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[flies]

it's not cost reduction.  it's saving money for later.

money now > money later

During the engine-building phase, you won't be spending spare buys on copper (except in special cases like Watchtower). All you're getting from the MG is money smoothing at that point. That's not bad obviously, but is it enough to make it worth the delay on your money?

What makes the delay useful is that you can wait to green.  If you're just smooth money and not building up for large turns, then it's probably not worth it.  If you can build up a large stash, then you can pick up a bunch of green late and build your engine longer.

I think bridge is probably going to be more useful in general, but my point was that if you take a MG when you wanted a bridge then yeah it's not as good.  MG can do things that bridge can't (bank loads of $$) and that what it's best at.  See it for what it is and not for what it isn't.

[flies]

I also wanted to say that MG is great when you want to add copper to your deck, in which case it becomes (nearly) a terminal gold that adds copper.  This is much like Horse Traders, but the money smoothing is very nice, and there are those rare occasions where HT discards two treasures.  HT will of course be superior to MG in most cases because it costs $4 and not $5, but once in your deck MG is better (aside from the reaction).

Overall, I agree with the crowd Bridge is better in general.  It would be interesting to try playing it costing $4 (IRL i guess) and seeing what happens. 

[flies]

I'd guess that MG is probably the best way to get a huge stash of coin tokens.  Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, Plaza, none of these can net you the piles of coins that MG can.

[jaybeez]

Butcher, Baker, and to a lesser extent Plaza usually can't net you a huge number of coin tokens because of how much they cost (the cards themselves I mean).  But when you have a way of getting a lot of them (for the $5s, University, HoP, maybe Altar?  For Plaza lots of gainers of course) they can do that for you--it's not typical I'd say.  Baker's the best candidate, Plaza you could get there, Butcher probably not without KC or at least TR.

But Candlestick Maker really can because it's so easy to amass them if you want to.  I think it would only work in a good engine with plenty of draw (or draw-to-X!), but it is definitely possible.

[blueblimp]

it's not cost reduction.  it's saving money for later.

money now > money later

During the engine-building phase, you won't be spending spare buys on copper (except in special cases like Watchtower). All you're getting from the MG is money smoothing at that point. That's not bad obviously, but is it enough to make it worth the delay on your money?

What makes the delay useful is that you can wait to green.  If you're just smooth money and not building up for large turns, then it's probably not worth it.  If you can build up a large stash, then you can pick up a bunch of green late and build your engine longer.

I think bridge is probably going to be more useful in general, but my point was that if you take a MG when you wanted a bridge then yeah it's not as good.  MG can do things that bridge can't (bank loads of $$) and that what it's best at.  See it for what it is and not for what it isn't.

I feel like we've gone off on a different direction than what my reply was about in the first place. I was responding very specifically to http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=9157.msg282248#msg282248, which was praising Merchant Guild's ability to explode, and I was saying Bridge is better at exploding because for exploding, getting $ a turn earlier is a huge benefit. At the time your engine is exploding, it's earlier than you're greening anyway (barring 3-pile endings in mirrors, which to be fair is an important case).

I of course know that MG is not a good drop-in substitute for Bridge, which was half my point in the first place...

[blueblimp]

I'd guess that MG is probably the best way to get a huge stash of coin tokens.  Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, Plaza, none of these can net you the piles of coins that MG can.

But coin tokens are at their worst in large quantities, as has been observed before in some other thread. A single coin token can bump you from $7 to $8 in late game, changing a Duchy buy to a Province and netting you +3VP for the one token. But eight coin tokens just buy a Province, netting you only 0.75 VP per token.

So the fact that MG is oriented towards amassing large quantities of coin tokens is actually a downside of the card, not an upside.

[Awaclus]

I'd guess that MG is probably the best way to get a huge stash of coin tokens.  Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker, Plaza, none of these can net you the piles of coins that MG can.

But coin tokens are at their worst in large quantities, as has been observed before in some other thread. A single coin token can bump you from $7 to $8 in late game, changing a Duchy buy to a Province and netting you +3VP for the one token. But eight coin tokens just buy a Province, netting you only 0.75 VP per token.

So the fact that MG is oriented towards amassing large quantities of coin tokens is actually a downside of the card, not an upside.

But amassing large quantities of coin tokens also has its advantages if you can amass enough; you can green later, and usually two buy phases is enough to end the game in a victory after amassing large quantities of tokens.

[AdamH]

[...]I was saying Bridge is better at exploding because for exploding, getting $ a turn earlier is a huge benefit.

I don't think this is always true. Say the goal is to buy that big expensive victory card (this applies so far to BM or engine). It doesn't matter what your previous buys do as long as you can get Provinces in the end. You use Merchant Guild to save up a stash of coin tokens and then spend them all at the end to get expensive victory cards.

So your second-to-last shuffle looks the same only this time, whether you're playing money or engine, now instead of having a deck full of action cards that you *have* to play in order to kick off, you have a reserve of coin tokens, which is much more flexible.

But coin tokens are at their worst in large quantities

...unless you have some +Buy to use them with. With MG and nothing else in hand, you can double-province with tons of coin tokens in reserve.

A massive reserve of coin tokens and a deck with +Buy cards is a constant threat to at-least-double-province every turn without the risk of a bad draw. This gives you nearly complete control of the end game, and I think that's very powerful.


...Of course everything I just said based solely on my own experience so I could be wrong.

[Watno]

I was responding very specifically to http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=9157.msg282248#msg282248, which was praising Merchant Guild's ability to explode, and I was saying Bridge is better at exploding because for exploding, getting $ a turn earlier is a huge benefit. At the time your engine is exploding, it's earlier than you're greening anyway (barring 3-pile endings in mirrors, which to be fair is an important case).

I of course know that MG is not a good drop-in substitute for Bridge, which was half my point in the first place...

If you consistently manage to play 3 Bridges, that's nice, but you really need more bridges to explode, which also means more villages (which might not even be available). For exploding with Merchant Guild, 3 of them are enough.

[Qvist]

I don't know if this topic is still interesting for the OP, but maybe you want to have a look at the detailed post that I wrote about Merchant Guild.
It's a very interesting card for sure and better than it seems at first glance. And it really can't cost $4.

Summary:
Merchant Guild is no top $5 card, but it's definitely way better than many on the forums commented. It has many uses (Slogs, other Coin Token cards, Engines with cheap components) and is not only useful in megaturn strategies, but there it can really really shine.