So my question is: Is Silk Road really a thing when there is nothing much going on except +buy?
To answer this question, I mean, no? But on this board there's quite a bit going on to support Silk Road.
Horse Traders and Masterpiece are amazeballs for Silk Roads. Haven, Bureaucrat, and Scavenger are all good as well, but I don't know if they find much use given the other support (maybe Haven does?)
I would say that in the absence of anything else, then yes, SR are going to be a big factor, but on the other hand, the absence of anything else is quite rare, so its perhaps not a very useful question.
HT is pretty good, though I'm not sure that BCrat isn't better. Masterpiece is probably better than either, at least in a not-mirror, but it's not entirely trivial. Scavenger I think doesn't help a slog as much as it does just about every other strategy.
@OP
To that end, Scavenger and Masterpiece really seem to anti-synergize. Scavenger likes having one bullet that it can take you back to over and over. Masterpiece makes your deck thick and even and resilient. Basically, I assume Scavenger wants Gold a lot more than a pile of silvers.
In the actual game, I think you're making a pretty big mistake by Scavenging Scavenger every time. I mean, you get a terminal silver every turn plus
4 random cards... that's not really all that good. In general, I do like your opponents strategy here, but it's not entirely clear. If we take a look at your decks after turn 7, you have 3 extra silvers, a gold, and 2 Scavengers against 3 HT and a Haven, and you also have a Province against a Silk Road. I think you should, form a theoretical standpoint, be ahead here? You have better money, and he has buys. So the thing about this is, your money is better for getting provinces, and his buys are going to be better at trading blows for SR. Which means you need to plan to win the game by getting more Provinces than him. HOWEVER that doesn't necessarily mean you ignore SR entirely. You have kind of 2 options: the first is ignore the SR more or less entirely and basically try to empty the Provinces fairly quickly, perhaps snapping up some cheaper VP toward the end. On the other hand, you could try to race down SR going blow for blow with him until they're gone, and then pivot towards getting some provinces and winning that way. This second plan has the benefit of forcing him to green very fast, turning his deck into a lot of green, and hopefully making it implode. The big factor is that SR run and Estates run, but there's no third pile, which means you have a lot of time to get Provinces. So this is the road I tend to favor. If it turns out that even in that case, he is just fast enough to get too many points, that means you either needed to race Provinces faster or possibly, that you just started to green too late (which probably means your whole conception is flawed).
You played, it seemed, mostly for the "race to provinces" plan, which I think isn't as good, but ok, it's not so clear or so bad necessarily. Let's take a look where you end up when the SR run out on turn 12. You have an extra Gold compared to before, you picked up 1 SR and 2 more Provinces. In addition to his SR, he was also able to get another silver. Fine. You have a 4 point lead at the moment, which is good, but he has 7 SR which are right about to level up. Ok. So going long, every VP card is worth an extra 7/4 of a point on average for him, as opposed to only an extra 1/4 point for you. Your economy is significantly better than his at this point, with more money and less junk, but even though you're nominally ahead on points, in reality he is better positioned in green cards. Which means you need the game to end sooner rather than later, or in any case, you need to get a lot of Provinces fast - his deck is still good enough to get a good number of Duchies along with Estates more or less at will.
If we assume at this point that he can't get to any Provinces (and even if he can, he may well not want to), then we can look at, if you get them all, what does that do for you? 5 Provinces added to your tally is 32 more points, bringing you up to 54. This is equalled by only 6 duchies from your opponent, or 6 estates and 3 duchies. Better than that and he has you more or less cooked. In all honesty, you're in quite bad shape, so it seems like you needed to do something different before now, BUT I will say that you aren't 100% dead. However, trading Duchies with him doesn't help - indeed it actually makes things worse, because you're further away from getting those Provinces you need. So it's very important you focus on getting Provinces above all else. That means you should prefer Province over everything (obviously), Gold over everything else, and then we can quibble but probably Scavenger is 3rd-best for a while. I suppose a Masterpiece wouldn't be bad on e.g. 7, and it's possible one or two of your earlier Provinces should have been very big Masterpieces, but again, this is not clear or easy, especially at the time.
Instead of this, you play a game to maximise having Scavenger + 4 randoms every turn. And that's a fine hand, a slightly above-average hand, but it's just not good enough here - you aren't going to hit Province often enough. You really want the Gold as much as you can get it, so you should be placing it on top as much as you can. You will probably still lose, but you have a better chance, I think.
With Silk Roads, the trick is knowing how long to build and I believe that depends quite a bit on what your opponent does. That's a tough call to make for even the best of players (except for maybe WW)
It's definitely a tough call for me. I screw it up a LOT - it's just that I tend to screw it up a bit less than most other people. But that's because it's really complicated and interesting and difficult (also I'm not sure I'm really that much better than other top players here, at least not uniformly. But thanks).
