This is secrety a "how-do-I-play-this-board" question, but I enjoy giving the background as well.
I recently had an idea to spice up my face-to-face dominion playing. I only have Intrigue and Base for now, but I really like playing with the other sets on isotropic and wanted to introduce my friends to them. So I printed out the mechanics of a kingdom only using expansions that I do not have, and tucked them into the sleeves of my current cards. Huzzah, new cards!
So we played with transmute, duchess, fool's gold, native village, warehouse, spice merchant, mountebank, highway, counting house, apprentice.
With 3 players, we played 3 rounds, and each won one apiece. The fun thing is that every round each player was trying a new strategy, and we even had very little overlap between players. The first round a strategy with fool's gold, warehouse, native village, and highway, using spice merchant for +buy won out (can't remember what he was playing against, but it's probably significant that nobody played mountebank this round). The second round was won by a player that went for double mountebank (but no village), apprentice, and warehouse. (this beat a similar strategy that used mountebank, warehouse, NV, and highway). The third round was won by a player who relied on warehouse, apprentice, spice merchant, and a small amount of mountebanking.
So the questions are, what strategy do you prefer here? What would you do if an opponent was trying to 3-pile with duchies, and duchesses (3rd pile being transmute or NV probably)? No strategy using counting house or transmute ever won; I know these are considered weak cards, but is there a viable strategy using them?