(this is a series where I take a real game I've played against a real opponent, and analyze the board in as much detail as I find necessary, trying to figure out how it should be played. I've not selected specifically interesting boards, I will go with whatever game happens whenever I decide to do a game like this. It is mostly an exercise for me to become a stronger player, but hopefully we can all learn something through discussion and shared analysis.)
Game #1
Feast, Jester, Margrave, Nobles, Remodel, Thief, Trading Post, Tribute, Walled Village, Witch, !Colony
4/3 opening, going first.
The key card early is Witch. You want to play it early, and often.
Option #1 is to open Feast/Silver, looking to get two early Witches and play them often with Walled Villages. This would transition into more of an engine, with Silver at 3, Walled Village at 4, Nobles at 6, and at 5 you'd likely want to pick up a Trading Post quickly, and possibly a Margrave in the midgame (although the +buy isn't that likely to be important on this board; as the cards you want are not cheap, it's not very likely you'll be able to start picking up stuff like Walled Village+Nobles with $10, and at that point you might prefer Province anyway if you can draw most of your deck reliably enough to get there). It's possible Tribute could be a nice card to pick up at $5 too in the midgame, and Remodel could be reasonable in the mid/endgame to turn Nobles into Provinces to accelerate the game ending.
Option #2 is to go for a deck focusing less on enginey things and go more for a money approach. Silver/Silver or Feast/Silver opening, looking to buy two early Witch, Silver on 3/4, Gold over Nobles at 6, and $5 cards to pick up would probably be.. Margrave? In a deck like this with less reliable card draw, Trading Post shouldn't be very impressive in the midgame since you can't reasonably rely on it to get rid of the cards you really want to get rid of (Curses primarily). Even buying Margrave might be bad as that would add a third/fourth terminal draw action; then again that might not be the worst as you're probably adding around 5 Curses to your deck, so clashing is less of an issue than normal.
After writing this out, I played a test game between the two strategies, and as I predicted option #1 crushed pretty hard. I would expect it to win very comfortably over the more money-centric approach if the two kept playing for a long time:
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201207/22/game-20120722-181313-818d312e.htmlTrading Post seemed key here, to the point where I think the Money deck would want to add one early too. As mentioned above, it would run into problems of not being able to draw it consistently, or drawing it dead, too often, and at that point I believe the deck would want to morph into something like deck #1 anyway.
Some questions to get discussion started:
What do you think the optimal strategy on this board looks like? Does it involve Nobles over Gold? Is it close?
Knowing your opponent would go for this optimal strategy, what adjustments, if any, would you make to your own strategy to gain an edge? Does Jester come into play here at all?
Feast/Silver, Silver/Silver, or other for the opening? Why? Is it close?
What parts of my analysis do you disagree with? Why? What key things have I missed in my analysis?
General discussion is also very welcome!
