I'm not really taking issue with WW's types. Big money is a deck type, it has certain solutions to the obstacles
Do they though? If I tell you I played an Engine, do you immediately know what my specific solutions to the obstacles were? I don't think any of the 4 deck types actually imply one and only one answer to each of those questions.
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as you mix big money and engine, you're guaranteed to lose against someone who just plays big money or just plays engine.
Just to be clear: "Guaranteed to lose" is not the same thing as "Does not exist". If I say "A player could even trash their Provinces with Chapel!" you wouldn't then say "No they can't, because as far as I'm concerned they're guaranteed to lose." A bad strategy does not equal a nonexistent strategy. I'm not saying that one
should play an even mix of BM and Engine, just that they are inversely correlated, and one theoretically
could do it.
Furthermore, can you really say that all of your Big Money decks are purely Big Money with not even the slightest hints of an Engine? You never pick up a Smithy or a Governor or a JoaT to supplement your money? I suspect you would argue that that's still just Big Money. So then where would the cutoff be? If I pickup a Lab to supplement my Smithy/BM, is it still BM? Exactly how many Action Cards must I be running to qualify as an Engine? As far as I'm concerned, the only proper way to resolve such questions is to consider it on a spectrum, where Engine and BM are inversely correlated. And really, that doesn't contradict your argument that the two should not be mixed. If they're inversely correlated, it's not a stretch to argue that perhaps there are very few (or no) cards which support a mixture of BM and Engine. I'm just arguing that such a deck, however terrible, can be created.
Also, I have actually lost matches and thought "I should have had less moving pieces like my opponent did" or even thought after a match that I would have done better if I had added a couple more moving pieces to support my previously purely Big Money deck. I'm not arguing that there's some magic sweet spot on the BM/Engine scale or Rush/Slog scale that one should be shooting for (and I don't think WanderingWinder ever argued there was). What's best is entirely dependent on the Kingdom. The efficacy of one's moving pieces is determined by how well they solve the fundamental issues of building a deck such as only having 1 Action, only having 1 Buy, etc.
Are you sure that, in those cases, the important thing was the number of moving parts you had in your deck, not the abilities of the exact cards you had in your deck and ended up not needing very much or the abilities of the exact cards you didn't have and would have needed?
The above quote does lead me to believe that we're actually thinking in similar terms on a practical level, and we're just getting hung up on the more abstract level. Just to make sure I'm making my thoughts clear: what I'm trying to get across is that I feel the definition of an Engine is the number of moving parts,
regardless of whether the engine works or not. You can construct a crappy engine. It happens. It's still an engine, it's just that the engine you set up fails to properly address the 7 questions you posed in this article. So my underlying interpretation of WW's deck classifications is not that they give you any strategic insight- that's what your 7 questions do. Like I said before, my interpretation is that WW's classifications tell you
what is being attempted, not how effective the attempt is.
So I have had situations where I felt that I had too few moving parts relative to the 7 questions you're asking. Or in other words, situations where I look at the Kingdom and say "In this situation, an Engine actually handles the primary challenges of deck building better than my Big Money approach did, so more moving parts would have paid off more effectively here"
I'm not saying or implying that it's about that. I think we're just experiencing a miscommunication.
Oh. It sounded like you were saying that a lot of newbies fail to see how strong +buy is, but I guess it wasn't about that.
This is my fault. What I was trying to say at the end of my original reply was that, tangentially, it's a little bonus that by splitting the "Only have 5 cards" apart from the "Only have 1 Buy", new players psychologically are forced to consider the weight of that problem. But I explained it very poorly. I'm not trying to say that the goal of the article is/should be to help new players understand the value of +Buy (or any other mechanic), but rather that it's just a nice little bonus if that happens. I'm also not trying to say that that's my primary reason for arguing for splitting that question in two, but again, I could see how you thought that, because I explained it horribly. The fact that it will help new players is mostly irrelevant, so I honestly should have just left it out. It was just a last minute thought that popped into my head. Pretty much just an ADD moment.
Being able to control what those cards are is a separate issue covered by obstacle #6.
Totally, and that was what I meant in my original reply when I said something along the lines of "You've already covered this elsewhere". Like I said, the fact that I only draw 5 cards is a less generalized version of the real issue, which is that I need to somehow get enough buying power to buy that Province (or whatever else is gonna win me the game). My handsize only matters to me sometimes. The fact that I need some form of increase to my economy matters to me all the time. I know we're on the same page on this because:
The fact that you only draw 5 cards doesn't mean that you're supposed to draw more than 5 cards
But I guess all I'm really telling you is that some readers are going to read it that way. They will think that they somehow need to increase their hand size (maybe it's the reader's fault for assuming, but I'm just saying, they're gonna do it whether it's a fallacy or not), when in reality, as we both understand, that's only one solution. All I'm proposing to you here is that:
1) The phrasing "You need a good economy" or "You need a way to draw your good cards" gets the job done in a more generalized way
2) What I just proposed overlaps with previous #'s from your original article, and is therefore redundant
3) This is unrelated to the +Buy issue.
That's not the only solution to Buys. You can work around them by splitting your focus between Treasures and Gainers (thus eliminating the need for extra Buys but still increasing the rate at which you can acquire cards). Coin tokens and Overpay are also a solution to not having extra Buys.
Not having extra gains isn't really the issue here; most decks don't need extra gains anyway. The issue is leftover money.
No, I didn't say not having extra gains is the
problem, I said it was an example of a
solution to not having +Buy.
Problem: I want to 3-pile, but I worry I'll have a lot of money and no +Buy
Possible Solution: Pick up Ironworks instead of so many Silvers/Golds, then you will have a bit of a lower money density and will still be picking up a lot of cards.
That's all I'm getting at.
You deal with it by not having it
But it seems like you think that's one solution, and it's not. There are many ways to not have leftover money. You could get +Buy, you could use Plaza to convert them to Coin Tokens, or you could dump them into Overpays.
I probably didn't make this as clear in my original reply as I would've liked, but it really is a good article. The fact that we're mostly disagreeing on abstract interpretations of deck classifications and pedantic stuff is kind of a testament to that. I think it will be valuable to a lot of players. I just disagree on certain specific phrasings, and thought I'd chime in with my 2 cents.