This is probably the fifth time I look at this board, and finally, I feel like having an idea what to do
I'd open Ratcatcher/Bards, planning something like
2 Ratcatcher, 6 Bards + Lost Arts, 2 Libraries, Duplicate, gaining some treasures by Bards.
If I use Duplicate twice, this will be achieved until T10. My ratcatchers are slow, but being two, they should have trashed approx. 3 estates and 2 coppers, leaving me with a deck similar to
6 nonterminal Bards
2 Libraries
7 treasures.
In average, I hold 6/15 * 5 = two Bards per starting hand, and 2/15*5 = 0,66 Libraries.
This is a good starting point to achieve $11, some examples:
play one Bard, library draws 8$, bard gives +1$
play two Bards, library draws 7$
play three Bards, have 3$ in hand, +extra card and extra coin
Something like this should work more often than not; buying 4 colonies by T16 seems possible to me.
Btw, I'd like to adress two interesting subthemes:
Monastery>Ratcatcher?In most cases, yes. Definitely, I have Monastery on #3, it's bonkers! Compared to Ratcatcher,
a) it misses less shuffles,
b) it can trash multiple cards,
c) it's never drawn dead,
d) when trashing copper, copper still provides +1$.
Usually, this outperforms ratcatcher - but not in the situation I described. I don't really care about trashing faster (a) and b)), because my library wants to draw up to 7 treasures, and I don't want to spend time on replacing coppers by other treasures. c) doesn''t matter because libraries don't draw actions dead.
Compared to this, ratcatcher has three advantages,
a) It draws a card, which is important to get 4$/5$/6$
b) it trashes before library draws, which will draw one more card
c) it gets out of the way when it comes to greening.
Therefore, in this specific situation, I prefer Ratcatchers to Monastery.
Pirate Ship? Really? Maybe ...I gave +1 to fausts posting because it is really a fascinating idea. If everything works well, Pirate Ship is really an option here.
However, it doesn't really scare me, because it's clumsy to achieve all three goals in a reasonable amount of time: trashing, gaining multiple Pirate Ships and spiking 6$ for lost arts. My gut tells me this will be slow, and in case that my Bard-Deck is threatened by this, the detour to replace lib's by some Poachers is not desirable, but possible.
But, to be fair, I'm not sure here. Maybe, really, this might be one of the rare decks where Pirate Ship is king, thanks to Lost Arts and Colonies.