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[ackack]

Mostly I'm posting this because it was fun, but maybe I can wrangle a question or two out of it.

http://councilroom.com/game?game_id=game-20111003-151708-af41a98d.html

With Council Room out for +buy and +$ actions around (Fishing Village, Black Market) I saw Pool and KC and pretty much stopped looking. In particular, my eyes largely slid over Bank until a few turns in. I thought about coming back to grab one later, but then my opponent had a huge turn 12, pulling all 7 Coppers and both Banks with a KC'ed Council Room to buy 3 Provinces. Before my turn 12, here was the situation:

matt979: 33 points : 5 Province, 2 Bank, 1 King's Court, 2 Council Room, 1 Envoy, 3 Fishing Village, 3 Estate, 7 Copper
ackack: 6 points : 1 Province, 1 King's Court, 1 Grand Market, 1 Council Room, 1 Potion, 5 Scrying Pool, 1 Black Market, 4 Fishing Village, 1 Chapel, 0 Estate, 1 Lighthouse, 2 Copper

I was able to come back thanks to some luck in my opponent not hitting the KC/CR combo again in the next few turns and perhaps the strongest set of Black Market pulls I've had: Chapel, Grand Market, Harem (ok, this wasn't special but I figured I needed all the points I could get), Bishop, Festival, Swindler. The initial Chapeling was possibly dubious, I might have been better off keeping the Coppers and trying to Bank up as well. However, once the huge Province gap developed, it turned out I was better off having more robust draw. Grand Market gave me a source of +buy without having to play the Council Room, freeing up a valuable card to Bishop and making life a little tougher for my opponent. Later on I was trying to play Pools to get a Duchy on top to Swindle to a CR, but never managed to pull that off. Given the composition of his deck, I realized after the fact that Copper -> Curse was considerably stronger than usual and that I should have been happy to hit those whenever possible.

I felt pretty bad about this afterwards. I really dislike being on the wrong side of the tedium gap in terms of engines, and having a game that's nearly in the bag lost on top of that is about one of the most annoying things there is. So, apologies! I almost resigned after the 3 Province turn and then decided that there was enough going on in the Black Market deck to try sticking it out.

---

Ok, so now possible things to think about:

-- KC/CR/Bank seems very strong indeed, and I think I deserved to lose this game for overlooking it. Is the build order adopted by my opponent best? I think I'd skip Envoy and pick up a Silver instead if I'm doing this kind of approach. Envoy is just so much worse than Council Room for this plan that I'm unconvinced that having one in the deck at all is good. Silver was pointless for me given my plan, but a Bank-based deck doesn't mind it at all.

-- How should I be handling Duchies once I've gotten into my "KC a Bishop every turn" phase of the game? I don't think I really figured that out, exactly. My last purchase of them was largely for blocking purposes, but before that I was trying to decide whether it was better to buy cards that wouldn't risk gumming up the engine for Bishop fuel or just buy Duchies and hope for the best.

[DG]

As soon as you saw your opponent getting banks and king's courts there were dangers for you in taking council rooms. Increasing your opponent's hand size was enormously helpful and did in fact create the triple province turn. On the other hand, you aimed to  draw your deck every turn so the council rooms didn't help you that much. Perhaps you could have found extra buys from the black market and used envoys.

Taking the black market sooner may have given you more time to change the nature of your deck. It's always hard to tell though without seeing the available cards.

[ackack]

As soon as you saw your opponent getting banks and king's courts there were dangers for you in taking council rooms. Increasing your opponent's hand size was enormously helpful and did in fact create the triple province turn. On the other hand, you aimed to  draw your deck every turn so the council rooms didn't help you that much. Perhaps you could have found extra buys from the black market and used envoys.

Yes, he obviously benefits more from my CR than I do from his. The problem is that +buy is really necessary for my deck - I've already used it 3 times at that point to pick up useful engine cards, and the CR probably helped me get the KC which really speeds my deck up.

Re: the Black Market deck, the whole thing is seen in the log. +buy available in there: Festival (available on 3rd play), Grand Market (available on 5th play), Woodcutter (available on 6th play), Goons (available on 9th play). I did not do a check of what was in the Black Market, so that's an interesting point. However, I tend to think that gambling on being able to find (and then purchase) one of these +buy relatively early when it's so crucial for my deck is not so good.

[matt979]

From my end, I was thinking afterward that a better strategy would have been another FV + Envoy instead of a second bank.  Then on any given turn I'd aspire to draw my deck, including 7c and a bank, and the FV's coin would be enough to hit 2 Provinces.

If I have enough actions then the disadvantage of the Envoy isn't so bad (for example the coppers are interchangeable), but I'm coming to like an early silver more and more.

This whole strategy (especially since it eschews the Pools) relies on the assumption that with no trashing, Scrying will be too slow.  Once he's up to seven Pools that's not such a good assumption, but I've always been a sucker for greedy strategies (e.g. I love Vault boards).

Ironically, two of the key cards to this game (BM and Envoy) are two of the cards I'm most likely to veto (this game wasn't Veto Mode).