I've skimmed your article. I have several critiques and can quote several things you've said in the article that I flat-out disagree with and/or think are misleading, but I'm at work right now so I can't realistically type that out in a thoughtful, constructive way until tonight at the earliest (and it may be even longer, I can't promise that I'll have it done by the end of the weekend, TBH, though if you want me to do it I will make sure it happens).
I said I would do this. Sorry for the delay, I was off-the-grid this weekend and it turns out I'm going to continue to be very busy until I get married in July. But hey here it is!
How do I use it?
In general, Coin of the Realm's Reserve nature means that you'll never "waste" it as a Village - playing Village, then Smithy, only to draw a bunch of Treasures and Victory cards is not exactly optimal. That Village has now be used for the shuffle, and so you've in a sense lost your ability to support one of the terminals in your deck until you reshuffle, which is why it can often be good to get a couple more Villages than your deck actually needs. If that were a Coin of the Realm instead, you'd be able to hold onto it until you actually had a collision in your hand. With CotR on your Tavern mat, you can play terminal draw with impunity, knowing you can support up to two more Actions if you draw any, and still being perfectly happy if you don't. Without terminal draw, you can almost overload on terminals, since a single CotR can handle three terminals colliding in your hand - in this case, again, unlike with normal Villages, there's no chance of "wasting" CotR if you only draw one terminal.
So there's a great opportunity here that I think you're missing the chance to talk about. This deck you describe, where you have enough Villages and Actions to play that you're worried about Terminal draw drawing things dead. If you were using some other Village besides Coin, the deck you're describing is actually pretty bad. Why would you want enough actions in your deck that you want to play multiples in a turn if your deck can't be one that's trim enough to actually draw these actions together with your villages?
And you touch on this, Coin is special here, you get to use its ability and it looks really great, but before Adventures, this kind of deck was rarely viable. Now all of a sudden it could work! Talk about this deck some more! How do you build it? When do you get Coins? How does trashing interact with it? How do you prioritize draw? You should mention that +Buy is super-important for this. What kind of payload can you have to justify building this kind of deck vs. something else, and how has that payload changed versus using just a regular Village in this deck? These are the questions I want answered in this article.
And these are extremely difficult questions to answer. If you go ahead and assert answers for them, I could basically challenge them, no matter what they are. I'd want to see examples and discuss them -- this is a long process that's made much more difficult by the fact that we can't play Adventures online right now.
To get into more detail, let's look at two cases: boards without other villages, and boards with them.
Coin of the Realm as the only village
Here, CotR should be one of your earliest purchases. Be willing to spend $3 on it, though perhaps not at the expense of an opening Silver, unless you're aiming for $4 terminals instead of $5's. You want CotRs on your Tavern mat as soon as possible, so that you can start calling them as soon as you start getting terminal collisions.
That seems a little strong to me, and probably too simple. I realize that there are tons of different situations out there, and the strategy for them is so varied. It depends so much on trashing, right? If I'm running a deck I can draw every turn and I'm trying to maximize my payload, if that payload involves playing terminals, I have to pick up Coin one turn before I'd normally pick up a Village. I also have to draw it, and pick up another one for the following turn. But this time I can get a lot of terminals. So yeah in this case sometimes you want Coin before your terminals. But what if you aren't drawing your deck? Now you're talking about getting them a whole shuffle earlier. That's complicated too. There's a whole world of complexity and engine-building here that depends so heavily on the board and lots of other things that it's really really hard to talk about.
So what can you say? Well you can say you probably want it a shuffle earlier than most other Villages you'd buy, but I think you have to qualify that advice by saying that if you're shuffling every turn, the decisions get much more complicated than that.
It's at this point that we need to address CotR's major advantage, and major disadvantage:
Good: CotR gives 1 Action more than most other Villages, since it doesn't require an Action to get its effect. Therefore two CotRs can support 5 terminals, whereas 2 Villages can only support 3.
Bad: Due to its slowness, in order to get any sort of reliability out of CotR, you need to stagger them, like Durations, which means you need to buy twice as many of them. So, to support 5 terminals, you really should be buying 4 (which is how many Villages you'd be buying anyway).
...
All in all, is an engine possible with CotR as the only Village? Yes, but it can be a little finicky at times.
I really don't think the "bad" part is actually bad. It's just different. There are a couple of words you use here that I think you should be careful about. "Reliability" is sort of the thing that sets Coin apart from other villages -- it's there when you need it. But when Coin is the only village, I don't think that applies so much. I think you want to use a more descriptive word here, or maybe some more descriptive words.
Adventures brought on several new Durations or things that feel like Durations. And the big difference between these new things and the old Durations is that they are asymmetrical. Yeah sure you played Merchant Ship and got $2 on each turn, but you only had to play it on one turn, so that was already asymmetrical, but these new things are even more so. One turn you have to draw and play a Copper, which is really bad. The other turn you get two free Actions out of nowhere, that's super good! You're talking about getting multiple Coins to smooth this out -- to even out the asymmetry for more consistency. So maybe "consistent" or "regular" or "smooth" are good words.
And sometimes you don't want this or you can't have it. Getting an even number of Coins is good for this (which you should totally mention) but Coin (and other Adventures cards) can cause you to build decks that have a certain type of "rhythm." You like coining terms, maybe you can run with this one (see what I did there?
) -- my deck does better this turn, but it won't do as well next turn because I'll only have two Coins on my mat. This is yet another archetype of deck that Coin makes possible on a very fundamental level. Again, very difficult to talk about but it's there and that's what people who read this article want to read about.
Coin of the Realm with other Villages
In these cases, CotR is often ignorable. Getting $2 is not usually a happy turn, and you'd often rather pick up a drawing Action Village. In these cases, if you get CotR at all, it will be as a supplement, something you pick up with an extra buy to help smooth out your engine. When paired with other Villages, CotR kind of feels like Cartographer: not something that's really going to be essential to your strategy, but it certainly has a net positive effect on your deck if you happen to pick one up. It can also add some reliability to your deck - as mentioned before, CotR doesn't have to worry about being drawn with your terminal draw card, as it's already there, on your mat, waiting to be called. In these cases, picking up one or two CotRs can help ensure that your engine fires every turn.
You proceed to talk all about when you want Coin after you say it's ignorable. This means Coin isn't ignorable. I think you should just begin this paragraph with "it will be as a supplement" -- Coin is still really good in these decks.
What does it work well with?
CotR likes +Buy. It's a perfect "sure, why not" purchase when you have $2 left to spend, and certainly helps your deck more than Pearl Diver. The best version of this is terminal draw +Buy - Council Room, Margrave, Ranger - that way your CotRs can help support their play, and then you can pick up another draw card along with another CotR, or whatever other payload you feel like snagging.
One of the best parts of the article. I really like this part, it's pretty close to spot-on (I don't think Ranger is worth mentioning here, but that's a minor gripe). You mention in several parts of the article that Coin doesn't draw a card and yeah that's a mark against it. But what that means is that strong terminal draw is something that works very well with Coin.
You really need to emphasize that here, because that's a fundamental way that you change the way you build your deck based on Coin's uniqueness -- you prioritize strong draw. Most of the time you aren't going to get strong draw and +Buy in the same package, so how do you balance the two things? What's more important? How do I decide? Similar to strong draw is trashing, but that doesn't get mentioned at all here. This is what people reading this article really want to read. (Man, I say that a lot, and it's the really hard questions I say that about. Writing good articles is hard!)
Of course, we can't not mention the two cards that play Treasures during your Action phase - Black Market and Storyteller. While I wouldn't go so far as to call either of these a "combo" with CotR, the synergy is certainly strong here. Being able to play and call CotR on the same turn completely gets rid of the slowness disadvantage, and almost doubles the terminal capacity of your deck.
This seems really pipe-dreamy. I'm having trouble seeing a Black Market deck make this work, though Storyteller seems worth talking about in a little more detail. Since you're doing this to add terminal space, Storyteller's non-terminal-ness is really great here, and draw is especially important for this as well since neither Black Market nor Coin draw cards, and you need to draw you deck some other way (without playing terminals, or else you're just asking for tons of dud hands) to actually make this work.
Conclusion
A solid card, both in its role and its price point, though it shines more if it doesn't have any Village competition.
If I want people to take away something short from this article, it's that Coin is best with strong draw and +Buy. If I want people to take away deep strategic insights from this article, it's the different ways I build and play my deck based on which of these components (plus trashing and perhaps other villages) are available or not available. With Coin, you have a lot of these things to talk about because it has such a unique effect, but there's not a lot of that here (as I pointed out above).
And if you asked me to help you provide that insight, I hate to be unhelpful here, but I don't feel like I understand it well enough to speak authoritatively about it. TBH I don't think anyone is yet, there's a lot of unexplored strategic space around Coin that deserves to be talked about in a strategy article.
(begin small tangent)
When I teach people Dominion, and even when I was learning it myself, I aim to get them to be able to look at a board and figure out the best deck to build by seeing what's there and not there, but by also seeing how the cards work together. Each card has its own place in certain types of decks, so one thing I recommend to people is that they read all of the cards and
figure out when they would want that card (why is that card good? Let's call this Level 1 of understanding.). They should also be able to tell me
when that card is going to be the-star-of-the-show-amazeballs, which requires a different level of strategic insight (Level 2). I feel like this article right now accomplishes that first goal -- so if someone learning the game was reading Coin's card text, they should be able to write this article.
Better would be if they could do that second part, and I think if you answer all of the questions I didn't label as "really hard" up there, this article could potentially get there. It wouldn't be the epic article of the ages that lives on forever that people remember you for, but if all of the information inside was correct, it could be helpful to beginning and newer players. TBH, I think that's the best any Coin article can be right now because it's too early.
What is the wisdom I gained from hundreds of games, where I'm beating my opponents because I'm outplaying them with this card, and I can finally put my finger on it, put it into an article, and communicate that to someone to actually improve their game?
If the answer to that question is compelling, you're going to have an article that is much more respected.
For reference, this thing I said before is kind of like Level 3 -- I personally wouldn't write an article about anything unless I felt I could write a Level 3 article, which is why I've only attempted to write one serious article, but that's just me.
I have a lot of respect for your enthusiasm and the time you put in to improve this community. I think a lot of the reasons your articles haven't been as popular is because there isn't much of an attempt to get much past Level 1. If I see a new article thread here, I get really excited because I think maybe I'm about to see a Level 3 article, so Level 1 can be a little bit of a disappointment. Sure you can't write Level 3 articles about every card or concept, but what level does it become worth it to write an article?
Anyways, I hope I've helped. I'll do my best to follow up on this if there's anything I've said that's unclear.