You, like most players, criminally underestimate Cultist. Not just based on this list, but also based on a recent game we played where you opted to ignore it in favor of Familiar, a choice which I think reduces your win % to less than 20 right there.
You mean that game where you got cultist on a 5/2 and I went for familiar on a 4/3?
Yes, that one. Being a bit behind in the mirror (having a Cultist in stead of two Silvers is great, but hardly game-deciding: more likely than not I can't get a 2nd Cultist during the next shuffle, which puts you just 1 Ruin behind at the start of the 3rd shuffle, while either having 3 Silvers vs. my 2, or 2 Cultists vs. my 1) is no reason to pursue an inferior strategy.
And I'm not sure why you think my well-reasoned post deserved such a snarky/sarcastic response. I thought you liked people citing evidence for their claims and supplying the logic behind their beliefs.
So, I wasn't intending to be snarky (and it certainly isn't sarcastic) - I genuinely wanted to know if that was the game you were referring to. And had not much time to get actual explanation down before heading to work. So I apologize for any snark in the above post.
I do like evidence for claims, somewhat, though it isn't the hugest thing in every case, and I'm not sure whether you are saying I'm not giving evidence here or whether you were saying that you were giving evidence. In which case, I guess it's evidence, but it's very weak evidence - 1 game shows very little, and moreover how I evaluate one card based on one particular game vs where I actually rank it on a list (which is, if you notice, way ahead of familiar...).
Anyway, that game, you get cultist/-, get the cultist on 3, and I am unable to play familiar until turn 7, after my 2nd reshuffle and after you'd played 3 cultists. Note that I couldn't have played cultist any earlier than I did familiar here. Now, I grant you, people too often go for a different strategy just because they don't want to be behind on strategy X. But I think it's quite clear that, in that game, I had no chance of winning basically no matter what I did. Indeed, I would have been in much worse shape with a cultist plan, I think - not that cultist isn't the generally superior card.
Also, I guess I should get thrown in jail as I am 'criminally' underrating Cultist so much by putting it at #12. I guess you guys have it in the top 2 or something? Okay, let's just go with witch, which has been the focus here, and which I only have one spot ahead of it, in actuality - which means you guys must think that Cultist is very clearly better than witch.
So, there's chainability+on-trash against curses-ruins dichotomy. Alright. So, curses are just significantly worse than ruins. Apart from the several counters to ruins (there are a few weak things for curses - farming village and the ilk through something like golem) which can be really slam dunk in some cases, there's that you can actually use the ruins. I mean, they're bad, for sure, but getting a card or coin is actually getting you a reasonable fraction of your card back when you are getting junked. Oh, and the 10 VP from curses, which is the biggest thing. This is almost just a 2 province swing *by itself*. Of course, chainability is very nice, when you can get it. Problem is, it's not all that reliable generally, unless you have trashing. Indeed, as trashing gets better, cultist gets advantage over witch. But on the other hand, this is limited, because if you have really strong trashing, you often don't want either one so much - particularly as you have to go deep into cultist to get that extra benefit, and there's other stuff to do on 5 here. T4B likes cultist more for the on-trash, that's a point worth making. And the big majority of other junking attacks make Cultist significantly worse, as you just aren't going to chain them. So there's a pretty big swath of cards that make witch clearly better than cultist and the best option on the board, there's a large set of sets of cards that make cultist better than witch, too, but a significant chunk of them make a third card preferable to either.
Thus, I overall think witch is *slightly* better.
