...compare 10 Ventures + 5 Copper against 15 Golds....
Okay. This is the last thing I'm going to say about Venture on this thread. I promise.
Maybe I'm being unclear in what I'm saying. But this is the last shot. I don't want to compare a deck with Ventures to a deck without and say which one is better. It's either too hard or not meaningful. What I've been saying is this:
Compare a Venture deck with no green cards to one with a lot of green cards. There is a small difference.
Compare another deck with no green cards to one with a lot of green cards. There is usually a big difference.
Hence, Venture decks are more resilient to greening than other decks.
(FWIW, I don't object to continuing discussing Venture. It's an interesting card.)
I think I understand what you're saying, which is: 10V and 10V40E decks have the same buying power most turns ($10), whereas 10G and 10G40E have drastically different buying power per turn ($15 for the former, an average of $3 for the latter). I agree. Then you're saying that it must be the green-resilience of Venture that is causing this effect. I disagree--I think the effect is not from green-resilience. Then you're saying that if it is the green-resilience causing this effect, then because there is a large effect here, then there should be a small (but non-zero) effect in normal cases. I would agree with that, if I thought it was the green-resilience causing the effect in the extreme case.
What I think is actually going on with 10V vs 10V40E is that Venture is whiffing when you play it. By "whiff", I mean the Venture chain from a single play terminates without finding a non-Venture treasure. Whiffing is bad: you miss out of the value of the final treasure you draw, plus you use up the Ventures in your deck, so that they don't contribute value to your next plays. I argue that the reason 10V40E is so good is that 10 Ventures in a deck
should be $10 per play, but with a 10V deck only, you whiff too much, so you don't get the full value you would otherwise expect.
Whiffing doesn't happen in normal decks (unless you've drawn your whole deck, in which case Venture is bad). Even Venture-heavy decks are typically built to not whiff much, because whiffing is bad, unless you can get enough Ventures to buy a Province without other treasure. So, I don't think considering a whiff-every-time deck is helpful for understanding how Venture acts in a normal deck, where Venture never ever whiffs.
There IS an effect that might cause Venture to be green-resilient in normal decks, which is when you play Venture and it triggers a reshuffle, but doesn't whiff. I don't know much about this effect, but I believe it's very small in normal decks, and I'm not yet convinced that it's always a helpful effect.