I really enjoyed rspeer's
Evaluate your best and your worst board and was thinking about what other sorts of interesting analyses we could get from Council Room's Popular Buys data. One thing that came to mind was to look at the % column, see what cards end up in your deck most and least often, and try and evaluate a board based on them. The "most often" analysis may not be all that interesting: I mean, I suppose if someone had a board
without Fishing Village then that would be noteworthy, but I'm going to bet there's a lot of overlap: the cheap, obviously powerful non-terminals are bound to be well represented. But trying to find a strategy out of your ten least-bought cards has to be at least a little enlightening.
Anyway, I'll go first:
Most bought (again not counting Archivist):
$6: Border Village (93.
; Goons (93.4)
$5: Hunting Party (94.2); Festival (90.
$4: Tournament (96.5); Remake (94.1)
$3: Fishing Village (97.4); Ambassador (95.5); Menagerie (92.5)
$2: Hamlet (91.1)
Yes, Virginia,
half of my top ten is from Cornucopia. That whole expansion just immediately clicked with me. I mean, I buy Remake more than Chapel! And no Mountebank either! (To be fair, Mt. Bank is #11.) And much like my "best board" the name of the game is pretty obviously a massive Goons engine where Menagerie (which, oh hey, is great against hand reduction, and with disappearing cash, Actions and trashing) can draw the whole deck with ease, though winning the early Ambassador war is probably going to be crucial. I say probably because Remake/Fishing Village into Menageries ASAP might actually be faster at getting to Goons and churning those points, and Remake can deal with the incoming trash pretty well. While I think that winning Tournaments is nearly always crucial, Goons engines are the one situation where getting that Province just isn't as powerful. Festival works great with all these cards, but it's mere support and the other cards are just so powerful; Border Village is normally great but I'd rather spend $6 on more Goons.
Least bought:
$6: Adventurer (10.1)
$5: Explorer (5.4); Counting House (10.1); Cache (11.6); Stash (12.1); Saboteur (12.5)
$4: Thief (3.6); Noble Brigand (6.9); Treasure Map (10.0); Bureaucrat (13.5)
Well this is a much different board! All of the worst five $5 cards are here, and the worst $6, and some of the worst $4s too. (Since Scout is non-terminal it gets bought more often; and I used to mistakenly think Pirate Ship wasn't so terribad). Frankly I'm shocked Thief ended up in my deck this often; looking at buys vs. gains it appears that fully
half of the times I've had a Thief it's because my opponent's Swindler hit a $4 card.
Bureaucrat is easily the most powerful single card in this setup, especially since Treasure Map has no enablers, so on a 4/3 open it's definitely Bureaucrat-BM for me here. The B-crat used to be my third-least bought card but I've grown to like it a lot more lately, sometimes to my detriment (c.f. one of my matches against rspeer in the tournament) but usually not! However, if I had a 5/2 split I'd probably open Cache instead, aiming for Cache/Counting House (I'd probably alternate buying them on $5 hands, or something like that, not sure about the best buy rules), which has pretty respectable synergy.
