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[Awaclus]

http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20131009/log.510d7890e4b0ac7a7a0be611.1381317892233.txt

Code: [Select]

Stonemason, Chancellor, Doctor, Workshop, Gardens, Militia, Moneylender, Butcher, Library, Adventurer
So, did my opponent get lucky or is Butcher actually an amazing counter to Workshop/Gardens?

[SCSN]

I have little feel for games like this so can't tell you what is generally best, but after T3 you have 4 terminals in a villageless, 14-card deck. That can't be right. Why not just gain a Gardens from the T3 Workshop? Or a Silver, if you think a Gardens is too early.

[Awaclus]

I have little feel for games like this so can't tell you what is generally best, but after T3 you have 4 terminals in a villageless, 14-card deck. That can't be right. Why not just gain a Gardens from the T3 Workshop? Or a Silver, if you think a Gardens is too early.

As it turned out, Gardens would have been the best play. However, it looked like my opponent wasn't going for Gardens at all and in those situations, more Workshops is better than a Silver or a Gardens, because it's not the end of the world even if your terminals collide, but it's pretty important to play one every turn.

[Mic Qsenoch]

Workshop/Gardens is the original basic rush deck, but it SUCKS! Seriously, it is not very good. It is an awfully slow "rush". All sorts of basic money based strategies can beat it, any sort of decent combo or engine should win easily. I would guess that if your opponent steals your Gardens with Butcher and then builds into Provinces he would beat you by a wider margin than with the Duchy thing, though I'm not sure.

[BadAssMutha]

You rush to get the Gardens, but only wind up with 4 of them. After that happens, you probably need to readjust and try to get some Silvers, rather than plodding ahead with the Estates. Your opponent has a better deck with some cash and the Butcher, so you have to expect he'll get some Duchies and maybe even a Province. The size of your deck isn't blowing up by leaps and bounds (2 cards per turn at best), so you can't expect to win on deck size alone. I think I might have opened with a Militia to slow my opponent down, and possibly even picked up a Copper over Stonemason on turn 3. You're unlikely to be able to play the SM with all the Workshops floating around, and you really need a double Gardens turn to pull ahead in the split.

Why didn't Azusu pick up two Gardens on turn 6 (or buy anything for that matter)? He could have put the nail in the coffin right there.

[zporiri]

any sort of trash-for-benefit is good against gardens, as you can contest the other player for the gardens, then trash them so they don't clog your deck. it's really tough to win against a province strategy if you only have 4 gardens (in a 2 player game). bishop is great for this, as they don't benefit from the penalty of allowing your opponent to trash.

[DG]

What you've got here is a gardens mirror that is decided on duchy points rather than gardens points. That's isn't unusual at all. The pure workshop strategy will always struggle to reach up to duchies once the gardens are empty and you didn't even try in this game. There are a few variations you can use here with butcher to contest both gardens and duchies.

[SCSN]

As an aside, I encounter the term "denying Gardens" quite often, but the whole concept has never made much sense to me. If something is good you want to go for it yourself; if it sucks, why bother denying it? Unless the Gardens player somehow extracts a big super-linear pay-off from having more Gardens above and beyond the super-linear pay-off you gain from investing more in your own strategy, denying seems sub-optimal. And while it's certainly better to have 8 Gardens than 5-6, I really doubt it's so much better that denying benefits you enough to compensate for the facts that

1) Gardens aren't quite free; gaining 2-3 Gardens over cards that actually accelerate your own deck presents a gigantic cost in terms of opportunity lost.
2) The Gardens will be dead cards that, once bought, almost certainly slow you down.
3) Rush strategies tend to amass a moderate amount of points quickly and then plateau. Once this plateau is reached, they seek to end the game as soon as possible, before the competing engine has burned through enough rocket fuel to reach escape velocity. Denying Gardens empties the Gardens pile faster, thus shortening the game by helping your opponent end it.

In general, "schizophrenic" strategies that do a little bit of this and a little bit of that are inferior to a strategy with focus. So unless the denial happens to align with your strategy anyway (e.g. you just want TfB fodder and don't care for the actual card) or is but a small deviation from it (which might well be the case in this particular game), I expect a strategy that wins while denying to perform even better if it does not deny at all.

[CopperrCopper]

I disagree somewhat with your aside.  The gardens player has little to no ability to switch gears into a different strategy. By denying him some gardens, you are taking advantage of your flexibility.  Him not being able to piledrive the gardens hurts way more then the couple of gardens slow you down. 

[flies]

I disagree somewhat with your aside.  The gardens player has little to no ability to switch gears into a different strategy. By denying him some gardens, you are taking advantage of your flexibility.  Him not being able to piledrive the gardens hurts way more then the couple of gardens slow you down.

Does it tho?  you're denying him points, but he has an early lead, and you're bringing the game closer to an end without helping yourself.

I think denying makes much better sense in a slog than a rush.

[Warfreak2]

If you have Butcher or something like that, those extra Gardens don't hurt you anyway, you needed fuel and it didn't matter what it was.

Denying Gardens can be important because to go for Gardens, you normally have to commit to it from the very early game. By the time it's turn 13 and the Gardens are out, if you only got 5 of them you are pretty much dead, you have no hope to reach Duchy any time soon, any attempt you make to improve your deck will only be seen six turns later.

With 8 Gardens, every buy and gain is almost a VP chip, but with only 5 Gardens, the only deck you can beat in the long run is a Golden Deck which buys and trashes a Copper every turn. It's true that the game will be nearer to an end, but not by much - it still takes ~10 turns to empty a couple of piles if your opponent isn't helping you.

[DStu]

As an aside, I encounter the term "denying Gardens" quite often, but the whole concept has never made much sense to me. If something is good you want to go for it yourself; if it sucks, why bother denying it? Unless the Gardens player somehow extracts a big super-linear pay-off from having more Gardens above and beyond the super-linear pay-off you gain from investing more in your own strategy, denying seems sub-optimal. And while it's certainly better to have 8 Gardens than 5-6, I really doubt it's so much better that denying benefits you enough to compensate for the facts that

1) Gardens aren't quite free; gaining 2-3 Gardens over cards that actually accelerate your own deck presents a gigantic cost in terms of opportunity lost.
2) The Gardens will be dead cards that, once bought, almost certainly slow you down.
3) Rush strategies tend to amass a moderate amount of points quickly and then plateau. Once this plateau is reached, they seek to end the game as soon as possible, before the competing engine has burned through enough rocket fuel to reach escape velocity. Denying Gardens empties the Gardens pile faster, thus shortening the game by helping your opponent end it.

In general, "schizophrenic" strategies that do a little bit of this and a little bit of that are inferior to a strategy with focus. So unless the denial happens to align with your strategy anyway (e.g. you just want TfB fodder and don't care for the actual card) or is but a small deviation from it (which might well be the case in this particular game), I expect a strategy that wins while denying to perform even better if it does not deny at all.

I don't have the time to post bots now, but if you e.g. modify BM-Smithy to just take Gardens instead of Duchies in the endgame, it will beat Workshop/Gardens.
I think that somehow counts under what you write in your last sentence (small modification), but it also shows that you have enough time until you have to start denying against WS/Gardens.

[2.71828.....]

Workshop/Gardens is the original basic rush deck, but it SUCKS! Seriously, it is not very good. It is an awfully slow "rush". All sorts of basic money based strategies can beat it, any sort of decent combo or engine should win easily. I would guess that if your opponent steals your Gardens with Butcher and then builds into Provinces he would beat you by a wider margin than with the Duchy thing, though I'm not sure.

With this thread in mind, when I stumbled upon a board that had workshop/gardens I intentionally avoided gardens to see if I could build a successful engine to get enough provinces to beat the 8 gardens that my opponent got.  I managed to use a workshop to build a village/smithy/remodel engine that worked nicely for the win.  It was pretty close in the end, mostly because my opponent ended the game by piling out on estates early while behind.  I would have been able to build a comfortable lead had he not piled out to end the game losing.

While my opponent may not have played workshop/gardens to its greatest potential, this game still proved to me what Mic Q stated, workshop/gardens is a pretty lousy combo

(I am the guest-I was playing at work (slow day) and didn't know if I would have to leave the game for some reason and resign so I played as a guest)
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20131010/log.52533bb0e4b091c1996ae64c.1381425554968.txt

[Powerman]

Workshop/Gardens is the original basic rush deck, but it SUCKS! Seriously, it is not very good. It is an awfully slow "rush". All sorts of basic money based strategies can beat it, any sort of decent combo or engine should win easily. I would guess that if your opponent steals your Gardens with Butcher and then builds into Provinces he would beat you by a wider margin than with the Duchy thing, though I'm not sure.

With this thread in mind, when I stumbled upon a board that had workshop/gardens I intentionally avoided gardens to see if I could build a successful engine to get enough provinces to beat the 8 gardens that my opponent got.  I managed to use a workshop to build a village/smithy/remodel engine that worked nicely for the win.  It was pretty close in the end, mostly because my opponent ended the game by piling out on estates early while behind.  I would have been able to build a comfortable lead had he not piled out to end the game losing.

While my opponent may not have played workshop/gardens to its greatest potential, this game still proved to me what Mic Q stated, workshop/gardens is a pretty lousy combo

(I am the guest-I was playing at work (slow day) and didn't know if I would have to leave the game for some reason and resign so I played as a guest)
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20131010/log.52533bb0e4b091c1996ae64c.1381425554968.txt

Your opponent did play quite sub-optimally.  Only 4 workshops?