After that article was written,
michealjb made a significantly stronger engine, which was later linked in the article. One of its innovations is to use Mine to improve money-content rather than buying treasure. Cool!
But actually, I *do* want to talk about michaeljb's strategy a bit: I know his Mine added benefit in the simulator, and I know mine's "not all bad", but whenever I was running that engine I found Gold to be better in most situations. Whenever I started 4/3, I quickly found myself able to draw my whole deck by the time I had a market and was ready to pick up a mine. When you can draw your whole deck and play every action, mine adds +$1 cumulatively every turn, while Gold adds a flat +$3 to every turn. It takes mine 5 turns to pass Gold in total money provided (without even considering the cost of an action), and the game was always finished by that point. I was able to handle the extra bloat from gold via careful use of Cellar to discard VP and copper, taking care to avoid a turn with VP and copper on the top of the deck.
(It's possible I had unusual luck the three times I ran it. I rarely got $5 hands - it was mostly $4 hands until it exploded and I drew the deck.)
Thoughts? Taking michaeljb's results into account, what do people think about the value of Mine here?
