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[AdamH]

tl;dr: I opened Village/Coppersmith and bought my seventh province on turn 16. The game ended in a draw.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/02/game-20121202-180511-72487d1f.html

cards in supply: Adventurer, Bishop, Coppersmith, Council Room, Explorer, Great Hall, Oasis, Pirate Ship, Secret Chamber, and Village

I played this game last night with an IRL friend. We were chatting on Skype whilst playing, which is somewhat relevant to the discussion of this game. If you don't care about the metagaming, you can skip this section and join in later.

We have a running joke; one person who we seldom play with has said that whenever he plays Dominion, he looks for a couple of cards that combo, and then buys a lot of them. One game we played, he just bought a bunch of coppersmiths and we slaughtered him. We asked him why he bought coppersmiths and he explained that to us, so now we have our joke whenever we see coppersmith in the kingdom.

"Oh no, I hope my opponent doesn't see the Power Combo on this board! Coppersmith/Copper!"

So when this kingdom was seen, we made the joke, and as I'm looking at the kingdom, I actually thought coppersmith might be a decent opener -- I could use it to get early golds, and it might be a nice Bishop target later at the very worst. I thought about opening coppersmith for this reason, and then I had an idea:

A Village/Council Room/Coppersmith engine. This might work if my opponent uses Bishop and/or Council Room. I resolve to open village/coppersmith, and if my opponent opens Bishop, I'm going for it. Otherwise, I can fall back to my first idea.

I'm sure you've all seen this video, so we also make jokes about Village being the best card in the game.

I say to my opponent "Wow, Coppersmith and Village on this board. Well I'm definitely opening with that." He says "You do that" and buys his Bishop. I opened V/CS and he's thinking to himself "well I've got this one won. Thanks for the rating boost, Adam."

[End pregame metagame discussion]

My plan is to open Coppersmith/Village, trash only Estates to my opponent's Bishops, get Village on $3, one more Coppersmith on $4, up to 4-5 Council Rooms on $5, and Provinces on $8. I'm aiming for double-province turns, here, but if I end up drawing and/or over-drawing my deck, I could go for triple-province turns by buying more coppers, but not more coppersmiths.

I get a little lucky to trash two Estates early, but my opening CS misses the reshuffle. I was hoping to play it to get a Council Room in before shuffling, but it was not to be. I get a CR Turn 5, and Turn 8 I can double-province, so I do. I was a little worried that it might have been premature, but looking back, I don't think so.

My opponent sees this and I think was pretty shocked, since I think he legitimately thought I was just throwing this game away. After I buy my third province on turn 9, he says "Oh wow, I'm in big trouble, aren't I?" "Yup," I say.

I realize, perhaps too late, that I should be buying coppers with my extra buys, but my deck is actually able to buy Province pretty reliably. He's going for a heavy Bishop-based strategy, meaning I'm going to have to pile the Provinces if I want to win this, so that becomes my goal. On my opponent's last turn, he talks through his options and decides to take the tie. He said he felt lucky just to get that.

[Evaluation]

So the interesting thing here is that I really liked my strategy, and looking back I thought the only way to improve it was to get a couple extra coppers on my extra buys after I had 3 or so Provinces, instead of later when I actually did it. Maybe swap the T3 and T6 buys (Village, and CS, respectively)? It turned out not to matter, I think. 7 Provinces in 16 turns is nothing to sneeze at, even given the presence of game-accelerating cards like Bishop and Council Room.

The thing that puzzles me, though, is that my opponent ended up pretty near a Golden Deck, with his Bishops as the only trasher, and that seemed to be his strategy the whole game. I know I Council Roomed him a lot, but the fact that I tied a strategy that didn't seem well-formed means that maybe I was giving too much credit to an oddball strategy. Then again, he did score 43 points in 16 turns, so maybe that was a thing...

Any thoughts? How could I have played better? Should I have built up to drawing my deck before greening? Is CS/CR/Village dominant here? Did I get lucky? Unlucky? What about my opponent? Can I feel better about my tie knowing that his strategy was decently strong?

What do you think of my backup plan? It wasn't super-well-formed, but CS for early golds into later Bishops seemed like it might have been the best thing. Maybe the engine was better than that, even without the free Estate-trashing?

[DStu]

I like Coppersmith as a payload for an engine.  On this board, I would have been a bit afraid of the Pirate Ship, because if you don't trash Coppers yourself it has a lot of targets, and you need those Coppers.

Ignoring this, Coppersmith is just a great source of terminal money, if the board does not support strong trashing anyway. You are stuck with this Coppers, then CS is a terminal $5-7.  Anyone would buy this for $4.  I don't like getting greedy with it usually, it's more important for your engine to hold than to get the Coppersmiths to $14.  Maybe a 8th Copper depending on what else sources of money is on the board for easier double/triple Province, but barring extremely stable engines (Wharf/Scheme) I would say $8/CS is enough.

[zahlman]

Should I have built up to drawing my deck before greening?

The opposite, if anything. I want to jump in the lead here in case he dips into Pirate Ships, I want to end the game before he can catch up. 1 Province a turn is a more than fine pace for that here. It would take an incredibly sick board, in general, for me to turn down the ability to double-Province on turn 8. This definitely doesn't qualify. You can use spare +Buy on Oases later if you really start choking I guess.

I like Coppersmith as a payload for an engine.  On this board, I would have been a bit afraid of the Pirate Ship, because if you don't trash Coppers yourself it has a lot of targets, and you need those Coppers.

It's not like Copper is hard to replace. Unless he starts hitting multiples of it. The bigger worry is what happens when he gets a lot of PS tokens and has a draw engine with PS as the payload and +Buy from the CR. The Village split might become important to mitigate this :/

[ycz6]

Insane idea: Adventurer for Coppers. I guess Council Room is almost always better, even with the benefit to your opponent? Meh.

[DStu]

It's not like Copper is hard to replace. Unless he starts hitting multiples of it. The bigger worry is what happens when he gets a lot of PS tokens and has a draw engine with PS as the payload and +Buy from the CR. The Village split might become important to mitigate this :/

I meant in the sense of: if you are hit, you have to replace, and so give more targets that can easily power up the Pirate Ships. It's hard to get them above 4-5 if all that's to target is the initial 7 Coppers in an engine, but if you are buying more Coppers, that's a lot easier.

[dondon151]

The opposite, if anything. I want to jump in the lead here in case he dips into Pirate Ships, I want to end the game before he can catch up. 1 Province a turn is a more than fine pace for that here. It would take an incredibly sick board, in general, for me to turn down the ability to double-Province on turn 8. This definitely doesn't qualify. You can use spare +Buy on Oases later if you really start choking I guess.

If you dive into green before you're prepared, you're never going to end the game.

When you saw your friend diving into heavy Bishop trashing, what I think you should have done is to pick up a Pirate Ship or two. He ended the game with 4 Treasures in his deck and only bought 2 more Silvers over the course of the entire game. Trashing his Treasures gives him fewer Bishop targets and puts pressure on him having to rebuild his economy as opposed to picking up more Bishops and trashing stuff for VP freely. I was wondering how he managed to muster 37 VP in 16 turns and it looks like your Council Room plays helped him a lot.

[zahlman]

If you dive into green before you're prepared, you're never going to end the game.

It seems to work fine for me, you just have to not panic and try to grab all the greens. This kind of engine is super variable, but you just build it more every time you don't hit 8.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/03/game-20121203-133412-52463270.html 8 provs and a duchy in 17 turns, first try. Not sure if taking Golds would actually help.