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[philosophyguy]

After getting thrashed in a number of games featuring Tournaments, I will appeal to the wiser minds of Dominion Strategy for help.

Game 1: Black Market, Familiar, Feast, Harvest, Hoard, Ironworks, Outpost, Potion, Tournament, Village, and Wharf

I planned to go Familiar, Ironworks to gain Villages for free, and Wharf. My opponent somehow managed to get a huge Wharf lead and then added to the pain with Tournament prizes.

Game 2: Bureaucrat, Colony, Courtyard, Cutpurse, Haven, Platinum, Remake, Scout, Thief, Tournament, Watchtower, and Woodcutter

Initial plan was Remake and Courtyard/BM, rushing for a Province with a couple of Tournaments. It went…not well.

So, where did things go south for me? And why did Tournaments not slow my opponent down enough to give me a strong lead?

[Epoch]

It looks a lot to me like the story of the first game is the story of your opponent getting luckier with his Potion and his Familiars than you were.  He played 2 Familiars on turn 7.  You played one on turn 9, and he promptly played one back at you on turn 9, and then again on turn 10.  So at that point you've sucked down 4 curses, him just 1.  That's a nasty deficit, and while you eventually closed the gap a little, it was too little, too late.  I don't think there's too much you could've done.  Your Potion missed the turn 5 reshuffle.

The second game looks a little less well-played to me.  Your turn 8 gives you $8 and you already have a Gold in your deck, and you go for Gold.  Turn 11, you turn $9 into a Platinum.  You could've had a 3 Province lead at that point!

He gets a little lucky, capitalizing his first Province, turn 11, into a Trusty Steed turn 13, but in all fairness he is using Havens to finesse the Tournament race.  And then he gets QUITE lucky and re-capitalizes the same Province on turn 14, still with just one Province in his deck, into a Followers.

But you weren't playing coherently.  You either needed to commit to Provinces, in which case you should've had 3 Provinces at that point instead of 1, or commit to Colonies, in which case you should have had 0 Provinces instead of 1, and also you shouldn't have had Tournaments, which are too-low-buying-power to hit $11 in a reasonable time.

[ftl]

Game 1 - it definitely wasn't about tournament. You didn't get a single province all game! I guess once he got the first province, the tournament helped him get the second one, but he had more duchies and estates and fewer curses than you as well, so even if he hadn't used the prizes at all, he would have *still* been ahead. This game wasn't won or lost by tournaments.

I'll let wiser minds than I comment on the second game, because that one did feature tournaments heavily.

[biopower]

I agree that the game 1 problem was losing the cursing race due to your potion missing the reshuffle.

In game 2, other than what Epoch said, you should've trashed the estate turn 6, then bought a haven with the $2 instead of trashing both coppers.

[DG]

First game you didn't need villages so didn't need an ironworks. It's hard to set up drawing chains with copper, curses, and estates in the deck. Stick to familiars, hoards, duchies, with a few wharves to draw them up. The watchtower may have been a good buy from the black market. Perhaps harvests or tournaments could be used to drive the deck as well as wharves. The tournament prizes
aren't very good anyway in curse filled decks even if you pair up the tournaments and provinces.

And why did Tournaments not slow my opponent down enough to give me a strong lead?

Second game you needed to get into the provinces quickly. Tournaments do not slow down an opponent. Provinces slow down your opponent's tournaments and claim the prizes for you. Taking an extra gold and platinum isn't necessary as you can use the bag of gold and the diadem for quick treasures. By the time that both players have a couple of provinces each it's likely that the province pile will be the first to deplete, so even though colonies remain important you might be able to win without them.

[ehunt]

Rephrasing what everyone else said on game two: absent cards of the form +draw without +action, a peddler, market, or treasury never hurts a deck. Those cards are just as good in a deck with 10 curses as they are in a deck with ten platinums. The only reason not to buy these cards is the opportunity cost.

So it's not reasonable to expect tournaments to "slow your opponent down" if you are allowing the tournaments to be peddlers. Put differently, in this game, prefer province over platinum not just for the offensive value (winning tournaments, winning the game) but also for the defensive value.

Concretely, during his amazing and game-winning turn 13, you have a platinum in your hand. If instead you had had a province, that turn, while it would have put a trusty steed on his deck (not bad) would have left him with an awkward five money buy and he wouldn't be able to play his remake.

(edit: that last thing i said is not true because he has these havens, so it's not clear from the log how much $ he has this turn or if he has any remake-able cards. But still, the reason he is able to draw the trusty steed and enjoy a power turn is that your platinum is not a province.)

[DG]

cards of the form +draw without +action, a peddler, market, or treasury never hurts a deck. Those cards are just as good in a deck with 10 curses as they are in a deck with ten platinums.

Check the maths on that. I'm not sure that is true.

[Epoch]

cards of the form +draw without +action, a peddler, market, or treasury never hurts a deck. Those cards are just as good in a deck with 10 curses as they are in a deck with ten platinums.

Check the maths on that. I'm not sure that is true.

Depends on what exactly you mean.

The one card they draw has an expected value of, obviously enough, the average value of the rest of your deck.  If your average deck value is $4 (ie, you have lots of Platinums), then a Peddler is worth expected $5.  If your average deck value is $0.5 (ie, you have lots of Curses or other worthless cards), then a Peddler is worth expected $1.5.

They never, you know, are net negatives to your hand, unless you're comparing them to "whatever you could have bought."

If you're comparing Tournament ($4) to the Silver you could have bought instead, and nobody's bought any Provinces so far, the Tournament is worth more than the Silver if your average deck value is greater than $1... which you should hope it is if you're past the second reshuffle.

[ehunt]

cards of the form +draw without +action, a peddler, market, or treasury never hurts a deck. Those cards are just as good in a deck with 10 curses as they are in a deck with ten platinums.

Check the maths on that. I'm not sure that is true.

Hmm... I'm not sure which of 2 objections you're making. All I was attempting to do with this claim was rebut the argument that a tournament should slow an opponent's engine down, I may have oversold it.

1. You might be arguing that there's something besides a +cards but no +actions in my deck that would make me want to refuse peddler/market/treasury. I'm sure I can concoct some other scenario  (here's one: say I really want a golem always to hit the same two terminals). The point is that, in most games, the best reason not to spend 5 on a treasury, for instance, is that there's something better that you can spend it on. It's very rare that you would, say, hit a treasury with a Jester, and decline it (compare this to silver).

2. You might be objecting to my phrase "just as good." I didn't phrase this correctly - maybe you are reading this as saying: the expected increase in the probability of a win by gaining a peddler is the same in a deck full of curses as in a deck full of platinum. I don't mean that - I have no idea how I would compute that, and I agree that it's probably false. I just was responding to OP's thought that an unblocked tournament would slow the opponent down.

[DG]

It was the "just as good".

[Jimmmmm]

cards of the form +draw without +action, a peddler, market, or treasury never hurts a deck. Those cards are just as good in a deck with 10 curses as they are in a deck with ten platinums.

Check the maths on that. I'm not sure that is true.

Depends on what exactly you mean.

The one card they draw has an expected value of, obviously enough, the average value of the rest of your deck.  If your average deck value is $4 (ie, you have lots of Platinums), then a Peddler is worth expected $5.  If your average deck value is $0.5 (ie, you have lots of Curses or other worthless cards), then a Peddler is worth expected $1.5.

They never, you know, are net negatives to your hand, unless you're comparing them to "whatever you could have bought."

If you're comparing Tournament ($4) to the Silver you could have bought instead, and nobody's bought any Provinces so far, the Tournament is worth more than the Silver if your average deck value is greater than $1... which you should hope it is if you're past the second reshuffle.

Surely +1 Action, +1 Card, +$1 is worth exactly $1 every time you play it. The card it draws would already be in your hand if you didn't buy it. If you're comparing it to say, a Silver, which is worth $2 but costs you a spot in your hand, it's not the cantrip that gets you your "average card", it's the Silver that costs you it.

On another point, a Market can be worth a heck of a lot more in a deck with 10 Platinums than one with 10 Curses.

[Fangz]

The card it draws could be another +1/+1/+1 card...

[Jimmmmm]

But by the time you've finished playing all your +1/+1/+1 cards, you have the exact hand you would have had if none of the above cards were in your deck, but plus exactly $1 for each of these cards (and some buys for Markets).

[biopower]

But by the time you've finished playing all your +1/+1/+1 cards, you have the exact hand you would have had if none of the above cards were in your deck, but plus exactly $1 for each of these cards (and some buys for Markets).

Each Cantrip+$1 is worth exactly $1; people are comparing the Cantrip+$1 and the card it draws to the 4-card hand without the cantrip and without the draw.

The marginal benefit of the $1 cantrip is lower in the platinum deck compared to the curse deck, especially without +Buy to give you anything to do with the extra $1.

[guided]

Relative value only makes sense in the context of win probability and opportunity cost. As a simple example, consider a deck consisting of nothing but 10 Curses plus (a) a Market, or (b) a Silver.

In general, +$1 cantrips tend to be less valuable the more trash there is in your deck, in part because they are less likely to bump you the $1 over whatever hump you're targeting at any given point in the game (typically $4->$5, $5->$6, $7->$8). Saying they're always worth exactly $1 is not especially meaningful (and false given the possibility of playing a +cards terminal with your last action, but that's neither here nor there).

[rod-]

In general, +$1 cantrips tend to be less valuable the more trash there is in your deck. Saying they're always worth exactly $1 is not especially meaningful (and false given the possibility of playing a +cards terminal with your last action, but that's neither here nor there).

Conversely, +1$ cantrips tend to be more valuable the more velocity your deck has ; compare the average turn of a deck of 10 markets to that of a deck of 10 silvers.  (Both make 10$, one has a lot more buys and a lot more room for "payload")  For decks with good trashing and a lot of cantripping, the "can you beat lucky chancellor" thread culmination has a lot of really good theory to it.

[guided]

compare the average turn of a deck of 10 markets to that of a deck of 10 silvers.

Yes, this is (near) the other end of the spectrum. "more valuable the more velocity your deck has" strikes me as exactly right.

[Jimmmmm]

Saying they're always worth exactly $1 is not especially meaningful (and false given the possibility of playing a +cards terminal with your last action, but that's neither here nor there).

Whether you deem it meaningful or not, my statement "+1 Action, +1 Card, +$1 is worth exactly $1 every time you play it" stands.

[Davio]

Yes, the regular Cantrips only give you +$1, but they give that money without taking any place in your deck or hand. Of course they are there, but they are sort of invisible. It's like every time you play them, you get free money.

Their relative value is actually higher than $1 if you can chain them. This chaining is their most powerful property, because it can create some consistency. It's like the old saying the sum is greater than its parts.

Look for example at a deck of 9 Peddlers + 1 Silver (not Markets) vs 1 Plat, 1 Gold, and 3 Coppers.
Both decks can draw exactly $11. If they never buy anything, they can do this every time.
In both cases, you're guaranteed a Colony. You can't draw dead with the Peddlers and you have exactly $11 in your 5-card draw deck.

Now, both decks buy a Colony, but the Peddler-deck will still be able to buy another Colony no matter how you shuffle.
If you shuffle the Colony into the money hand, you can't buy one however.

Okay, let's assume the money deck got lucky and missed the Colony on the shuffle and buys another one. The Peddler deck does the same.
At this point, the Peddler deck can still always buy a Colony. At most 2 Colonies and 1 Silver are in its hand and it just goes through the remaining Peddlers with 2 other Peddlers in its hand.

In fact, the Peddler deck can have up to 3 Colonies and still be guaranteed another one, while not drawing a single Colony. With the money deck this is almost impossible with 3 of them tucked in there.
P(no Col with money) = ~1.7% (if my math is correct)

[Jimmmmm]

Yes, the regular Cantrips only give you +$1, but they give that money without taking any place in your deck or hand. Of course they are there, but they are sort of invisible. It's like every time you play them, you get free money.

Yes, of course. A Peddler etc is a free $1 every time you have it in your hand with an Action to use. A Treasure, on the other hand, is not free money. It's money at the cost of a spot in your hand. That's why Copper is (usually) such a terrible card. Compare 9 Peddlers + 1 Silver to 8 Peddlers + 1 Silver. $10, every time. Add a green card (or four three), you still get $10 every time. 7 Peddlers + 1 Silver = $9 every time. Each additional Peddler is worth exactly $1, not $5 or $6 because you happen to draw more Peddlers. You would get most of that money without the extra Peddler. The reason your Peddler deck is better and more resilient than your Treasure deck is because of the penalty of Treasure cards: they cost you a spot in your hand. So a Peddler is worth $1 when you play it. But a Silver isn't worth $2. Unless you're drawing your whole deck, it's worth, on average, $2 - your average card. If the Silver wasn't there, you wouldn't get $0. You would get whatever happens to be the next card in your deck. Your "average" card.

[Mean Mr Mustard]

On Topic:

I feel that Remake may be too slow to compete in a Tournament game.  It can make for strong late hands, sure, but there is a loss of tempo to consider.  I think on a board like this I would open Courtyard and Big money, establish a couple of Provinces and some treasure density and then maybe change gears.

I am not wholly convinced that this game was completely out of hand.  I would have played on and seen if I could catch up.  You had better treasure and were not so committed to Tournament, and you had less cards.  The only(!) thing your opponent really had on you were prizes, and they were already in a diluted deck.  Followers is good but it brings his deck to a halt just as fast as yours.