apothecary is definitely one of my biggest demons atm, never quite sure what kind of deck it wants.
Apothecary is a tough card to play right. Something that really helped me was to play several games in a row and force it into every kingdom. Some games I made myself go for it no matter what and other games I made myself not go for it no matter what (much less of those).
Something to keep in mind when you do this is that Apothecary can result in very swingy openings -- the difference between the best possible outcome that you can control and the worst possible outcome is so large (consider cycling as well) that you really need to take luck into account. Some kingdoms are worth playing more than once if you don't feel like you are getting a good handle on what Apothecary is doing/not doing for you.
oh yeah, one last thing: looking back through my stream chat after the match, i noticed SCSN seemingly complaining about how slow i was with cartographer/apothecary/lookout. just warning you now, that part is never going away with me. i am probably the worst person on this forum when it comes to messing up the simplest things, when there's a lot of steps/information involved in them. i don't handle large quantities of things at once unless i majorly slow down to process them all, period.
Don't let him get to you. If he thinks you're too slow, then he shouldn't watch, but he (like me) likes to complain about things. Especially in a league match, just focus on playing the best you can, and if he doesn't find your stream to his liking, well then I guess he just won't watch. Oh well.
the stream doesn't really help with all of this, though. my chat being so unfamiliar with the game kinda forces me to go over rudimentary stuff over and over, and obviously that slows it down a lot too. also, to be frank, it makes me a lot more dull than i otherwise would be - i'm a very intense person at heart who loves to bring up conversations on all sorts of topics while i play, but having to play professor all the time kills those aspects of me. this is why i stopped streaming power grid, and i'd like to figure out a solution for this game...
Well I don't have the solution to this, but I do have some thoughts. In the very early days when I was experimenting with streaming Dominion, Dethwing was giving me some help. One thing we noticed is that his audience (1500 Followers at the time, if he streamed for an hour or so he'd have 30-50 viewers pretty consistently) was not really interested in anything but speedrunning video games. He could have 50 viewers, then change over to Dominion and within 5 minutes be down to 10. Those 10 would ask questions and they would have a good interaction, but 10 minutes later those people would be lost and stop watching.
Dominion is a game that's harder to watch than Hearthstone or Mario, in either of those games it's pretty easy to see what's going on and follow things with no knowledge of the game: Mario is jumping across platforms and dodging/stomping on monsters, Hearthstone has life totals on everything and monsters run into each other (and there are bubbles that make everything clear that's happening). People describe Dominion as "just a bunch of cards flying around on the screen." This is a really difficult problem to fix and it's a huge barrier between us and getting more people to watch Dominion and get into it.
For a while I tried to "play professor" and I got nothing but negative feedback from it. Anyone who appreciates that isn't very likely to say anything in chat about it, and it's much easier to cater your streams to what people are telling you and what you want, rather than speculate about what hypothetical people may be wanting. I also think that streams where you're providing insightful commentary and explaining deeper points and trying to play well are just better than streams where you're trying to teach the game. If someone wants to learn the game, a live stream is just not the right medium for it and other games (Mario and Hearthstone) can get away with it because they're either very easy to learn or their game clients make the game very easy to understand. It's ironic that there's so much backlash against flashy animations when that's probably the thing that can help the most with this, but that's another discussion. A tutorial video/highlight that you point people to for learning Dominion is probably the way to go here.
So what I did was try to create a new audience -- I've found it very difficult to transfer an audience that wants to see other video games over to Dominion (as I'm sure you have as well, along with people like Chesswhiz), so most of the people who stick around the stream are the ones who came to watch Dominion. And the way I keep them is to just make the best stream I can for those people. I never simplify my commentary for the sake of being accessible, because I believe that high-level strategic concepts and accessibility are not mutually exclusive -- I just try to think out loud as part of my thinking process (which has taken me years to get to the point I am now, to be fair) and people will follow it. These forums have been extremely helpful for creating a community of regulars who will keep the chat active, and for directing lurkers towards live streams where they enjoy what they watch.
I guess that's a lot of rambling, maybe you can find something good in there you can use, I think it's really cool how someone as popular as you is now focused on streaming Dominion -- it could be really good for Dominion streaming in general and also for your audience to get into a really fun game