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[mischiefmaker]

jonts' Scheme article going up on the blog today and a game I played got me thinking about this potential combo.

Strengths:
 - Once you win the first tournament, Scheme gives you the ability to get more plays out of your Trusty Steed or Followers (or Princess or Bag of Gold, I guess). This is probably the biggest attraction.
 - Since you will often want some other action for trying to quickly bootstrap to $8, if you miss, Scheme lets you try again. For instance, say you play Vault, but don't draw Gold -- just buy Gold, topdeck the Vault, and try again.
 - If you have a couple of Tournaments and a Province already, but don't get them to collide, you can topdeck the Tournament to try again.
 - In many tournament games, you often want to use a Tournament to get to $8 and your first Province. In cases where your Tournament is at the end of the shuffle, having a Scheme prevents it from missing the shuffle and improves the chances you can collide Province/Tournament on the next shuffle.

Traps:
 - As the article says, Scheme sacrifices power for reliability. Having a Scheme instead of Silver might make it harder to get that first Province. Having the ability to topdeck Followers doesn't mean much if your opponent gets to Followers first.
 - Since you often want some other action to quickly bootstrap to $8, Scheme might get in the way. Terminal draw is the most obvious example.

Tournament is one of my 15 or so worst cards (-1.49 Eff With), so I'm hesitant to make definitive statements, but it seems to me that on balance it's worth picking up a Scheme or two in a Tournament-based deck. Not sure when, though -- before the bootstrapping action? After, but before Tournaments? After Tournaments, but before Province? After Tournament/Province? After getting a Prize? Probably depends on the rest of the board, but I'd like to hear thoughts from others.

[Jorbles]

The biggest trick is when to buy that Scheme. You don't want to open with it as a Silver (or Silver equivalent) will get you to that crucial first Province sooner. You probably ideally want to buy the Scheme after you get the first Province, but before you reshuffle to get the most effectiveness out of it.

[DG]

It's probably better if you can start with another action as a good partner for scheme in the early game and retain the scheme for use on the tournament mid game. A big advantage of scheme is being able to transfer its use between your action cards for maximum effect, something you can't do if you just have extra copies of the other action cards.

[Davio]

Maybe opening Scheme with a terminal Silver can be helpful? This way you can play that card twice in a row and hopefully get at least 1 Gold, getting two $5's early can also be very helpful.

[Asklepios]

Maybe opening Scheme with a terminal Silver can be helpful? This way you can play that card twice in a row and hopefully get at least 1 Gold, getting two $5's early can also be very helpful.

I agree - I'm a big fan of Silver/Navigator with Scheme as my next $3-5. Sure, its not strong enough to really be called a combo, but if there's no great options around I find its usually almost as good as silver/silver at getting to $5-6, and adds in faster early deck cycling and a little draw control as well. As has been said, the fact that the Scheme is transferrable to a better action later is a big help.

Obviously its not as good an opening as something like Remake/Silver or Moneylender/Silver or Baron/Silver, but I think its (probably) as valid an opening as silver/silver, or silver/tournament.