After being handily beaten in the first round of the DS 2012 Championship, I'm attempting to learn from those games. Three of my four losses I think came down to mismanagement of cursing attacks. This must be a weakness in my game, so I want to focus on improving it.
Why are cursing attacks a weakness in my game? Well, I don't like cursers! It's more fun for me to build a deck and watch it do stuff, so whenever I can veto a curser on iso, I almost always do (except for Tournament and Black Market, which are auto-veto cards for me, and ironically, I don't think I'm half bad with). Perhaps I just lack experience with them. Even sometimes Ambassador, Saboteur, and Swindler and other junking attacks give me trouble. It seems my game is weaker when I have less control over what is in my deck.
On a tangential note, I am beginning to theorize that 3+ player games with junking attacks are just not worth playing because attacks just fly around so much you can't even stop them, and the winner isn't determined by who played the best, but rather by who was able to spike a lucky $5 to get a duchy more times than the others. It may be balanced, but I think the variance is through the roof and the fun is in the opposite direction.
Not liking cursers is not an excuse to be bad at playing them. If anything, it just makes me like them less. I'll state my general thoughts on cursers, link the games, ask some specific questions, and hopefully get smarter.
When I look at a board, the first thing I look for is a curser, because if it's there, you have to deal with it somehow. Winning with ten curses in your deck is nearly impossible. If an attack is capable of handing out curses and is not named Ambassador or Jester (or Young Witch with an awesome bane) then I need to deal with it.
How do I deal with cursing attacks? Well, worst-case, I just load up on the cursers and fight fire with fire, but there are some other options.
1. Play Defense. I actually really like this option if I can get away with it. If lighthouse, Masquerade (less so), Ambassador, a good bane card, Jack, or Trader (or any of the other ones I'm missing here) are on the board, I can counter the curser. A lot of the times the benefits of these cards are enough to outweigh the opportunity cost of picking up the curser and playing it. In these cases, I'm likely to not pick up the curser unless my opponent has decided, for some reason, not to pick up any of these counters. Game 1 of my match was one that involved this, and even though I won, preliminary feedback on the video suggests that I should have ignored the curser and just played defense; I think it's a little more complicated than that, but I'll link that game below as well.
2. Play Clean-up. If there's a strong engine on the board AND strong trashing, playing proactive clean-up and building the engine can still be dominant. This is also not mutually exclusive with doing the cursing myself, and is often a good supplement to it, since I'll hopefully be able to play my curser more often with a thin deck.
"Strong Trashing" in this case means any card that's capable of removing two bad cards from my deck, but with the exception of Forge (getting up to $7 while getting cursed is often too late to play clean-up unless Forge has some HUGE enablers, like Tactician or something). The jury is still out for me as to whether Trading Post fits in here or not.
The important thing here is to trash extremely aggressively, because if you fall behind in clean-up, your engine is underwater before you've built it and you are just totally screwed.
3. Ignore/Outrace it. I really struggle with this, as evidenced by two (!) of the games here. This is mostly the case with Familiar because of the potion cost, but I've heard legends of BM-based decks that ignore the cursing (without necessarily countering it) and just get to 5 or 6 provinces so quickly that they win a majority of the time. I have never, repeat, never been able to get this to work in practice. I feel like in this case, there is a lot of variance involved, where a majority of games are decided by whether or not the Familiar player can hit $3P before shuffling a second time.
4. Fight Fire with Fire. In the absence of any of this stuff, just try to win the cursing war and claw your way back up to Duchies, or maybe Provinces.
I think the area for improvement here comes with knowing which of these approaches to take in a given circumstance. I'll link four games from the match below and add some brief thoughts to it, and hopefully get some feedback.
[NOTE: I've added the video commentary for each of these games.]
Game 1: http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/03/game-20121203-183411-31a4af0f.htmlVideo: Mountebank vs. Trader here. I actually won this game, and Trader as defense played a huge role for both of us. The main reason I'm bringing this up is because of the question of whether or not to even bother with Mountebank. I think as an opener, since we both opened 2/5, the first Mountebank might have been a good idea, but looking back, the second one might have been a mistake.
Some people on the video comments are saying that Cartographer might have been better than Mountebank or even Governor here. I might understand about Mountebank, but Governor? I'm still a little confused...
Game 4: http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/03/game-20121203-191712-e02b3dd3.htmlVideo: Familiar vs. Hunting Party/Cutpurse here. I thought the HP Stack would be fast enough and resilient enough to curses to outrace a Familiar player. I was incorrect...
Game 5: http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/03/game-20121203-193246-1a5c65e9.htmlVideo: (Attempted) Familiar vs. Wharf/IGG. The video gives my thought process here (when it actually gets uploaded). On a 5/2 opening, I decide to open Potion/Herbalist vs. my opponent's Wharf/nothing. It's a long time before I'm able to get $3P, and by the time I play my first Familiar, half the curses are in my deck from my opponent's IGGs.
In both games 4 and 5, I misjudge whether or not to go for Familiar. Granted, when my opponent went for it, he got there with flying colors, and when I did, I failed fantastically, but it couldn't have all been luck, right? I mean, I should have just gone for the IGG rush, even though I thought the presence of another curser made it completely ineffective (that's probably super-wrong, though, right?)
I thought Hunting Party plus a nice attack (especially one that was likely to keep him from hitting $3P early) would have been great against Familiars, and I thought after winning the HP battle that I'd still be able to compete. I can either blame luck for hitting $7 and $4 so much or blame myself for making that luck. Which should I do?
Game 7: http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/03/game-20121203-200114-e92cf3ab.htmlVideo: Young Witch with Chancellor as a bane vs. Remake in a race to GM/Peddlers. The engine was there and I tried to play clean-up. I think I got rotten Remake luck, and I wasn't able to get silvers very fast. I don't know that I dealt with it in the best way possible, though.