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[randomdragoon]

Village + Smithy is one of the first combos many beginning Dominion players see, especially since it's present on the recommended first set of 10. It also happens to be pretty terrible of a combo.

I had this thought experiment back when I was playing on BSW, and it made me realize why my old foolish days of playing village/smithy were horribly misguided. Here it is:

Say that the only cards available are the basics, village, and smithy.

- I am buying my first actions card. Will I take a Village or Smithy? Well, the village doesn't do anything (it replaces itself), so I should get a Smithy, because it actually helps my deck.
- I am thinking about a second action card. If I get a second smithy they might collide and make me a sad panda. What about a village? Wait, taking this village makes my deck worse! I might draw the village in my hand, in which case it replaces itself, but I don't have two other actions so it won't do any good. If I draw the village with the smithy, it's dead! That could have been a silver or something. That would have been way better.
- I guess I should get a second smithy then.
- A village now? If I get my dream hand of village, smithy, smithy, I can draw a lot of cards! Wouldn't that feel nice. On the other hand, I might draw my village with my smithy, same problem as above. Yech. What are the chances I get all of my action cards together like that anyway? A silver is probably more helpful to me...
- A third smithy? That's just asking for mega terminal collision at this point.
- Maybe I should just get a lot of villages, to make sure I draw one with dual smithies. Man, I feel like a village idiot doing this. Meanwhile, my opponents are starting to take provinces, while my deck isn't really improving in a meaningful way -- the two smithies aren't really glued together or anything, I'll spend turns playing village-village-village-smithy, not knowing where my second smithy is.
- You know what? Villages aren't helpful in this setup. I'll just get silvers instead.
- My smithies draw silvers, and I am happy buying provinces while my opponent complains that he drew his villages and smithies in the wrong order.

+cards/+actions can make some pretty scary engines, but they had better have more going for them than village/smithy or you'll be too slow to grab the green cards before they're gone.

[Anon79]

(1) I disagree with your analysis for 3rd card, and perhaps even with your 2nd card. If you buy a 2nd Smithy, you now have more ways to make your Smithies collide (drawn together in same hand of 5, or Smithy A draws Smithy B, or Smithy B draws Smithy A). With a Village, only one of those is happening. Certainly when it comes to the third card with 2 Smithies, Village is helping loads.

(2) Just because your general strategy is Village/Smithy doesn't mean that you're barred from buying a single Silver (or Tournament).

[kn1tt3r]

Just get a single Smithy and money and forget about those Village chains. Without +buy there's no point in drawing the whole deck anyway.

[ARTjoMS]

Great, another player has realized that pure smithy+money>pure villages+smithies.
Very well done.

I will just add that there are 10 cards in kingdom and some of them might give some benefit for village+smithy.

1) militia, torturer,ghost ship, goons. Hand size decreasing attacks that you will be eventually be able to play every turn. Rabble.
2) workshop,ironworks,horn of plenty,talisman. - to speed up engine building and not only (horn of plenty)
3) copper smith, bank if you have extra buys.
4) tournament (gives you 8th coin for province and you have engine that allows you to get those prizes), conspirator, peddler.
5) cards like baron, horse traders. Extra buy, you get some good extra use of your estates.
6) remodel, remake, salvager, steward, upgrade,expand,forge,moneylender, mint, trade route,bishop - you benefit from slow trashing, that helps you to improve deck and helps you accelerate VP collecting for final turns.
7) monument, outpost, apothercary, scrying pool, university, alchemist, possession, vineyard, black market, fairgrounds
kings court, throne room.
9) cards that generally give you +buy.

[timchen]

While the end result is correct, the reasoning clearly isn't.

Note that there is entirely no reason why your buy has to optimize your current deck. One of the key advances to a better player, I assume, is to consider both things: how a buy affect your deck immediately and how it will be a role in the deck you are building up to.

Or for an example, strictly following this logic opening chapel won't do any good. The starting deck only gets worse, in terms of buying power, with that extra chapel.

[randomdragoon]

(1) I disagree with your analysis for 3rd card, and perhaps even with your 2nd card. If you buy a 2nd Smithy, you now have more ways to make your Smithies collide (drawn together in same hand of 5, or Smithy A draws Smithy B, or Smithy B draws Smithy A). With a Village, only one of those is happening. Certainly when it comes to the third card with 2 Smithies, Village is helping loads.

With a village, you have additional bad cases (cases where village is worse than nothing):

Smithy A draws Village
Smithy A draws Smithy B and village
Smithy B draws Smithy A and village
Smithy B draws village

The following cases are made better:
Village+Smithy A+Smithy B in hand
Village+Smithy A, draw Smithy B
Village+Smithy B, draw Smithy A

All other cases are equal to before. I'm not convinced that the village would be helping loads if you have just two smithies in an untrimmed deck.

While the end result is correct, the reasoning clearly isn't.

Note that there is entirely no reason why your buy has to optimize your current deck. One of the key advances to a better player, I assume, is to consider both things: how a buy affect your deck immediately and how it will be a role in the deck you are building up to.

Or for an example, strictly following this logic opening chapel won't do any good. The starting deck only gets worse, in terms of buying power, with that extra chapel.

Maybe not, but you usually want some pretty near-term benefits to buying a card, and the longer you have to wait, the better the reward ought to be. Chapel makes your deck much better very soon after you buy it. Villages in a deck with smithies do no such thing; you will need some kind of huge reward from a third card (goons for example) in order for it to be worth it.  Is monument a good enough reward? Probably not.

[timchen]

Maybe not, but you usually want some pretty near-term benefits to buying a card, and the longer you have to wait, the better the reward ought to be. Chapel makes your deck much better very soon after you buy it. Villages in a deck with smithies do no such thing; you will need some kind of huge reward from a third card (goons for example) in order for it to be worth it.  Is monument a good enough reward? Probably not.

Well, sure you can try to think this way, but I don't think it is the most fruitful approach. Usually I would think in terms of what my deck should be when the engine sort-of completed. For (an again old) example, if the kingdom cards are just Village, Smithy, and Remodel, I am quite certain the opening should be village+remodel. This would be quite hard to explain in terms of short-term gains. I think this kind of statement always depends on the setup; after all the winning condition is to have the most VP only when the game ends. Any claim about how a mid game state assumes a certain way of building up the deck, which may not always be the case. Indeed, if you do the silver test for your buy every turn, what you wind up with would always be some BM+x strategy.

[Anon79]

Playing Village + Smithy has the same effect as playing 2 Labs. And Lab seems to be receiving quite a lot of love around here.

Of course PURE Village + Smithy doesn't do well, you need to buy money in conjunction with it. Just like a PURE Lab deck which buys only Labs, with no Silver or no Gold (if I recall correctly, there's a graph showing that a Lab advantage has a higher correlation with win rate than a Gold advantage) will never buy Provinces with only $7 in the deck. But I think a single Silver is often sufficient, say opening with Silver/Smithy and after that just getting Provinces, Golds, Villages and Smithies (not that you expect many hands of <$6 after the first reshuffle) does better than you give it credit for. Certainly with a Silver/Smithy opening you expect to pick up a Gold on Turn 3/4 more often than not, which also diminishes the value of Silver thereon.

[Razzishi]

But I think a single Silver is often sufficient, say opening with Silver/Smithy and after that just getting Provinces, Golds, Villages and Smithies (not that you expect many hands of <$6 after the first reshuffle) does better than you give it credit for. Certainly with a Silver/Smithy opening you expect to pick up a Gold on Turn 3/4 more often than not, which also diminishes the value of Silver thereon.

You can do pretty much just as well completely ignoring Villages and just buying 1 Smithy early and a 2nd smithy if you get stuck at $4 mid-game.  In such a case you have a small chance of the Smithies colliding, but you'll average a higher buy power.  Simulations show Single Smithy dominating a Village/Smithy strategy unless the latter buys a large number of Silver before getting Villages, to the point where they just don't ever buy any.  Buying a second Smithy after reaching 10-15 treasure in the deck is a marginal (1-2%) improvement, but adding a single Village on top of that makes it tank.