Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[guided]

Steward is not slow. The #1 reason why it's not slow is that it remains a useful card in a trimmed deck. Chapel is of course the fastest trasher, but it eventually becomes a painful dead card, and at some point you have to figure out how to bootstrap your trimmed deck up to usefulness. The tempo you lose compensating for Chapel's total lack of usefulness outside of trashing means it's only a slightly better deck-trimming card than Steward as a general rule. I'm something of a Steward specialist (2.20 effect with, used in 82% of games when available), but I don't think I'm possessed of any secret knowledge about the card that would give me a crazy advantage above and beyond its power in the hands of other good players.

If you prioritize Salvager over Steward in the opening 80+% of the time, then I mean, I don't know what to tell you other than you're doing it wrong. I say this as someone who likes opening Salvager in the absence of other compelling cards, and who knows full well how to press an endgame with Salvagers. I used to win a lot of games with few actions in my deck other than Salvagers (but I've gotten better about finding more interesting strong strategies since then).


If there's a strong engine that can be built on any given board, Steward is an elite opener. If there's not a strong engine, sure, open Smithy/Silver or whatever. Like other deck trimmers, Steward is only good if there's some compelling reason to trim your deck.

[ackack]

If there's a strong engine that can be built on any given board, Steward is an elite opener. If there's not a strong engine, sure, open Smithy/Silver or whatever. Like other deck trimmers, Steward is only good if there's some compelling reason to trim your deck.

Right, and those are the situations where Steward is uncontroversially better. Even in the situations where you lack "compelling reason to trim your deck," though, Salvager's cleaning up of Estates for benefit is still worthwhile. And in those sorts of games, Salvager is also fantastic late. This is why in a lot of games - in my opinion the majority, though I wouldn't think 80% - I think it's probably a better opener.

[Epoch]

And sure moneylender has a lower chance of miss, but the amount by which salvager is better when it hits plus the amount it is better late game makes salvager waaay better imo.

Salvager is no better when it hits -- they both return a hand that gives $2 more than it otherwise would.

Moneylender's value is in its longevity: With Salvager, you're likely going to hit 1-2 Estates and then be trashing-for-no-benefit (unless you at that point want to start trashing silvers or other $3-$4 cards, in which case Salvager is fine).  Moneylender has 7 initial targets as opposed to 3.  It's less likely to fail to produce $5 on turns 3 or 4, but it's MUCH less likely to be drawn dead on the next two passes through the deck, and to continue to up the buying power of the deck.  Then, once it's hit, say, 2-4 times, it's likely to be dead, and Salvager jumps way up in comparative value.

[ackack]

Moneylender's value is in its longevity: With Salvager, you're likely going to hit 1-2 Estates and then be trashing-for-no-benefit (unless you at that point want to start trashing silvers or other $3-$4 cards, in which case Salvager is fine).  Moneylender has 7 initial targets as opposed to 3.  It's less likely to fail to produce $5 on turns 3 or 4, but it's MUCH less likely to be drawn dead on the next two passes through the deck, and to continue to up the buying power of the deck.  Then, once it's hit, say, 2-4 times, it's likely to be dead, and Salvager jumps way up in comparative value.

But you're not confined to having to use your Salvager on Estates, and often you'll use it on other things with even better yield. Like HiveMind says, picking up more Salvagers rarely hurts much because Salvaging a Salvager is not a bad outcome. Completely useless Salvagers are somewhat rare - completely useless Moneylenders are pretty common. Thus I don't really think longevity is an argument in favor of the Moneylender. Quite the opposite. I do still think Moneylender is better as an opener than Salvager, but I don't think it's a huge difference.

[Epoch]

But you're not confined to having to use your Salvager on Estates, and often you'll use it on other things with even better yield.

Gosh, you might have thought that I would have said something like, "unless you at that point want to start trashing silvers or other $3-$4 cards, in which case Salvager is fine."

The thing is, trashing a Silver with Salvager gets you $3.  The Silver would have given you $2.  If you had bought a Silver instead of the Salvager, you would've had $4.  That's...  pretty good.  Better if the Silver is a serious liability, worse if you might miss having that Silver in your deck later.  Trashing a $4 action is a lot better-looking...  but what's the $4 action you're trashing?  If you bought Salvager and another $4 action, should you have bought that other $4 action first, and Salvager second?  If the $4 action produces $2, then it likely would have improved your first few hands more than Salvager did.

Trashing a $5+ card in the mid-game is...  probably not super-good.  Unless you did something like buy a Duchy with a Hoard.  Or you had one of the relatively few $5 cards that obsolete themselves.  Mint or Mine, maybe.  Trading Post, definitely.

Like HiveMind says, picking up more Salvagers rarely hurts much because Salvaging a Salvager is not a bad outcome. Completely useless Salvagers are somewhat rare - completely useless Moneylenders are pretty common. Thus I don't really think longevity is an argument in favor of the Moneylender. Quite the opposite. I do still think Moneylender is better as an opener than Salvager, but I don't think it's a huge difference.

Moneylender is better early, better mid, and then quite a lot worse late.

[chwhite]

The reason Moneylender is a better opener than Salvager is because there is almost no chance of Moneylender whiffing on Turn 3/4, whereas a third of the time your Salvager will miss the Estate.  That's a high rate of failure.

Salvager is a great card, but it's not a great opener.  Its power is strongest in the endgame.

[guided]

in my opinion the majority

Not really an opinion, but I'll assume you mean "estimation", and then suggest that your estimation is badly off. Trimming at the tempo that Steward can provide is strong on a substantial majority of boards. And when trimming is not particularly strong, there are many stronger alternatives to Salvager as an opener (as simple as Smithy or Militia).

[ackack]

Gosh, you might have thought that I would have said something like, "unless you at that point want to start trashing silvers or other $3-$4 cards, in which case Salvager is fine."

That you think this is some sort of special oddball Salvager case meriting a parenthetical suggests you probably undervalue Salvager.

[Epoch]

That you think this is some sort of special oddball Salvager case meriting a parenthetical suggests you probably undervalue Salvager.

I don't usually want to trim out Silvers starting in the third reshuffle or so, in the sense of "I am willing to go to an effort to do it."  If it comes up, then... sure.  It's more likely than not a mild advantage trash them for $3.

But...  when do you hate Silvers so much that you are excited about getting rid of them for a mild benefit?  Not in Big Money decks that are aiming at Provinces.  You might in an engine deck that wants a very trimmed deck -- but now we're in fantasy land, because that doesn't happen in games where you open Salvager.  You might in a Big Money/Colony deck -- but if you're going Big Money in a Colony game, you're in pretty dire straights.  A Colony game in general is more likely to dislike Silver.

I can construct hypothetical scenarios, here.  Lesse: I might be really excited about the Salvager trashing a Silver on turn 8 or so if on turn 3, I trashed 5 Coppers to a Mint, leaving me with a very trimmed deck.  But I didn't know I was going to luck into a 5 Copper hand on turn 3 when I opened Salvager.  Similarly, if I got an early Forge (though how did I get an early Forge with a Salvager opening?), and trashed down a lot, sure.  Again, not something I could've planned for at the point I opened Salvager.  Hmmm, maybe if Fishing Village is on the table: the FVs give me the Actions that mean I don't mind playing Salvager, or even several, and with their money and the Salvager +buy, I can probably do a couple of turns of $6->FVx2 and catch up if I need to.  But then I probably never had a Silver to trash.

Like I said, I'll Salvage a Silver in the mid game if that's where I am, but if you think that that's likely to be a great deal, I think you're just wrong.  It's likely to be a "decent but not exceptional" deal.

[guided]

Salvaging a Silver isn't usually awesome, but it's sometimes the best alternative, and the existence of the option to trash Silver (or some random terminal action, or whatever), instead of wasting time trashing a Copper instead, is part of what makes Salvager a useful card.

[HiveMindEmulator]

I decided to see how well my list matches with the best openings, pairing with a few typical non-terminals. I've sorted base on the order on the council room page and colored base on my rankings, with redder being higher and bluer being lower.


with silver:
masquerade
ambassador
chapel
sea hag
young witch
bishop
swindler
remake
salvager
steward
island
monument
moneylender
militia
smithy
envoy
cutpurse
navigator

This is reasonably close to my rankings, with bishop a bit higher and militia/cutpurse a bit lower.


with fishing village:
masquerade
ambassador
young witch
sea hag
chapel
remake
steward
bishop
salvager
monument
envoy
swindler
militia
moneylender
smithy
cutpurse
island
baron
navigator
remodel

Now steward jumps up, as with fishing village an steward, you already on the fast track to a good-looking engine going. Monument also jumps up due to the nice monument/fishing village combo strat. And bishop stays high.


with lookout:
sea hag
young witch
ambassador
monument
swindler
militia
moneylender
bishop
salvager
masquerade
remake
island
steward
cutpurse
bridge

Now masquerade drops because masq/lookout is worse than masq/silver. Moneylender jumps because while it's weak at trashing alone, combining with lookout makes for good trashing. I'm surprised steward doesn't jump as well. The "estate trashers" also take a hit because lookout already knocks out estates, though I'd still think remake would be good.


with loan:
sea hag
young witch
bishop
masquerade
salvager
ambassador
steward
remake
militia
monument
island
envoy
remodel
cutpurse
chapel

Bishop is again surprisingly high. And moneylender is gone for obvious reasons -- loan does the same thing but better, which would turn moneylender useless too fast. Steward jumps here as I would have expected it too with lookout -- while its a bit slow trashing on its own, it's great when paired with a non-terminal trasher.


with chapel:
monument
sea hag
militia
young witch
bishop
treasure map
bridge
swindler
salvager
cutpurse
conpirator
ambassador
moneylender
smithy
steward
masquerade
baron
remake
horse traders
black market
island
envoy
navigator

The VP chip cards are high here because they combo well with chapel, and the elite openers are lower because they don't. Militia is high because it counters chapel well, plus gets more repeated plays in the slimmer deck. Remake is surprisingly low.


with warehouse:
sea hag
swindler
ambassador
young witch
remake
moneylender
monument
militia
treasure map
cutpurse
baron
chapel
bishop

Swindler is high because you can repeatedly attack. Militia and cutpurse don't share this benefit because warehouse is weak when attacked by hand-size reduction, making attack/silver a better opening. Steward is mysteriously MIA, and salvager is gone because it doesn't play well with the smaller hand given by warehouse.


with tournament:
ambassador
chapel
masquerade
steward
swindler
fortune teller
trade route
chancellor

Here we're limited to $3 cards so there is not much to say. Steward is better because you want to trash into a slim enough deck to increase your chance of drawing province with a tournament.

I'd say that the general picture I get out of this is that I may have the +$2 attacks too high. Based on this data, it may be appropriate (as WW noted) to swap the attack and VP tiers. Other than that (and the note I've made about steward), I'm pretty happy with the list.

[Thisisnotasmile]

I'm just wondering... Why do you keep referring to Chapel as a non-terminal?

[AJD]

That's addressed in the original post:

"While you generally only want to open with a single terminal action to avoid the 36% chance of collision, you make an exception for chapel.... In terms of play, if you get a collision, just trash 3 cards and be satisfied that you’re going to get back to your other terminal soon enough with your rapidly slimming deck."

[Thisisnotasmile]

Sure, it's more okay to open Chapel/terminal than any other terminal/terminal, but that doesn't really explain the following quote:

I decided to restrict to terminals because you usually only buy one terminal. Non-terminals, like chapel, can be bought along with one of these cards. Comparing swindler to tournament, for example, is not important, since you can just buy both.

If you mean "non-terminals AND Chapel", say that. "Non-terminals, like Chapel" is just plain wrong.

Never mind. I just realised that that "like" is an "in a similar way to" like rather than a "for example" like.

[Fangz]

I feel like that list strengthens the case of including the non-terminals in the analysis of the openers. In several cases, the real 'work' of the opening cards is done by the non-terminal. With cards as good as loan and lookout, I'd be totally happy going tournament/loan or whatever, and not pick up a $4 or $3 terminal at all, if there's only a few poor choices on offer.

[Fangz]

But you're not confined to having to use your Salvager on Estates, and often you'll use it on other things with even better yield.

Gosh, you might have thought that I would have said something like, "unless you at that point want to start trashing silvers or other $3-$4 cards, in which case Salvager is fine."

The thing is, trashing a Silver with Salvager gets you $3.  The Silver would have given you $2.  If you had bought a Silver instead of the Salvager, you would've had $4.  That's...  pretty good.  Better if the Silver is a serious liability, worse if you might miss having that Silver in your deck later.  Trashing a $4 action is a lot better-looking...  but what's the $4 action you're trashing?  If you bought Salvager and another $4 action, should you have bought that other $4 action first, and Salvager second?  If the $4 action produces $2, then it likely would have improved your first few hands more than Salvager did.

Trashing a $5+ card in the mid-game is...  probably not super-good.  Unless you did something like buy a Duchy with a Hoard.  Or you had one of the relatively few $5 cards that obsolete themselves.  Mint or Mine, maybe.  Trading Post, definitely.

Like HiveMind says, picking up more Salvagers rarely hurts much because Salvaging a Salvager is not a bad outcome. Completely useless Salvagers are somewhat rare - completely useless Moneylenders are pretty common. Thus I don't really think longevity is an argument in favor of the Moneylender. Quite the opposite. I do still think Moneylender is better as an opener than Salvager, but I don't think it's a huge difference.

Moneylender is better early, better mid, and then quite a lot worse late.

But then explain

http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=moneylender%2C%20salvager%2C%20steward%2C%20silver

I think there's some merit to the argument that it can be worth picking up a salvager early if you fear not having the opportunity to get a salvager later on when you need it. The cost of not being able to buy a gold, or even a province later on so that you can get a late salvager, can well overwhelm the relative weakness of the card as a trasher in the early game, especially when salvager can accelerate the endgame enormously. Plus you are neglecting the one other thing salvager adds to the table that many opening cards don't - that +buy. Having a +buy is essential to the acquisition of several powerful but cheap cards. I'd usually prefer two menageries to a gold. (Heck councilroom rates menagerie as uniformly better than a gold, which is interesting...)

[Epoch]

But then explain

http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=moneylender%2C%20salvager%2C%20steward%2C%20silver

I explain almost every Council Room stat by noting that my not-very-exalted level 27 status puts me in the upper 10% of all isotropic players on the leaderboard.  I just don't know that you can draw terribly worthwhile conclusions from data that is overwhelmingly from very low-skill players.

[rrenaud]

What happens if you measure by #games played, rather than straight up #players?  Presumably the players who play the most tend to also be the best..

Also, from prior experience, when I get baited into doing skill based analysis for rftg, the numbers basically don't change, but I waste a fair amount of time.

[Fangz]

But then explain

http://councilroom.com/win_weighted_accum_turn.html?cards=moneylender%2C%20salvager%2C%20steward%2C%20silver

I explain almost every Council Room stat by noting that my not-very-exalted level 27 status puts me in the upper 10% of all isotropic players on the leaderboard.  I just don't know that you can draw terribly worthwhile conclusions from data that is overwhelmingly from very low-skill players.

If the stats are flawed, you'd expect them to break the other way though. Since moneylender is a fairly straightforward card requiring no judgement of which card to use it on, while salvager is one you'd expect substantial skill to recognise and use effectively, and susceptible to a lot of misplay from newbies (like trying to use it to trash coppers).

[Epoch]

If the stats are flawed, you'd expect them to break the other way though. Since moneylender is a fairly straightforward card requiring no judgement of which card to use it on, while salvager is one you'd expect substantial skill to recognise and use effectively, and susceptible to a lot of misplay from newbies (like trying to use it to trash coppers).

I don't think anyone misplays Scavenger.  If you could target an Estate or a Copper with it, it's pretty clear that anyone who's played for more than two games understands you target an Estate with it.  I think people may mis-buy Scavenger.

Here's a narrative that explains that chart fine:

1.  Scavenger is a good late-game card.
2.  Low-skill players either buy it early (and get decent value out of it all through the game), which, against other low-skill players, tends to be good for them, or they don't buy it at all, or they buy it in the mid-late game only because they're having lots of trouble generating $5 or $6, and/or because they're getting Cursed a lot -- indicating that their game is already going poorly.  It's not a good enough card to turn that kind of game around, explaining its somewhat lower rank as a later-game buy.

[Fangz]

But to get the best use out of salvager, you want to be salvaging provinces, or high value cards, which requires an understanding of which cards have value and when, and control of game pacing - which are very advanced techniques. I've seen plenty of idiot players buy salvager to salvage curses! My point is that all of these factors ought to drag down salvager, and make it look worse, statistically speaking, than it actually is at the hands of a skilled player. When, after all these influences, it is still *uniformly* better than moneylender no matter which turn it is bought, then that's good evidence it's a strong card throughout, and a decent opener (most likely because of the way it keeps its value).

[rod-]

alternatively, moneylender is a universally-known "better option" for opening, meaning that everyone opens it and the avg. win rate is dragged back down to 1, while salvager is rarely chosen as an opener unless it's by someone who actually knows what they're doing.  You'd have to show that the buy rates were equal to prove otherwise.
Councilroom suggests that the buy rates are similar (62% salvager, 67% moneylender).  If you assume that the .05 difference in purchase rate translates directly to a win/loss(which is of course a huge assumption), you would expect salvager's win rate to be .1 higher than moneylender, and it is in fact more like .06 higher. Is that difference all due to "I win because my opponent was too dumb to open salvager when they should have"?  Probably not, but who can really tease that difference out?

[Fangz]

In terms of buy rates, salvager is actually bought a bit more often than moneylender.

[rod-]

In terms of buy rates, salvager is actually bought a bit more often than moneylender.

The difference in buys/gains is due to multi-salvager decks, which are far more prevalent than multi-moneylender decks.  The %+ is the relevant statistic for this situation.

[HiveMindEmulator]

Councilroom suggests that the buy rates are similar (62% salvager, 67% moneylender).  If you assume that the .05 difference in purchase rate translates directly to a win/loss(which is of course a huge assumption), you would expect salvager's win rate to be .1 higher than moneylender, and it is in fact more like .06 higher.

I don't really follow this. Why would you expect a .1 higher win rate?

In terms of buy rates, salvager is actually bought a bit more often than moneylender.

The difference in buys/gains is due to multi-salvager decks, which are far more prevalent than multi-moneylender decks.  The %+ is the relevant statistic for this situation.

Even that is not particularly relevant as it includes games in which salvager was not used as an opener.

And on a non-councilroom note, I think the "miss" chance is a bit overblown. In remake vs moneylender, given that both show up on turn 3-4, the chance of remake missing is 8/11*7/10*6/9*5/8 = 0.21. So 21% of the time you "miss" and end up having in your deck a salvager and a $3 card instead of a moneylender and a $5 card. How much worse is it? It of course depends on the specific cards, and if there is a super-critical $5, salvager may not be the right opening. But the fact that you keep a salvager instead of a moneylender makes up for part of the difference. I don't think it's a catastrophic occurence. And in the more likely scenario (4x more likely) that you don't miss, you have a salvager and a copper instead of a moneylender and an estate, which is of, course, much better. So most of the time, you are in a very positive situation and about 21% of the time, you're behind. I think that in most cases it's worth the minor risk of missing.