I've been meaning to write more short and simple articles in order to try and jump start content creation here and hopefully get more good stuff onto the blog (or wiki). Here's an article about Monastery, a trasher that new players seem to underestimate. If you've been itching to write stuff and want to contribute to the online resources, give something like this a try.
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Monastery is a far more powerful trasher than it may appear to be at first glance. An obvious point of comparison is to how Forager plays in the early game. Like Forager, Monastery does not take an Action, trashes Estates for no (other) benefit, and trashes Coppers without hurting your economy for that turn. Where Monastery shines is that it allows you to trash without sacrificing momentum at all - you don’t give up economy, you don’t have to worry about drawing it dead, and it even trashes faster when used in tandem with gainers or +Buy.
Monastery’s properties allow for more aggressive openings than one would typically do with a trasher. Consider an opening of Smithy / trasher. Normally this is a bit risky - the Smithy could dead draw the other trasher, wasting a shuffle’s worth of trashing, but with Monastery, there is no such risk as it is played after the Buy phase. In addition, you get all of the benefits of Smithy’s extra cycling and economy, leading to more frequent trashing and faster gains. This can quickly snowball into a very potent deck that trashes seemingly without effort.
The synergy with gainers such as Ironworks or Engineer are obvious - gain a card, ideally buy another card, use Monastery to trash twice as much as you normally could. But this synergy often enables even weaker cards such as Silver gainers which you may not otherwise consider. Squire is an interesting example, where it can gain Silvers early to give Monastery an extra trash, provide multiple Buys later for a similar purpose, and can even be upgraded into an Attack card if need be.
The main takeaway from this is that you should adjust how you pace your deck when using Monastery instead of other trashers. In games where you need to get very thin very quickly, opening two trashers is often wise, but that is usually incorrect with Monastery as the collision case risks you being unable to gain a desirable card and you sacrifice some momentum. You do often want two Monastery, but you generally want to pair each Monastery with more aggressive enablers such as draw or gainers to keep things moving.