Tradering the Ruins will give you a Death Cart and two Silvers. That should guarantee you a Province buy, but probably just one, since you'll most likely be trashing the Death Cart. I have not tried this yet, though.
Well I mean, how often are you going to have both? But yeah, you're probably giving up the death cart much faster. On the other hand, you have two silvers in your deck rather than two dead cards, and I think that at least reasonably often this is actually right - I certainly wouldn't call it idiotic. I probably just wouldn't mention it at all, because it will almost never come up.
My rule 3 is not about overpaying - it's about not using all of what you pay for. There's nothing wrong with pay $8 for Herbalist if you really need the +Buy. However, there is something wrong with paying $5 for a City if you don't desperately need the +Actions and there's little likelihood of a pile running out anytime soon. There is something wrong with paying for a card, and then not using all of what you pay for.
Yeah, but what do you mean by that? Because I am basing my comments largely on a video you did where you criticize and ridicule your opponent for buying mining villages and then not trashing them on multiple occasions, and you were being REALLY unfair to your opponent on that, because he SHOULD be keeping those villages around and not trashing them. Yeah, he isn't getting all the use out of mining village, but really, he's just paying for a village, and he'd be happy to pay 4 for it. Same with a city - even if piles aren't running, sometimes you need village for 5, and city's better, so might as well get it. Or for something like herbalist, this is I think the clearest demonstration. What does herbalist do for you? Three things - it gives you a terminal $1, it gives a +buy, and it gives the treasure return. Now, the terminal copper is virtually never worth it (I'm sure there's an edge case somewhere). But very very often, you're buying herbalist in a big big engine, and you just really need the +buy, and in these decks you usually specifically DON'T want to put treasure back, because it hurts your chances of getting the engine to fire next turn. And most of the other times you want it, you have little to no use for the +buy, and mostly you want to hit those key treasures over and over - with hoard, or a weak-ish BM strategy where you are returning your good treasures. In either of these cases, you're definitely not getting the maximum usage out of the card, and thus you're violating your rule #3, but in both cases, you really need to do this. Of course, when you can use both things (a la with P-Stone), the card gets to its strongest. But you very often want to buy cards that aren't at their strongest, because you really need to fill a role. It's like you say here 'if you aren't desperate for actions'. Well, yeah, but this ENORMOUS exception of being 'desperate' for something basically nullifies the rule entirely - you're almost always 'desperate' for something. Well, this depends on how desperate is defined, but my point is that you are desperate enough to warrant it quite often, and the largest point is this:
whether or not you are getting the full use out of a card is actually totally irrelevant; if you aren't, then you might not "be getting your money's worth", but this doesn't matter. It's all about what, of your legal options, is best and most needed for your deck right now. The point of comparison should be your other options of what to buy, NOT how good that card can be for you in other decks.
And Goons and Mountebank aren't blatantly dominant?
No, they aren't. They're very strong (and I would guess much better than DC, though hey, I could be wrong), but there are plenty of times you don't want mountebank, and a decent number you don't want goons. I got clobbered a week or two ago largely because I got goons against an opponent who had an engine that was just too strong and fast for it to matter. Wharf is probably the most ubiquitous card, i.e. the one you want closest to 100% of the time, but there are situations you don't want it, either.
Yeah, I picked Moat because I didn't want to say Pearl Diver or Vagrant again.
My larger point here isn't about the moat specifically, it's about the denial strategy in general being bad. Trying to buy out the death cart fodder to deny your opponent is almost never going to work, especially if getting those cheap actions wasn't part of your own game plan. Again, I ask you for even one example of where this denial strategy has actually worked.
