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Ranking the opening terminals (for 4/3 splits)

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HiveMindEmulator:
In your first two turns of a game of dominion, you’re (usually) going to buy two cards (on a 4/3 split). In general, only one should be a terminal action, since you have a 36% chance of drawing the two together. In this article, I attempt to roughly sort the desirable opening terminals into tiers based on their typical utility. However, just because a card appears higher on the list than another card, does not mean it is always preferable. When you choose an opening, it should depend heavily on the strategy you plan on using in the mid-game. If there is a must-have $5 card, you may want to think about feast; if you’re going smithy big money, you better open smithy (duh); if you’re going to need an early quarry or potion, your terminal can’t cost $4; if you're going to heavily rely on trashing, you should bump the trashers up, etc...

Tier 0: The one and only...

Chapel
Everyone knows about chapel. It kind of transcends all lists of anything. While you generally only want to open with a single terminal action, you make an exception for chapel. So it doesn’t really belong on this list. You’re not going to choose chapel over remake, for example. You can just buy both! In terms of play, if you get a collision, just trash 3 cards and be satisfied that you’re going to get back to your other terminal soon enough with your rapidly slimming deck.

Tier 1: The elite openers
These two cards are far-and-away the strongest opening terminals in the game (yes, stronger than chapel). If either is on the table, you will usually want to buy one.

Ambassador
If you glance through the rest of this list, you’ll see that practically all of the cards either attack or trash. Ambassador does both! You slim down your deck while stuffing junk into your opponent’s deck. Ambassador is so good that if you’re not that concerned with getting to $5 quickly, you should probably just open with 2 of them. The one weakness of ambassador is that trashing 2 cards every turn doesn’t give you a lot of room to buy stuff. The attack can usually force a slow game, but the attack is not that powerful vs a money-based rush strategy where your opponent doesn’t need to draw combos of cards together. That brings us to the other tier 1 opening terminal...

Masquerade
Masquerade offers a slightly different approach to opening than ambassador. While ambassador is for slow games, masquerade is astoundingly fast. Drawing 2 cards and trashing 1 gives a lot of cycling power, and the fact that you get to draw half your deck the first time you play masquerade gives you a really good chance at grabbing an early $5 or $6 card. In a game with no attacks, a single masquerade and no other actions can regularly get you to half the provinces in 14 turns. Masquerade also shrugs off the $4 cursing attacks by allowing you send back and/or trash the curses while letting you play from bigger hand than your opponent, allowing you sufficient purchasing power to keep building your deck even in the presence of the curses.

Tier 2: The cursing attacks
The strongest type of attack in dominion is the cursing attack. If you can start cursing right off the bat, it gives you a huge advantage over anyone who tries to do something else (other than ambassador or maquerade).

Sea Hag
When you first start playing dominion, the cards that excite you are the ones that do cool things for your deck. But then you run into sea hag. Sea hag does absolutely nothing for your deck, yet is still one of the strongest opening terminals in the game. This is because sea hag’s attack is just sick. Not only does it hand out a curse, it puts it on top of your opponent’s deck, so they start feeling it right away. While you only have 4 cards with which to buy stuff on this turn, they will have only at most 4 non-curse cards next turn, plus the curse sticks around if they can’t trash it right away. There are several cards that handle the top-deck curse pretty well, but it still forces a useless card to be draw at least once, and very early in the game, when your opponents would rather be doing other things.

Young Witch
Young witch’s attack is weaker than that of sea hag, because the curse only goes in the discard pile, and because your opponent can block it with a bane card, but assuming the bane card isn’t something extremely useful and massable, it’s still a very strong attack, and doesn’t sacrifice your purchasing power as much as sea hag. If your opponent does not get a bane card, and there is no good trashing, young witch is almost as good as witch, since in curse games, you usually have 2 useless cards you’d be willing to discard anyway. While probably weaker overall, young witch compares favorably to sea hag in a head-to-head match-up since young witch cycles faster and allows you better chances at good buys on the turn you play it, by allowing you to select money out of 6 cards (5 if a sea hag just hit) instead of 4. In the presence of a good bane card your opponent will buy en masse anyway, young witch becomes much less spectacular, but even given a moderately useful bane, it's pretty good. You will still hand out some curses (they can't have the bane in hand every time), and you get the mini-warehouse effect.

Tier 3: The “good” trashers
What's the next best thing to handing out curses? Getting rid of the junk in your own deck. There are 11 sub-$5 terminals that allow you to trash or return other cards to the supply. Three have been mentioned already, three will come later, and two (remodel, trade route) don’t make the grade as consistently good opening terminals. The other three are listed here.

Remake
There are some strategies that involve heavy remaking all game, but even outside of those, remake is a very strong opener. It’s kind of like a trading-post junior, allowing you to dump two useless starting cards, and potentially get a useful $3 card out of it. Like trading post, remake can become dead weight later in the game, when you don’t have 2 cards you want to/are willing to trash, or when you can’t spare the terminal action. However, you may find some cases where you can use a remake to turn a $4 into a late duchy or even a $7 into a province.

Steward
Steward can trash as fast as remake but doesn’t come with the nice gains, making it harder to start building a deck. Turns of “trash 2 cards, buy nothing” are hardly exciting. However, steward does something that chapel and remake don’t: it stays useful into the mid-game. With most of your coppers and estates removed, +2 cards is often pretty good, provided you have a spare action. Steward can really shine when paired with a good non-terminal that lets you get something out of your trashing turn, and its $3 cost allows you to spend more on your non-terminal.

Salvager
Since it only trashes a single card, salvager can’t streamline your deck at the same rate as remake or steward, but it remains a very powerful opening due in large part to its ability to stay powerful even into the late-game. In the late game, you will very often be able to make good use of salvager’s ability to trash your expensive cards for a ton of cash a buy to help get extra victory cards. And since salvager can also provide a strong early game benefit (+$2, trash an estate), you might as well go for it right away. Salvager does carry the risk of being drawn without an estate in the early game, but even this unlucky occurence (which occurs about once every five games) is not the end of the world as you at least get to keep the increasingly useful salvager.

Tier 4: The +$2 attacks
These attacks are a class below the cursing attacks, but attacking is still really good as it slows your opponents down, keeping them from doing what they really want to do with their turns. Technically, this title includes fortune teller, but the fortune teller attack seems much weaker than those of the listed cards. Bureaucrat also offers a strong attack, but the gain a silver on top of your deck is too much weaker than the +$2 of these cards.

Militia
Militia is the standard hand-size reduction attack. Hand-size reduction is a nice kind of attack, because it scales well as the game goes on. As your opponents’ cards get better, they are forced to discard better cards. If your opponent has a deck with massive drawing power, it may hurt less late game, since they may still be able to draw a good portion of their deck starting with three cards chosen from five, but against decks with a heavy reliance on silver, it’s just killer. In any case, it can at least make the early game painful. By slowing down the pace of the early game, it can allow you time to build up slower, more powerful engines.

Cutpurse
While having to discard a copper sounds innocuous, losing $1 of purchasing power in the early game is a really big deal. In 2-player, cutpurse acts a lot like militia in the early game. A typical discard to militia might by a copper and an estate. In the absence of cards that take advantage of having the estate, the attack of cutpurse has basically the same effect. The situations in which the two cards differ are when your opponent has zero or two estates. In bad hands (two estates), cutpurse is stronger than militia, while in good hands (no estates), it is weaker. Since good hands are more important, militia is generally better. Additionally, cutpurse does not scale well into late game where copper is less important, and where hands may even have no copper. Cutpurse does, however, shine in larger games, because unlike the militia attack, the cutpurse attack stacks.

Swindler
Swindler is a kind of swingy card, as its attack can range from actually helping your opponent (discard an estate from the top of their deck) to completely killing them (turn their witch into a duchy). It’s particulaly strong in 2-player where hitting that $5 card just wins the game for you. The typical result of an early game swindle is turning a copper into a curse, which is still pretty good and reasonably competitive with the other attacks in this tier. The advantage swindler has over militia and cutpurse is its $3 price tag, which allows it to be purchased along with good $4 non-terminals like tournament, caravan, potion, quarry, etc...

Tier 5: The VP chip-gainers
While the attack cards can force slower games, in faster games you may be better served by just getting off to a VP lead. If you’re ahead in VPs, your opponents will have to either (a) get a fifth province before you get your fourth, or (b) buy a couple extra duchies, which entails either starting to buy them earlier than you or putting together big province+duchy turns. So if you can grab a few extra VPs without giving up too much of a tempo advantage, you’ll often find yourself in pretty good shape.

Monument
Monument is the only card on this list that neither trashes nor attacks, and it may not come to mind immediately when you think of strong openings, but it’s a pretty good choice for an opening terminal even if you’re not going for a monument-centric strategy. The +$2 gives good purchasing power so you won’t really fall behind in building up (assuming none of the higher-tier cards are available), plus you get the VP chips to give you an early score advantage. Even though you may not feel the benefits right away, you’ll feel them later when your opponent has to scramble to try to get duchies to make up the points.

Bishop
Bishop as an opening terminal is kind of hard to rate. It can net you a much bigger pile of VP chips than monument, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of purchasing power, and it helps your opponents slim their decks. So when is it good? It’s good when its drawbacks are less significant, i.e. when slimming your opponents decks is not horrible, and when you’re not that concerned with hitting $5 early on. In a situation where you are going to have to play some kind of big-money strategy, the boost of the extra points can offset your being slightly slower than them, but if they go for a stronger engine, the free trashing can be too great of a benefit to them that your VP chips can’t overcome it.

Tier 6: The lesser trashers
There isn't always a great source of trashing, but some is often better than none, provided you at least get something else out of it.

Moneylender
Moneylender is a nice trasher because, like masquerade or salvager, it allows you to trash without cannibalizing your turn. However, it’s trashing ability is pretty lackluster. You can’t trash estates and you trash copper only one at a time. Still, it’s better than nothing, and pure copper-trashing can be good for stuff like venture/adventurer, and it can be good to leave estates around to be trashed for greater benefit with upgrade/apprentice.

Island
Before there were VP chips, there was island. You can (kind of) think of an early island as a one-shot bishop that gives one more VP, one less coin and no benefit to your opponent. You get rid of a single copper or estate and get a couple extra VPs to show for it. It allows you to get off to an early score advantage while slimming your deck, rather than bloating it. You may not want to open island if getting to $5 is very important, but otherwise it’s a reasonable opening. While you’ll be behind at massing $4-$5 cards vs someone who favors purchasing-power to deck-trimming, you’ll have a slightly slimmer deck and more points, which means they can’t just run away with a quick win. When they slow down late game to buy islands/duchies to make up the points, your slightly slimmer deck should be able to help you stay ahead.

chwhite:
Very nice article.  I think Moneylender belongs up with Salvager and Remake in a "trash for benefit" tier, and I might in fact even put one or more of those cards above the curse attacks, but other than that, I agree with all of this.

guided:
Steward is an elite opening card, I promise you :) Definitely worthy of mention ahead of Young Witch (which I'd put much further down the list in general) as well as Salvager and Remake.

Minor point, but I'd put Sea Hag in the same league as Masquerade (though Masquerade might be a better choice in the specific case where both cards are available).

Epoch:
I'm very dubious that Salvager is a great opening.  It's a trash-for-no-benefit for Coppers, and it's a "trash for a one-use Silver" for Estates.  It's a terminal, and it won't get you to $5 unless you draw it with exactly 3 Coppers + 1 Estate, and won't get you to $6 with any combination of starting cards.

Salvager is a good card, don't get me wrong, but its utility doesn't come out until later in the game when you can either draw and play it more consistently, or where it's trashing higher-value cards.

guided:
Haha, and I missed the most important thing I should have said: Ambassador is a definitely a better 2p opener than Chapel.

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