Psyduck defeats dudeabides 3-0
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130827/log.506b5cfc0cf21d2313f966fe.1377631286811.txt
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130827/log.506b5cfc0cf21d2313f966fe.1377632762121.txt
http://dom.retrobox.eu/?/20130827/log.506b5cfc0cf21d2313f966fe.1377634564405.txt
Some comments on the games from miy side:
First of all, I'd like to thank dudeabides for being a fantastic opponent. I really enjoyed playing this interesting series of games and discussing them afterwards.
Game 1This one was truly designed for Vineyard. Candlestick Maker, Worker's Village, Highway, Spy, Lab, Stables, Cultist and thus Ruins. Both of us start CM/Silver. I concentrate on CM early on, while dudeabides gets a couple of Stables to get the draw on. Soon we get our potions (having plenty of +buy, I even buy a second one) and evenly split the Vineyards. dudeabides builds up to a very strong deck with some Labs and Highways, but the game is too short to take advantage of it. I use my buys to empty the ruins and win because of the additional action cards.
To be fair, both of us didn't realize the option to buy ruins until pretty late, luckily I got that idea a little bit before he did.
Game 2I really feel sorry about winning that game. It was by no means deserved, instead I should've been crushed..
Anyway, this was the most interesting game of the match, asking the big question: engine or BM? For me, the engine, featuring Inn, Merchant Guild and Hunting Grounds was just too expensive, also there wasn't any trashing. I thought it would take too long to build up against BM with Merchant Ship, so I started Silver/Scavenger. dudeabides went for the engine and started Sage/Scavenger. Soon he got his first engine components and his deck became stronger from turn to turn. I had to go ahead with Provinces and hope for the best.
In turn 15 he bought 5 Pawns and had like 35 coin tokens to spend. However, he got two ridiculous unlucky turns in a row, while I had $8/$6/$8 to spend. My lead was now just too big to overcome, so he couldn't really make use of his coin tokens.
After the game we agreed that engine was the way to go here, although it is hard to build up with Inn as only village and Hunting Grounds as only draw.
What do you guys think? Was engine the right strategy? How would you have approached it? Would a second Scavenger have helped to improve the reliability, preventing these two bad turns that turned the game upside down?
Game 3This game featured Remake, Familiar and City as important cards. dudeabides went for Remake, and I was really tempted to follow suit, ignoring Familiar. But as second player I felt I needed to take some risk and bought a Potion. I got really lucky to get my Familiar in turn 4 (and a second one in turn 6), while his Remake missed the shuffle. This pretty much sealed the game, as he couldn't get rid of the Curses. Later we went for Cities, and I think he made a mistake buying Gold and Merchant Guild instead of Cities, so we split the Cities 5-5. I didn't have any problems to end it on piles, afterwards.