Governor is the way to go. There's literally nothing else going on. So, both me and my opponent went for it. I considered opening Silver/Spice Merchant, but then I thought that hitting $5 early is very important here, and that I wouldn't mind postponing the trashing a little bit since Junk Dealer is better than Spice Merchant anyway and I'd be cycling extremely fast with all of the Governors getting played for +cards. Therefore, I opened Horse Traders and hit $5 on turn 4. My opponent opened Spice Merchant and didn't hit $5 until turn 5. Then I won the Governor split 6-4 and then I won the game. My opponent thinks this was an "RNG win", but I think that the different openings played an important factor here. If you look at the log, you'll see that if he had opened HT as well, he would have had $5 as well, and if I had opened SM, I wouldn't have had $5 either.
On the other hand, opening Horse Traders when Spice Merchant is available feels, admittedly, pretty weird. It still has to be the correct play, right? You wouldn't want Navigator either since it causes an unwanted reshuffle as often as it makes your next shuffle happen one turn earlier, and HT is at least better than Silver since it's going to be the only terminal in your deck anyway, and the other options are just obviously out of the question.