Oh yeah, and there are more cards that are hard to understand for newbies: almost all alt VP cards, and GOONS. But once you know about them, I find it relatively easy to go with it. So I would define high-skill cards as cards which are hard to master - just like Procession.
I agree. Procession remains a total mystery to me (as you would expect from my very mediocre rating, I guess). But I think there are levels of mastery, too. So after one or two games where you got clobbered, most people would realize that Apprentice trashing Gold can definitely be a thing. And having Market Square in hand when you trash something to gain Gold is an obvious thing. But I think you have to be pretty highly skilled to control the implied chain reaction and do something like this:
http://www.gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?20150407/log.51201cbee4b04e88c8da4f9a.1428458758346.txt
Yes, that's just your ordinary "buy 7 Provinces in two turns" plan. (Note: Mic Q also streamed this game, and pointed out some sloppy play on his part...wish I could be so sloppy.)
This is flattering, but trust me, it's not that hard to do. And it's definitely not original to me in any way. You can find a post in these very forums where I say something like "Apprentice / Market Square can't be fast enough without other trashing" and then AI says something like "Nope, you're wrong" (in a nice way probably) and so I played some solitaire games and I'm like "I'm a moron, Apprentice / MS works without support." And the rest is just practicing it once or twice.
Don't buy into the myth of the genius Dominion player, remember we're all morons.
Here are some things about Apprentice / MS (which I have been thinking about a bit because I played it in the game above, and WW-AdamH played it in their match)
- Don't activate Market Squares too early in the game, you only want early Golds if you are struggling to buy a few Apprentices. Otherwise just play the Market Squares so that you can cycle to your Apprentices faster, the most important thing is getting thin. This is also true of say Chapel/MS.
- Once your chain is set up, don't auto-activate MS. You won't cost yourself Gold gains unless one of your Apprentice plays is going to overdraw the deck. If you are going to play multiple Apprentices anyway, it's okay to wait to activate until right before a shuffle. By keeping the MS in hand you give yourself an out (playing them as cantrips for a few more cards) in case you haven't yet managed to draw your next Gold/Apprentice pair.
- Don't assume you need to win the MS split. You can see in the log above that 4 works just fine. You don't want to end up with 2-3 probably, but you don't need to rush to buy 6 of them. There might be other $3 cards which help you play Apprentice more often (like Sage or Warehouse). Of course you might opportunistically take the split 7-3 (or 8-2) in denial if the opportunity presents itself, but that seems unlikely.