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Gardens and Embargo

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jimjam:
Let's say you have gardens and embargo in the set. The four plausible enablers of a gardens rush (I would put Market, Hoard as mid or late game gardens, and card such as hamlet and pawn are not enough for rushing) would be Workshop, Ironworks, Woodcutter, and Baron. It's debatable whether the $4s can actually be used effectively on their own.
Anyways, if it is the case that you are gardens rushing with the first two, then embargo may work to your benefit:
Obviously one may choose to embargo $5-8 kingdom cards (and gold and province), but perhaps the most important to embargo may be gardens.
Because your opponent will presumably get less gardens, and is aiming for a cleaner deck, they will be slowed down by garden buys much more than you will, especially if you are using workshops or ironworks as the primary way to get gardens. Moreover if you (or they) have played more than one embargo you may be able to count on curses being emptied if they do choose to buy gardens.
The opponent's usage of embargo might be workshops, coppers, or estates.
The first is not too effective, since you can just gain them with workshops.
The second one is more problematic, since you may not want to take on a large amount of curses early on. In that case it is probably best to not buy coppers, and count cards near the end.
The third is also not so effective. If the opponent does it late game you may have bought enough estates that a couple of curses will not affect much; if they do it early game then you might switch to buying embargoes, which should lead to a fast three pile ending (gardens, embargoes, curses). Of course, they could embargo the embargoes...

I haven't tested this out, unfortunately. Thoughts?

ftl:
How is ironworks 'debatable'? It's an awesome gardens enabler.

I would guess that an embargo on the gardens would suck for a gardener IF you're buying them with woodcutter or baron, but it would have no effect at all with either workshop or ironworks around (since you can just gain them).

An embargo on the coppers might be ...interesting. Not sure how it would play out. It would be annoying for sure, copper is an easy way to inflate a deck and you need zero-cost buys around and you need to keep buying some coins to stay up at the 2-4 range. With Pawn around, embargo on coppers is probably workable. Without pawn around, maybe not. Baron might be pretty good at getting around an embargo on coppers, because you'll be ending up at 4 whenever you get an estate-baron collision.

I'm pretty sure it would depend on what enablers are around.  With Ironworks, you can spam a lot of ironworks and then end up inflating your deck not with coppers, but with 2-4 cost actions. Depending on which ones are around, it might help get around an embargo-on-coppers or it might not.

jimjam:
I rather like ironworks for garden myself, though I've never been able to test it against somebody who actually tried to counter the gardens rush. One of theory's articles puts down baron and ironworks, since you can't double open them or buy them as easily. Ironworks/Embargo may be a good opening in that case.

I'm not too sure about Pawn. Presumably if you are buying Pawns or Hamlets you will be trying to get multiple buys with them, and that means copper.

Empathy:
A point in favor of embargoing your own gardens: you empty 2 piles in one, and prevent the other person from stealing your gardens. That, and buying a garden gives you 2 cards.

Downside is that you start with a bit less than10 point malus.

Soo, if your deck is say, 6ish gardens, 8ish curses, 10ish coppers, 5ish estates and 4ish random garden enabler (probably horse trader), that puts you almost at 40 cards and hence around 20ish points. Is that quick enough to steal a game?
Now having an indirect gainer like workshop/ironworks completely protects you from the curses, and prevents the other player from stealing you gardens if he's not gardening. But that's a completely different story, as then the problem is more finishing the piles quickly enough only with the gainer.

WanderingWinder:
Any talk of ironworks not being a good enabler of gardens is simply wrong. It's so powerful that there are EXTREMELY few boards (I've never actually played one) where it's not simply the dominant strategy.

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