Early and often is the conventional dominion strategy for cursing attacks. And it's true most of the time: we figured out awhile ago that the real terror of a deck bloated with curses is not the negative VP, but rather that dead cards in your hand are incredibly damaging. It follows from this that we want to distribute curses, and thus kill your opponents deck, as quickly as possible.
Four cursegivers sometimes create exceptions to this rule, for various reasons:
1) FollowersThis exception is the most obvious, and has two reasons; One, it's nearly impossible to get followers into your deck "quickly", and two: Followers junks up your deck as much as your opponents. Surprisingly, followers could be considered a card closer to Goons than say, Mountebank.
2) Young Witch with a mediocre or worse bane.A case could be made that this is similar to any curser with Moat on the board, but 85% of the time the bane will be significantly better than moat (15%, i'm looking at you, secret chamber and moat); so much so that it's really a different case.
Your opponent might pick up one or even two banes in the opening, making young witch a relatively weak prospect. But in the midgame if they continue to spam the weakish bane, you're going to pretty easily cruise to a victory with your superior cards. If they ignore the bane outside the 1-2 from the opening, midgame their is often bloated enough that you can significantly slow them down if you start focusing on cursing then with a
well timed buy*. Is the only reason this works psychological (meaning that with perfect play this case wouldn't exist)? Probably. But you're opponents
are human, so it works. This is especially true if you find that you actually will benefit from the effect of young witch in your deck.
3) Ill Gotten Gains with trashingWe have mastered IGG down to a science. The IGG rush is one of the most methodically crushing strategies, so much so that people find it boring. The IGG Rush works well without trashing, or even with some trash for benefits (Expand, Salvager, Apprentice, remake to an extent) but fails hard against other trashers (Lookout, Masquerade, sometimes Forge, Chapel). You should probably ignore IGG in any of those cases.
Except you shouldn't. Like young witch and her banes, people won't buy those trashers en mass (unless it's masquerade. I do not endorse trying IGG if your opponent has more than one masquerade on any circumstances, ever.) So while an all out IGG rush against those cards is very likely to fail without support,
a well timed buy* or two can be a major annoyance, though not a crushing blow, to your opponents deck.
So whats a
well timed buy* anyways? When you elect to curse midgame with young witch or IGG, you really want to pay attention to the shuffles. The closer
your opponent is to the shuffle, the better the time it is to start buying IGG. The closer
you are to a reshuffle (or if your cycling your deck each turn), the better the the time it is for you to buy young witch. This is, once again, due to the somewhat subjective psychological aspect of dominion and limiting your opponents timing; if your opponent has one or two more hands in their shuffle, they might love to buy another masquerade to counter your curse, but they draw 6$ and now would have to severely overpay for a counter.
4) Familiar Familiar is probably the most maligned curser. This is because of its immense cost due to the way we play dominion on isotropic (if whenever we played with a potion cost we played with 3-5 of them, people would have a much higher opinion of all potion cards, even transmute.) But the nay-sayers are right: Opening potion-silver is often a mistake with trashing on a board: Geronimoos unoptimized familiar bot beats the unoptimized remake bot only 52-45; a small margin for a curser. With other things aiding trashers, Remake is often a far better opener than familiar because familiar kills your economy in the short term (the potion is like a curse) while remake will jumpstart theirs too quickly for familiar to slow them down.
But as with the other cards, a potion doesn't necessarily need to be bought in the first round or not at all.
Look at the following game:
http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20120421-140353-f310ab74.html With spice merchant and remake on the board, both me and Michael Harris think that familiar is against too much trashing and open remake/silver. On the second reshuffle I hit
remake-C-C-C-C, while he hits Remake-E-E-C-C, essentially killing my chances at winning a mirror match. Shifting my strategy, I pick up a potion on turn 5 and proceed to fill him with 8 of the ten curses (I took two from his torturer when I could trash them). He successfully trashes them all, but the curses slow him down so much that I eek out a 4 point victory. Except for perhaps buying one too many nobles, Michael Harris played his strategy close to optimally, making me believe it was the decision to grab familiars that let me win.
Note also that if I opening potion-silver, remake-spice merchant would almost certainly have crushed me (guessing that the odds are roughly 75-25 there)
