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[philosophyguy]

How do you decide when not to trigger a reshuffle? When is it worth missing a reshuffle in order to play a card?

For instance, if you open 5/2 on a Witch-BM board and draw your Witch turn 5, do you play it?

What about an engine board where playing an extra Market will reshuffle but will allow you to pick up two engine components rather than just one?

Any thoughts, examples, game logs, etc. are welcome.

[Mic Qsenoch]

I think I'd almost always play the Witch turn 5. The Market question is much harder. I think developing better judgement in these kinds of situations offers a pretty marginal improvement in skill because its going to be really hard to evaluate whether your decision was "correct" or not.

You really want to avoid reshuffles if several of your key cards will miss the shuffle, but I couldn't say what "several" and "key" mean.

The one obvious case where it's really important not to trigger reshuffles is when you are playing an engine with a lot of sifters (I think that's what people call them). Cards like warehouse, cellar, cartographer etc. If your discard pile is full of junk you really need to be careful not to trigger a reshuffle.

Hunting Party decks also need careful attention paid to the reshuffles. Here it is almost always bad to cause the reshuffle with your HP stack in play.

[eHalcyon]

Definitely play the Witch. Your choice is between playing it on this reshuffle or on the next reshuffle. Early cursing has greater impact.

I think I'm more worried about triggering a reshuffle if it would cause multiple key cards to miss.

[Rabid]

Minion stack is another deck where you need to be careful of bad reshuffles.

Examples:
T8 or so, 1 cards in deck and hand: Gold, Silver, Copper, witch, witch.
Playing double witch big money, as the witch causes a re shuffle, don't play it.

Same deck T8 0 cards in deck
Hand: Witch, Silver, Silver, Copper, Curse
Borderline but I think I would play witch, (hoping for a copper to get to Gold).

Same deck T8 0 cards in deck
Hand Witch, Copper, Curse, Estate, Estate
Should play witch no question.

Obviously lots of space between the extremes.
But I think the biggest lesson to learn is to think about reshuffles before you play actions.
The details will develop over time.

[Rabid]

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201211/24/game-20121124-135031-3fdee7a9.html

Just played this game.
T6 I chose not to play a market to stop a reshuffle.

[DG]

I think you've essentially got 3 things to consider
- the cards you'll be putting into the discard pile during clean up
- the cards you are gaining this turn and where they are going
- the cards already in the discard pile

If those three different sets of cards have an uneven distribution of good/bad cards then you need to consider the reshuffle. There can be times when you want to force a shuffle and then put bad cards into a fresh discard during clean up.  As with wishing well 'guessing', I suspect a lot of potential substrategies could appear in specific situations if one looked hard enough. Shuffle maths can be very complicated so some intuition, visualization, and counting might be needed.

I'll also add two Dark Ages cards to the list of actions that can create a bad discard pile while putting all your good cards into play: Sage and Wandering Minstrel.

[SirPeebles]

I think you've essentially got 3 things to consider
- the cards you'll be putting into the discard pile during clean up
- the cards you are gaining this turn and where they are going
- the cards already in the discard pile

And is it your turn or the turn of an opponent you're possessing 

Triggering a miserable reshuffle can be one of the most powerful applications of Possession, requiring multiple turns to recover.

[zahlman]

Am I missing something about the original example? If it's turn 5, didn't you already reshuffle in the middle of drawing your hand in the turn 4 cleanup phase?

[philosophyguy]

Zahlman is correct; the original Witch example should have been something like opening Witch/nothing and drawing the Witch turn 4.

[RD]

Definitely play the Witch. Your choice is between playing it on this reshuffle or on the next reshuffle. Early cursing has greater impact.

This is exactly the point. You pass up playing a card once now in order to avoid the situation where that card misses the reshuffle and you won't get to play it later? Does not compute.

Hell, at least if it misses the reshuffle, you won't have a dead Witch taking up handspace at any point along the way. And you have two cards' worth of extra cycling which might help you get your second Witch play sooner. And you will have zero possibility of missing the subsequent reshuffle. So even if early cursing weren't preferable to delayed cursing, this is really bad in principle.

Now you can concoct situations where it might be better to wait. Maybe rather than trigger a reshuffle with Tournament, you save that Tournament for the next reshuffle in hopes of hitting a Province. Maybe playing one Smithy with your last Action is awful and you save it for a turn with +Action. But most often if you refrain from triggering a reshuffle with one card, it's because you're worried about also losing a DIFFERENT card, from which you would otherwise benefit both now AND later.