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[zahlman]

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201212/21/game-20121221-233954-cbce2f22.html

I tried to keep my stack under control early, but I couldn't take the weight of his KC-Mountebanks, and eventually he ran out the Copper pile on me. I had actually been hoping at one point that I could get enough green to stay ahead on the turn that the Copper ran out, but that was pretty desperate :/ Past a certain point, there's just no holding this together with Forge - so I guess I have to fight fire with fire earlier?

[dondon151]

The way that I sort of see this game is like an Ambassador war, except there's quite a bit more luck involved since there's KC and Alchemists. If you KC a Mountebank, you give your opponent 3 cards even after the Curses are depleted. If you inundate your opponent with Coppers, then that significantly reduces the likelihood of their KC colliding with a useful action or their Alchemists being returned to the top of their deck.

So you have to prioritize keeping your deck clean and keeping your opponent's deck fat. On turn 10, after you KC your Alch and get a huge hand, you should forge away all of the Coppers in your hand and not buy the Alch. An Alch effectively reduces your deck size by 1 card, but trashing 3 more Coppers reduces your deck size by 3 cards. On turn 11, you buy a Province that should have been a KC. If you had done both of those things, it likely would have been possible that on turn 13, you could have drawn your Mountebank, KC'd it, forged away more cards, and drawn your Potion (by the way, since you have KC, Mountebank generates more money than a Gold). But none of that happened and your opponent played a devastating turn 14 on you that sealed the game.

[ftl]

I think I would go with
1) KC instead of province on turn 11.
2) Turn 13 - don't play the lookout, Forge it with the coppers/curses into something!  Oh, and keep enough coin to buy another KC.

Those are the two things that I'm pretty sure were definite mistakes. (I'm also not convinced the lookout opening was right, but it definitely worked for you here, since you drew 3P  for an alchemist anyway, and then used lookout to hit 2 estates...)

But the first one was a big one. You greened too early, and that let you lose the Mountebank war. For example, on turn 13, you start with Alchemist, Alchemist, Province, [stuff]. You do pretty well anyway - but you don't draw your whole deck and you miss your potion, your alchemist stack falls apart, and you never get it going again. If that early province was a king's court, you would have had a chance to do KC->KC->(alchemists and mountebank), probably drawing your whole deck, forging away everything, not just some stuff, and KC-mountebanking him.