1. These cards are actually ignorable a non-negligible percentage of the time.
Non-negligible ? Ok, we have gardens, trader, lighthouse, masquerade... but even, Witch and mountebank are too often dominant, really.
Well, how often is too often, and how dominant is dominant? It's a matter of taste, but it's not so much about specific cards countering them. You bring up some good examples here, but... I would say you don't want to buy any given curser in let's say 30% of games. Now, about half of these are because there's another curser available that's better, but apart from this, you have rushes, slogs, some soft counters, and really strong engines which can trash through. Not to mention dozens of other strategies that shrug curses off (really fast things, or also something like chancellor/stash which is REALLY impervious to cursing).
they do NOT totally stop you from going for engines. In fact, they *help* certain kids of engines, though they of course hurt others. Like... every other card, basically.
What kind of engines ? I don't see...
And when witch is on the board, most of the time you'll play double-witch big money. And all funny strategies you could have played are killed by this damn curser.
Really not the case. Most of the time implies >50%, and I would say the number is closer to 30%.
I mean, witch-mountebank games are interesting sometimes, but they tend to be dominant almost every games they appear on, and that's not fun. I think dominion really needs more defenses for these attacks.
Well, fun is of course a matter of opinion, and you certainly don't have to play the game, like the game, play the game without the attacks, whatever. But I would like to say that it's possible to play engines and do wacky things with these cards, and even not do too badly in the process. And I think it's actually even quite fun to beat these simple things with some good refinement.
Finally, I reject the non-evidenced position that the only thing fun about the game is playing engines. If this were true, the whole game is designed badly, because you can do more to make big money strategies weak. But I think the game is designed quite well (not that there aren't *some* flaws)
Ok, but about witch... how often can you play a village-witch engine ? I regret above all the lack of strategic depth in this card... and it creates mirror games.
Village-witch engine? About never. How often can you play Village-moat? There's not enough card-draw there. However, you CAN certainly transition from witch into some kind of engine, and get some utility.
Anyway, mostly popping in to get an example game in where in the face of mountebank, I go engine. Not that I ignored mountebank, but going to engine after was very good for me.
http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/02/game-20121202-132633-6554669f.html