When to Venture(I would like to thank the commentators in this thread for there invaluable input; you have forced me to be clearer and correct some of my errors and I thank you.)
I tend to play decks with a lot of money (I know; I'm boring). As such, I have an interest in alternative treasures and how they interact with your deck. I wanted to provide my thoughts on Venture.
Venture is quickly becoming one of my favorite additions to a low action / heavy money deck. Part of the problem for a money-centric deck is what you should do with $5 hands. Do you go with another silver? Buy another terminal that might conflict with your other terminals? Venture provides an answer: if you have a couple of enablers in your deck and it is not yet time to pick up Duchies, Venture is a good solution.
Big Money / Enabler / VentureA single Venture is strictly better than Silver in a pure money deck (ignoring edge cases like Horn of Plenty, Potion and Philosopher's Stone) since you are guaranteed to hit $2 with every play (the $1 from Venture and Venture will find at least a Copper) and can be worth as much as $4 (assuming no Platinum of course). So, if you hit $5, a single Venture is a better purchase than Silver in a pure money deck (you would hope so for $5). Stacking Ventures provides potentially an even larger return on your investment which Silver cannot. So, multiple Ventures provide an even larger benefit than simple Silvers.
But, of course, playing a pure money deck is both boring and inefficient. So, you want to add in a couple of Big Money enablers (e.g. Envoy, Smithy, Monument, etc.) to speed up your deck and make it competitve. But then your Venture is always in danger of bypassing your action cards looking for that next Treasure card.
How bad is it to skip a terminal action in a money deck? Not a hinderance at all. Using Geronimoo's Simulator (
http://dominionsimulator.wordpress.com/), I edited the optimized Smithy, Envoy, Monument and Courtyard bots to simply purchase Venture whenever the deck hit $5 assuming that it was not yet time to purchase Duchies. The results:
Venture greatly improves Smithy / Big Money:
Smithy / Venture beats Smithy 55% to 37%.
Smithy / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 80% to 15% (Smithy beats BMU 72% - 22%).
Venture does not improve Envoy much if at all:
Envoy / Venture ties Envoy 46% to 46%.
Envoy / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 81% to 15% (Envoy beats BMU 80% to 15%)
Venture greatly improves Monument / Big Money:
Monument / Venture beats Monument 60% to 37%
Monument / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 87% to 11% (Monument beats BMU 80% - 17%)
Courtyard / Venture is only a slight improvement on straight Courtyard:
Courtyard / Venture beats Courtyard 46% to 44%
Courtyard / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 84% to 12% (Courtyard beats BMU 82% to 13%)
So, there is no reason to worry about Venture bypassing your Big Money terminal enablers; Venture empowers the Big Money deck by keeping the $ rolling and helping you hit the crucial $5 and $8 price points and missing your terminal action is no drawback to your deck.
Big Money / Copper Trashing / VentureBut, where Venture really shines is in decks with light copper trashing. Adding Venture to decks with Moneylender or Spice Merchant increases the expected value of Venture. As your money density increases, so does the value of Venture. Moneylender and Spice Merchant allow you to purchase quality Treasure, trash low quality treasure and Venture will go and find the high quality treasure and become increasingly less likely to find Copper. (I recommend looking over WanderingWinder's excellent article on Money based decks:
http://dominionstrategy.com/2012/02/27/the-keys-to-big-money-money-density-and-opportunity-cost/).
Moneylender / Venture improves greatly over a single Moneylender:
Moneylender / Venture beats Moneylender 64% to 28%
Moneylender / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 68% to 25% (Moneylender beats BMU 49% to 42%)
Spice Merchant / Venture improves greatly over a single Spice Merchant:
Spice Merchant / Venture beats Spice Merchant 67% to 26%
Spice Merchant / Venture beats Big Money Ultimate 59% to 33% (BMU beats Spice Merchant 54% to 38%)
As you can see, Venture drastically improves as Coppers are trashed out. I am not a fan of Loan / Venture but that is more due to my dislike of Loan (which might be a future write-up). Obviously, Venture would be nice in Chapel decks as well and provides a solid 5/2 opening if other strong 5s are lacking or minus strong Engine possibilities.
Venture In the Face of AttacksHow does Venture fair in the face of attacks? Venture is a nice soft counter in the face of handsize reduction attacks like Militia and Goons since it will search for another card, effectively giving you a four card hand thus cutting the power of the Goons/Militia/Torturer style attack in half. Venture thus provides a nice soft counter to handsize attacks.
Of particular note, Venture can be a good soft counter to Ghost Ship. Ghost Ship's attack can be particularly vicious since it effects both this turn (via handsize reduction) and future turns (forcing you to redraw the previous cards and thus slowing cycling time; a Ghost Ship attack actually slows down your entire game unless your deck has serious and consistent drawing power). But, Venture can both reduce the this turn effect and the slow down effect. By putting non-Treasure cards on top of your deck, Venture can cycle through them, gaining a fourth card (another Treasure) and skipping over Curses, extraneous Actions and Green. In the face of Ghost Ship, Venture lets you effectively discard Green Cards, conflicting terminal actions and Curses.
In a similar vein, Venture can counter deck inspection attacks that put Green on top of your deck and has synergy with deck inspection plays. Cards like Bureaucrat, Rabble, Fortune Teller, etc. try to slow down your deck by forcing you to draw Green on your following turn (and thus reducing your hand quality), but Venture can cut through the Green and search for the next treasure.
For similar reasons, cards that help you reorder the top of your deck (e.g. Navigator) can help cut through the Green by placing any Green at the top of the deck and playing Venture to bypass it for the next treasure. If it is worth the trouble of setting this up is questionable but there is some benefit to be found in the combination.
Venture can help against cursers as well. Swindler's power to turn Coppers into Curses can be brutal to some decks, but Venture can turn that negative into a small positive since Swindler's propensity in the early game to turn Coppers into Curses thins the Copper in the deck which means Venture is more likely to hit the better treasures (as in the Spice Merchant / Moneylender case). If Swindler is used to load your deck up on terminals, Venture can help you bypass the terminals in search of other Treasure cards effectively reducing the clutter that Swindler can cause.
In a Witch, Young Witch or Sea Hag battle, Venture can smooth your deck once the curses are dealt out since it can search past the curses to look for Treasure.
On the flip side, Venture will be hurt by attacks like Ambassador, Mountebank and Jester since those attacks can also add Copper to your deck which reduces the value of Venture considerably.
Venture in Green DecksVenture can be a valuable asset in a heavy green deck; it can make the difference between hitting that crucial $ point and missing it. In any deck where you have far more Green than usual, Venture can help you search past the green.
That said, Venture clashes directly at the $5 price point in a Duke / Duchy deck and needs to be bought either before or after it is time to make the Duke / Duchy run if it should be at all.
Venture is ideal in money-based Silk Road decks since you are green heavy and your primary buying power will come from finding enough Treasure fast enough. This is not typically an ideal Silk Road strategy, but Venture does provide a boost in money heavy Green deck.
Venture will not work in a Vineyards deck though since Vineyards decks are action heavy and bypassing a number of actions is a stiff drawback. For the same reason, Venture is non-ideal in a Fairgrounds deck.
Finally, Venture helps in the greening phase of standard Province games. As you green and load up on Provinces and Duchies, Venture can help push through the Green and help you keep hitting $5 and $8 and help prevent your deck stalling at less than $5 hands.
Further, Venture can help you cycle your deck faster. This is both a cost and a benefit. Reshuffles while greening make you more likely to draw the Green cards you just added (thus reducing your money density). On the benefit side, your key treasures have already likely been used to buy the Green cards and faster cycling means that you can get the key cards back into your deck faster and thus keep buying Victory cards.
Bypassing Gold for VentureWhen can I bypass Gold for Venture, if ever?
In a straight Big Money deck, the simulator shows no benefit in choosing Venture over Gold. Modifying Gerinomoo's simulator to begin purchasing Ventures over Gold at intervals of the number of Gold in your deck (6, 5, 4, 3, 2) yields no statistically relevant difference between Venture and Gold. Venture neither hurts nor harms a straight money deck in choosing Venture over Gold. Note, that I set the bot to buy Venture once a certain number of Golds are reached and does not apply to earlier $5 buys, so, what I said earlier about Venture still applies (it is a solid $5 addition to a money deck), but it is of no benefit to your deck to choose Venture over Gold if you hit $6.
What about the light copper trashing of Spice Merchant and Moneylender? I set the bot to buy Venture at $5 and then Venture over Gold once a certain number of Golds were reached in the deck against a straight money deck. Here are the results:
Buy Venture Once: Spice Merchant + Money Win Rate Moneylender + Money Win Rate
6 Golds in deck 68% 59%
5 Golds in deck 68% 59%
4 Golds in deck 67% 58%
3 Golds in deck 68% 58%
2 Golds in deck 66% 57%
1 Gold in deck 64% 54%
Purchasing Venture over Gold is a very slight benefit in both decks once you have three Golds in your deck. I would not expect it to make a large difference (and it doesn't) but it certainly does not hurt your deck to do so. If other factors are present (e.g. a moderate amount of curses, extra green, etc.), Venture might become a better purchase than Gold once a small number of Golds are already in your deck.
Comparing Venture to AdventurerVenture draws a natural comparison to Adventurer given that both search for Treasure. Adventurer is generally considered very weak (see
http://forum.dominionstrategy.com/index.php?topic=1668.0). But, there are important differences between Venture and Adventurer.
First, Adventurer is an action whereas Venture is a Treasure. So, Venture does not compete with good action cards in a non-+Action deck whereas Adventurer does. Second, the price points are importantly different. Adventurer competes directly with Gold at $6 and thus you must justify bypassing the Gold which Adventurer has a difficult time doing (I think there are cases where it might be a better purchase than Gold, but this is merely an intuition). Venture is only $5 and thus need not exclude a Gold purchase. As I mentioned above, there might be cases where Venture is better than Gold, but you never need to bypass Gold for Venture which makes it a more convenient buy than Adventurer. Finally, Adventurer is twice as likely to bypass critical action cards in a light action deck compared to Venture. To be fair, Adventurer will also hit twice as many treasures, but how beneficial hitting one Treasure over two will depend greatly on the Treasure composition of your deck.
Venture can shine in the same types of cases that Adventurer does, but is far more convenient since it is not an action, is at a better price point and reduces the chances of hitting your terminal actions.
In ConclusionI hope that this sheds some light on the cases where Venture can be a powerful addition to your deck. Thank you for reading and, of course, any and all thoughts are welcome.
Works WithHigh Quality Money Decks (stacking Ventures, Bank)
Light Copper Trashing (Moneylender / Spice Merchant)
As a soft counter to curse battles
As a soft counter to hand size attacks (especially Ghost Ship)
As a soft counter to deck attacks (Bureaucrat, Rabble, Sea Hag, Spy, Fortune Teller)
Heavy Green Decks
Mint
Conflicts WithAction Heavy Decks
Attacks that add copper to your deck (e.g. Ambassador, Mountebank, Jester)