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Why is Potion a bad card?

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Markov Chain:
The Councilroom list of popular buys shows Potion as one of the worst cards in win rate; it's bought half the time and has a win rate of 0.94 with the card and 1.06 without it. 

I believe this is an artifact of the way the game is played on isotropic, which takes a random selection of kingdom cards; there would be much less of a split if you played with a minimum of three Alchemy cards (and thus usually have 2-4 Potion-cost cards rather than just one).  This also explains why Potion is bought only half the time.

Potion is good in some sets, bad in others, depending on which Potion-cost cards are available.  If there are several Potion-cost cards, then Potion is likely to be a good card, and everyone will buy it.  If there is just one Potion-cost card, the weaker player is more likely to overvalue the card and buy a Potion.  Note that even Possession is break-even on win rate; if Apothecary and Alchemist are there to make Potions useful, then the player who uses them on the way to Possession will do very well, but if Possession is the only good Potion-cost card, then buying a Potion will slow down your deck and you will be too far behind when you get your Possession.

The only very good Potion-cost card is Familiar, and even it scores much worse than Witch and Mountebank.  This is probably because of the delay in getting Familiar into the game; if only one player has Witch, he may have bought it on a 5/2 opening, and that made it hard for his opponent to get to 5 until a lot of Curses were already out.  In contrast, Familiar cannot be gained until the second time through the deck.

The other two Potion-cost cards which are better than average are Vineyard and Apprentice.  Apprentice is interesting; it's better than the similar Salvager, probably because Alchemy decks can make good use of the actions from Apprentice in a big hand.  Vineyard has cause and effect reversed; if you are buying Vineyards, that is because you have a deck which benefits from the VP from Vineyard, and usually that means a strong deck. 

ackack:
Apprentice is an Alchemy card, but it doesn't have a Potion cost.

Beyond that, it seems like this is largely based on fishing through Council Room data without any real analysis. I'd disagree with the claim that "the only very good Potion cost card is Familiar;" almost all of the Alchemy cards are strong.

added: I'll expand a bit on the weirdness of some of the analysis. Your state that isotropic data is skewed and that there aren't generally heavy Alchemy games - which I'd agree with - but your argument that Apprentice is strong is that "Alchemy decks can make good use of the actions from Apprentice." There can't be that many of those decks out there, so it's unlikely that's doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And while there are weird causality effects with some cards -  using the standard example, Curses might look like strong buys because people will often be buying them to pile out - Vineyards is not a convincing example at all. Vineyards are, like Gardens, quite often the dominant path to victory. That makes them strong to begin with. And with Gardens, a non-Gardens opponent can still find it easy to deny you a couple. The Potion cost of Vineyards mean there will be more games where somebody totally ignores Vineyards, so it would be unsurprising if there's a bigger "delta win" with Vineyards than Gardens.

HiveMindEmulator:
I do agree that the reason the potion stats are bad on isotropic is that weaker players buy potion simply because the alchemy cards look good. They are all good to *have*, but it takes a little more knowledge to know when it's worth buying a potion to get them.

I completely disagree, however, that familiar is the only very good potion-cost card. It is the one that is most *often* good (in that most of the time it shows up, you want to go for it), but in appropriate situations, the other ones are all very strong, and not just when multiple potion-cost cards are present.

DG:
I suspect the university is largely to blame. According to the stats it is bought almost as often as familiars and alchemists and has a worse record than the potion. The university can look very tempting when there are good 5 cost cards in the kingdom but the slow speed of the university often still kills the deck making it worse even than pure money.

The potion cost cards are generally very strong but expensive/slow. They also tend to bring cards into play such as the outpost, chancellor, or even woodcutter that many players might ignore. As a result the power of the alchemy cards is generally not harnessed well by beginners.

Davio:
Well, it's a 1-2-3.

Potions are only as good as the cards bought by them.
The cards bought by them are only as good as their effects/other cards that interact with them.

If you buy a Scrying Pool ang play a Big Money strategy, then you'd probably have been better off with 2 Silvers.
If you buy University and grab just 1 Tactician with it, it's just a waste.

Often, there is just 1 card with a Potion cost and you really have to judge it well, do you absolutely need that Golem if you have a bunch of Haven's? Probably not. If you have 2 Mountebanks and it's a multiplayer game, then it's probably very good.

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