Okay. So. You open with a lookout. I open with an ambassador. You play your lookout, trashing a card. I play ambassador, getting rid of two cards and giving you one.
Your deck did not get any smaller! You still have the same amount of junk! If we continue to play lookouts and ambassadors with equal frequency (not hard to do even though ambassador is terminal) you will never successfully trash your estates and coppers since I will keep giving you new ones! This is bad for you, and as such the majority of the time ambassador is superior to lookout.
But you're like, wait man, I opened DOUBLE Lookout! I'm trashin' two card a shuffle now! So, maybe I open Ambassador/Lookout, and I get rid of three cards to your one. You are going to lose.
And then, you're still not done arguing of course, so you say, whoa man, you might be trashin' super fast, but I'm building my deck way faster than you since I get to keep my full hand!
Except, honestly, if you open double lookout, your hand is going to be pretty crappy, averaging 2.33 coins per turn. Which, as you said, isn't very good since often the two dollar cards aren't very important anyway.
meh, that is paper thin argumentation again. what if you open with dual ambassador, i open with dual lookout, we both draw both our action cards with 3 coppers. i can get rid of 2 of my 3 estates in the turn, buy a silver or a third lookout and have all the new cards come again super quickly, because lookouts shorten the repeat cycle. you, on the other hand, just get rid of 2 coppers, give me one copper, and can't buy anything
and your next turn will be just as bad because there are 3 estates left to draw
the way i would approach it is different. i'd try to figure out the amount of trashing per damage done, let's call it p/x. p can simply defined as difference of bad cards in both players decks, where as x would be the amount of damage that the turn in which you play it suffers. for lookout we can give it 1p/1x.
now let's try it for ambassador. i can give it 2,5p, because you get rid of 1-2 bad cards and your enemy gains 1 bad card. the amount of x has to be the estimated amount of damage compared to the one of lookout.
and that is really high. because once you got rid of your estates, you will have to return copper, which, if you don't want $2 cards, makes your turn completely useless. so i could give it somewhere between 2, while there are estates, and somewhere at 4, if it makes your turn useless. so that would be ~2,5/3,2. according to that, lookout is better. now obviously, you need about twice as many lookouts then ambassadors to make that work, but since you have more money in very early turns, you can get them. very early $3 instead of $2 is enough to have one additional lookout for the rest of the game.
now, obviously, this doesn't proof anything, it's just my line of thinking if i try to go onto the subject analyitcally. but also, what if there are shelters? what if there are no +action cards (exept necropolis)? lookout
always works, and in the statistic there are dark ages cards, so those cases have to be taken into consideration. it's about how often we would almost never buy it and i would never buy ambassador if there are shelters, and very rarely without proper action setups.
Tbh, I think in both cases Amb/Amb wasn't the best opening. Probably would have gotten my second Amb on t3/4 in both cases. But Lookout had the same issues, I don't know that lookout/lookout was the best lookout play? But I certainly know amb better than I know lookout.
none of us will argue here. i didn't think that dual lookout was the best opening and he didn't think that dual amb was the best opening. we did it solely because the point was to decide wheter dual amb beats dual lookout or not
I think it definitely illustrates why the Amb was better. Early-game things were pretty even, but the ambassador was just a little faster at trashing and then turned into a potent attack, keeping silverspawn from ever getting their deck thin enough given the weak draw (ghost ship, haven, followers, trusty steed being the only way to increase handsize).
Second game. Again, I think the conclusions are similar. Despite being hit by Mountebank, SCSN got rid of their starting cards faster. With both Mountebank and Ambassador, the game was super-slow, but at turn 17 scsn had three coppers and one curse in their deck. At that point, silverspawn had 7 coppers and 4 curses - this despite SCSN not having a mountebank yet. At the end of the game silverspawn had 11 coppers and 6 curses, whereas scsn had just 1 copper.
the order was reversed, the mountebank game was the first. but SCSN actually got lucky with mountebank, he only got hit like 1 of 3 times and he also drew better in the first 2 turns. also, i went for potions, which was just bad decision making. that's why i think the other game is more significant, becuase here we had similiar luck and went for similar strategies. and that game was incredibly close, both of our decks were small and the game snowballed once he got followers, and i actually bought the province earlier then him but drew it later.
oh and also, lookout is harder to execute i think. if you play perfect, you always know exactly which cards are left in your deck and then it takes a lot of the random factor away. and you always have exactly the right number. i couldve just bought too little/too many of them or bought them at wrong times