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[Jimmmmm]

You're not going to get 9 Potions if your opponent gets none. If you fight over the Potions and end up winning the split 9-7 you get a net gain of 5 VP. Similarly if you fight over Duchies and win the split 5-3 you get a net gain of 6 VP. Now obviously the Potions are better if you can win by only 1 instead of 2, which you can safely do if you end the game while you do it.

[Garth One-eye]

In my experience you don't try to guarantee the Keep points by getting the majority of the pile, you just make sure that you have as much or more than your opponent which means you have just 1 or 2 more stop cards than your opponent.

[trivialknot]

Faust is right.  It's possible to buy 7 potions and have no VP to show for it.  But this is only possible if your opponent filled their deck with at least 8 potions, which sounds pretty bad for them!  In a 2P game, this is mathematically equivalent to each player getting 5 VP per potion.

My experience with Keep is that it often results in weird money slogs.  Sometimes you have the choice between buying a dead card worth 6 VP, or buying a gold worth 5 VP.  Gold seems like the better option, but it doesn't bring the game any closer to ending.

[kieranmillar]

Worth noting that Keep + Castles is brutally unfair first player advantage. Not only are castles good in money slogs anyway, but Humble Castle is worth 6VP by itself!

Bonus comedy: Start player opens 2/5

[jomini]

Worth noting that Keep + Castles is brutally unfair first player advantage. Not only are castles good in money slogs anyway, but Humble Castle is worth 6VP by itself!

Bonus comedy: Start player opens 2/5

In like manner, the first tournament becomes a nice 10 point swing that (or a 4 VP one if you opt for Duchy instead).

Other oddities of Keep - it can be excruciating to figure out when/if to play Spoils. An unplayed Spoils can be 5 VP or 0, choosing not to play a spoils to buy a duchy instead is 3 VP down now, but do that twice and you might end up VP over two iterations.

One thing I think that may be overlooked is how much additional gains/buys become more valuable. Being able to spike a huge number of coppers on the last turn can easily be worth 10 VP and that can be worth whiffing on a late game engine turn (enough to go pure Wv instead of Wv/Farmv) . Being able to choose between 2 Provs or 2 Golds & a Silver is a also a large issue for end game analysis. To a lesser extend, Keep also changes to marginal value of draw & sifting so you can more easily play all that yellow for functional gain. It definitely is a major engine enabler as you can much more easily delay game end until you swing the VP back to your column.

[Davio]

You could inherit (cost-reduced) Crown and get bonus points for your Estates.

[Limetime]

This really loves tournament. Diadem~=province+harem Steed all but garentees silver split win. Bag of gold helps with gold split.

After several games with keep I have realized that this actually helps engines a lot more than you would think.
The big money player can get like 50 points in 12 turns. If the engine is strong it can peal away those points and give it to itself. That is a ten point swing. After this the bm player has 35 points and the engine player has 15 and a much better deck.

[ackmondual]

I've never dabbled much with Masterpiece, so this'll be a "double whammy" reason to do so now!