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[catsclaw]

Black Market, Cache, Grand Market, Great Hall, Herbalist, Menagerie, Moat, Sea Hag, Torturer, and Upgrade

You (and your opponent) open 4/3.

[D Bo]

Pretty tough to tell if Black Market's worth it unfortunately without knowing what's in there. Although I'll admit I'm usually tempted by it no matter what. I'd probably open Sea Hag/Silver trying to work my way towards several upgrades though. I would take the Moat if I had an early 2, but I'd still set my sites on Upgrades primarily. A couple Grand Markets might be nice if you are able to clean up the curses soon enough as well. I suspect since the board itself has both the cursing and trashing available, Black Market may be a trap card and end up being too slow, but I could be wrong about that.

[DG]

Here you're looking upgrades clearing out the deck then moving onto grand markets. Menageries will support that perfectly and the great halls will fit in too. Before you get there you've got to compete with sea hags, so the opening is probably sea hag/silver. Unless there's a ridiculously good black market, I imagine it would only come into play in the mid game here once you've got your deck fully under control.

[ehunt]

I want upgrade so bad here. Silver sea hag, not up for debate. Sea hag black market might get lucky, but it is not worth the gamble. Would even consider silver silver!

[catsclaw]

That was my plan, Silver/Sea Hag with an eye towards Upgrades to Grand Market.  It didn't work out for me.

http://dominion.isotropic.org/gamelog/201302/17/game-20130217-043555-cbc20810.html

Ignoring the last turn when I ended the game early (for some reason, I was thinking Great Halls were worth 2 VP, not one) I was playing catch-up the whole game.  The Sea Hag proved virtually useless.  It took forever to clear out the Copper from my deck, and by then the Grand Markets were almost gone.

Was it just bad luck with the Moneylender?

[DG]

Your opponent bought menageries, 6 of them, while you kept on buying silver. You were never going to get your deck trimmed down by upgrades since you kept adding more bulk to the deck.

[dondon151]

The turn 5 Sea Hag is unfortunate, but by then you know that you have 3 Silver or terminal Silver equivalents remaining in your draw deck, which means that you are all but guaranteed to hit $5 in this shuffle. Start buying Menageries instead. When you Upgrade Estate, get Great Halls or Menageries over Silver. Getting so many Silvers is bad for you on two levels because it makes your deck less trim (as DG pointed out) and it makes it more likely for Menagerie to fail.

On turn 7, I would have considered the Haggler from the BM. Yes, it does introduce a third terminal into your deck, but you can grab Upgrade + Menagerie on Haggler plays, which is pretty strong since you can just change the extra Upgrades to GMs.

You don't need 5 Upgrades. The sweetspot would be 2-3 Upgrades. When you get that many, you start drawing them with nothing to trash, although it's not so bad in this kingdom because you can upgrade Upgrades to GMs, which is something that you should have considered doing on, for example, turn 13. At some point you want a Gold because your only non-Copper source of income should be 3 Silver or terminal Silver equivalents and it's pretty unlikely that you'll get them to collide early on. Gold is better than another Silver for this because it's another unique card for Menagerie.

Whether to go for the Black Market is a good question. The two things that you really want out of the BM are villages and virtual $. It kind of helps that BM helps add unique cards to your deck and synergizes with Menagerie in that way.

(Also, going to nitpick here, but what was stated earlier by DG in the topic before you posted the game log was definitely not your plan.)



EDIT: you actually had an opportunity to end the game here with a win if you upgraded one of your Silvers into a Sea Hag before you reshuffled your deck, then drew that Sea Hag with an Upgrade and trashing it into a Duchy.