alright, i'll give some more detailed responses now...
Seprix & Dingan, thank you for all your breakdowns! thing is, i just can't believe someone like SCSN or Dan says "just screw it i'm doing this thing" in the opening. like, there's gotta be a level where you're fully in control, no?
jsh: "You're 80th on the leaderboard; that is very impressive." thing is, i was 25th a few weeks ago! hard for that not to feel rough, ya know? i figured i probably wasn't as good as that suggested but...
iguanaiguana: trust me, i knew i was very lucky to walk away with that first game. the gardens one i just didn't see a way to stop at all - i'm not used to gardens being relevant in a scrying pool game, and once you started i couldn't find any way to keep up in points. was i supposed to snipe some gardens from you or what? the stonemason/feodum one also felt to me like you had the better deck, or at least i couldn't figure out a way to beat it.
Dan Brooks: "Losing is good. It let's you figure out what works, what doesn't, and how different combinations of cards interact." thing is, i've never been great at figuring out precisely why i lost. here's another core issue: i build this set of rules & logic for a game, and can never understand when it loses because that destroys everything i ever knew about the game. i can look at the log, but i can't bring myself to believe that what my opponent did was really better if it's the opposite of what everyone here says.
in today's league match, there was one board with heavy trashing (chapel + amulet) & grand market. no villages or draw, but smugglers was there for a bit of gaining. my plan was to open chapel/amulet, go all-out with trashing, then gain silvers with amulet to grab a grand market. my opponent had a 5/2 and opened chapel/stash. he had rather bad early draws while i had pretty good ones, but he bought a silver early to go along with that stash. i think he then gained one silver from the amulet, and got a grand market the turn before i did. this led to him winning the split 6-4, and i had no answer after that. i don't know how to learn from a game like that, because i was winning the trashing race by a mile and that's supposed to be the most important thing.
another game from that same match had a similar issue. king's court/wharf was the big thing, and we both opened forager/ironworks (board had market square & village, along with training to power up those villages). i got a 2nd forager during the 2nd shuffle, while my opponent stuck with one forager; they got wharves and training really early, while i didn't buy a wharf until turn 11. i just thought whenever forager's the only trasher you want AT LEAST 2 of them, and had never seen a situation where 1 was the right number. i guess the ironworks was what made 2nd forager bad? i swear i've lost like 50 wharf games in this exact fashion but i never learn, because i can't imagine playing dominion in a way besides "trashtrashtrashTRASHYOUIDIOT KEEP TRASHING". tournament, inheritance, governor...anything like that will destroy me, because people play in a way i think is SUPPOSED to lose and it works for those cards.
thanks again everyone, i like to see people engage with the real core-level stuff here as opposed to just dominion cards!