Often, players will get into a Rock-Paper strategic scenario, where they say to themselves, “I can’t play R, they will just go P and have a good matchup against me.” This is an important kind of thought process to have. But then sometimes they find that their opponent goes for S, just ignoring both options which they were discussing, and sails right on by. Oftentimes, this will happen in a scenario where S is something really really simple and straightforward, and this will leave the player who lost scratching their head.
The best example I can think of is curse-giving attacks. Jimmy is afraid of Mountebank and goes for mass trader. Steve, his opponent, ignores this and just plays Big Money Smithy, and wins. What gives? Was Jimmy just doomed because he was first player?
The answer is to look at what you are reacting to. Why are you afraid of it? If you have legitimate fear of it, then you should be able to punish your opponent by going for it. In this case, Jimmy would need to pivot to getting Mountebanks of his own in order to punish Steve for not getting the proper defense. Sometimes, though, the fear is not justified. In this scenario, that would mean the trader opening transitioning into mountebanks is weaker than BM/Smithy (which, in this particular case, is quite hard to believe). If that is the case, it may be the case that you can go for the second strategy – BM/Smithy here – because it can just outgun the first thing, and you really shouldn’t have been afraid of it.
But there’s a third scenario: going for trader loses to smithy, smithy loses to mountebank, mountebank loses to trader, and as soon as you’ve committed to one, it’s too late to pivot to the proper response of another. Such situations are, I want to stress, pretty rare, as you aren’t really fully committed to one strategy or the other all that quickly (yes, opening smithy isn’t optimal for transitioning into mountebank, but of course it is possible to do). And here, that’s really the case with the mountebank – you can transition out of that pretty well. So maybe this isn’t the tip top example for the last and trickiest scenario. Fortunately, I have another example.
Young witch is the classic card here. Let’s say the bane card is something pretty bad, like duchess. Duchess isn’t a great card, and you especially don’t want to have to pay for it. So there are a few options. You can open Young Witch/Silver, Young Witch/Duchess, Silver/Silver, Silver/Duchess, or Duchess/Duchess. Let’s assume that, apart from YW and Duchess, the only reasonable kingdom card is Cartographer – this gives us a 5 that will definitely be useful, without making something else just a clearly more important strategy, and this is roughly as close to neutral as I can think of to make the example. Okay. Duchess/Duchess protects you pretty well against the possible YW of the opponent. But it is clearly worse, head-to-head, than silver/silver. If what you are looking at loses head-to-head to something that your opponent can transition to, (and assuming it’s too late to adequately transition out), it’s a bad strategy. So this is looking pretty doubtful. Silver/Silver almost surely loses to anything with YW. So you can look at YW/Silver. But let’s assume for the moment that this loses to Duchess/Duchess (I sorta doubt it does, but it’s plausible at least). YW/Duchess looks sort of gross, going double terminal including a drawer, but it has some defense against opposing YW as well as applying pressure of its own.
Out of this kind of analysis, you can see what your options are: basically, open double duchess with the idea of moving into YW if the opponent leaves himself undefended; YW/Silver, possibly picking up duchesses as defense if the opponent goes YW as well; YW/Duchess, adding more YW, Duchess, and silver based on what the opponent leaves open. And actually, the biggest lesson of all is to put yourself into a position of flexibility. Duchess/Duchess leaves you stuck defending pretty hard. YW/Silver is most aggressive, but leaves you open somewhat to YW hits. Still, it has some flexibility, and the worst-case is limited as well (in mixed cases with duchess, they can fall wrong and fail to defend you). YW/Duchess is probably the cagiest, and my recommendation, as it gives you good flexibility to pivot into more cursing, more defense, or just plain money, depending on the needs of the situation. It can fail the worst, though. So these are the things to weigh.
One final note: You can't ever really be behind, because you can always *do nothing* on a turn, and then grab their 'reactionary advantage' from them, if they move. This is almost never a good idea, of course, but you can actually think of the 'do-nothing kind of play' - grab a silver, say, which may not be the best thing for any strategy but will likely be fine in any of them, giving you flexibility.
Okay, technically, if the adaptability is a larger advantage than 1st player tempo but smaller than the chance the game ends in a tie, 1st player can be at a disadvantage. But this is *extremely* rare.
