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« on: August 03, 2021, 02:19:20 pm »
When I saw this topic, I actually thought you were going to argue something close to the reverse—each expansion increases the complexity dramatically and thus increases the odds that you are going to have build some kind of engine deck, whereas you can still win with some cute, simpler money strategy a decent percentage of the time if you stick to base game plus an expansion or two. I don't personally agree that that version of Dominion is better, but I could at least see that argument: It's a matter of personal preference, and some people might prefer it. I occasionally miss the days when winning games like that was somewhat more common. (Obviously, it still happens, but at high-skill levels of play, it's rarer, I think.)
I have a very hard time believing that adding expansions raises the odds that a random kingdom is going to be lacking some key component. Perhaps this is mathematically true in the event that there were infinite cards, but as you note, there are not. Note that cards don't just do one thing, and cards do different things depending on what other cards are there. I.e., Sheepdog is not really a draw card on its own, but if you have non-terminal mid-turn gaining, then suddenly it is. The odds of having mid-turn non-terminal gaining have certainly increased as we've added expansions. If Sheepdog was dropped into Base, you would need it to be present with Workshop or Artisan and a village to make it draw productively for you.
I would argue that if you're restricting yourself to fewer expansions, you increase the need for every kingdom to have +buy and +cards and +actions in order to be interesting (again, if by interesting you mean vaguely engine-y; interesting is a really subjective thing). With many more expansions, it doesn't matter so much if one of those components is strictly absent, because the kingdom will have some other exciting thing that you can do, like gain a bunch of VP chips, or acquire cards and points from landscapes, or whatever.