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[Awaclus]

Nuclear War

You may trash your opponent's hand, his deck and his discard pile.
If you do, -30VP and the game ends immediately.

Islands: the best way to protect yourself from a nuclear war.

[shMerker]

Native Villages and Havens are second and third best.

Also I like the idea that your monuments will survive a nuclear war.

[theory]

Nuclear War

You may trash your opponent's hand, his deck and his discard pile.
If you do, -30VP and the game ends immediately.

Islands: the best way to protect yourself from a nuclear war.

Bikini Atoll must find this revelation to be quite ironic.

[-Stef-]

There's another good reason to keep the hovel. In a kingdom without additional card names you need every single one to get your fairgrounds up to 8 points each. Now that I can look for old games again (thanks Andrew, guess you'll hear more on it soon) I can present an example.

This game features the mentioned Fairgrounds. Duchy-Duke powered by Hoards looks like the dominant combo. You can't get a serious laboratory-chain going because you just need to fight Duchies too soon.

I open $5/$2 and don't like Ghost Ship because I think I'm behind if my opponent answers with Silver/Watchtower. And Haggler is a good card anyway. This may have been a bad call.
Nonetheless, my next draws are pretty bad and my opponents Scavenger is a miracle worker, resulting in his first Duchy+Gold on turn 6, already having 2 hoards!
This results in enough desperation on my side to try something wildly unrealistic. On turn 11 I decide to keep the hovel and the next turn I add a Scout to the deck.
16 turns later it seems to have worked

[Synthesizer]

[snip]...and that extra card less *could* have made a big difference.  After writing all this, I could see some benefit to keeping the Hovel, but only in games where I'm likely to have several reshuffles AFTER I've started buying endgame victory cards.

Up to the point where you draw {hovel/estate} in the turn where you buy a province, there is no difference.
From this point forward, if you have trashed the hovel for an estate, each time you draw the Estate, you effectively minion-ed yourself (you drew a random hand of 4 instead of 5). This only matters if that 5-th card would have sent you over the {8, 13, 16, 21, etc.} coin threshold with {1, 2, 2, 3, etc.} buys respectively.

(Does this comment help anyone one bit in playing better? Nope. My excuse: I suck.

[Fabian]

Stef, I read the first sentence, and I knew that damn game would show up later in your post. Grr!

[Titandrake]

What isn't instantly clear about the Hovel/Fairgrounds interaction is that if you have Shelters, there are exactly 20 unique cards in the game. 10 Kingdom, 3 basic treasures, 3 basic victory, Curse, 3 Shelters. Without the Hovel, Stef has 70 VP to Fabian's 71 VP.

That's what we call deck management.

[Davio]

Fairgrounds has become quite an interesting card with Dark Ages anyway (as have the other Cornucopia cards).

Without Black Market, you can now have:

5 Basic Treasures (incl Platinum and Potion)
4 Basic VP cards (incl Colonies)
1 Curse
3 Shelters
11 Kingdom cards (Tournament, YW + Bane, Looter, Hermit, Urchin, Spoil-getter, Knights and of course Fairgrounds)
5 Tournament Prizes
5 different Ruins
1 Madman
1 Mercenary
1 Spoils
10 different Knights

For a total of 47 different cards, making each Fairgrounds worth floor(47/5) * 2 = 18 VP
Without Dark Ages there would be just 26 unique cards possible, so DA on its own adds 21 extra unique cards.

[SCSN]

In a game I just played against Andrew I made quite the show of trashing my Hovel on T2 (opening Trading Post/Estate). A few turns later I draw the following hand:

Copper, Copper, Copper, Estate, Market Square

Oops

[ragingduckd]

In a game I just played against Andrew I made quite the show of trashing my Hovel on T2 (opening Trading Post/Estate). A few turns later I draw the following hand:

Copper, Copper, Copper, Estate, Market Square

Oops

And then you went and won anyway!