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« on: July 06, 2011, 12:22:02 am »
The evidence on CouncilRoom does suggest strongly that Baron/Chapel is a poor opening. However, the idea of using Baron as an alternative card to power up appeals to me. What do I mean?
The canonical Chapel deck opens Silver/Chapel, trashes Estates and Coppers while usually getting one or two extra Silvers or an enabling card, then quickly starts buying Golds and Provinces, maybe trashing Silvers towards the later part too. What Baron can offer in this case is take the place of Silver; instead of buying Silver, one uses Baron to leapfrog up to Gold directly. This should not be too hard, since after all a 5-card deck of (Chapel, Copper, Copper, Estate, Baron) allows a Gold buy. Over-trashing Coppers fine too, as Estate + Baron alone allows a Silver buy, then the next turn Estate + Baron + Silver = Gold. In other words, the Baron + Estate here take the place of 2 Silvers. If Chapel and Baron collide in Turn 3 or 4, then by the same principle as in the Silver/Chapel opening we should use Chapel to trash all cards except the Baron (unless you draw Chapel Baron and 3 Estates, in which case depending on what 5's are available I think you can consider cutting your losses and trashing everything.)
What is the advantage of this compared to Silver/Chapel? If your Baron and Chapel are split between turns 3 and 4, and you draw your Baron with 1 or 2 Estates, you immediatly get a leg up to your first Gold even before you have finished trashing. The increase in speed here I estimate to be about one turn.
What is the disadvantage of this compared to Silver/Chapel? If you do not have the opportunity to trash your Baron and/or Estate once you have started building up, then they become dead cards in your hand, so your deck is less finetuned and has higher variance. To mitigate this, your Baron could fetch you extra Estates, and on rare occasions that +Buy may come in useful if it comes down to non-Province VPs.
The above argument is non-applicable to this particular set of 10, where Goons is an important $6 buy that is almost a must-get. In this specific set of 10, I am somewhat surprised by the lack of Library buys at $5... isn't the mantra "Library counters hand-size attacks"? I would seriously consider it over Wharf, since in any close game I am expecting to be Gooned every turn.