Original Base & Intrigue Cards

[anaslexio]

artisan with chapel or other good card trashers + actions is terribly op. if there are no good trashers or actions it's meh, unless there are no buys so you can get more juice out of it than workshop probably.
Talking about  the thread I'm glad that thief got replaced with bandit (it was pretty much useless for 2 player games), Idk what was so bad about adventurer, it had it's uses, surely you don't usually buy cards which cost 6 because of gold but in a game with a lot of curses + mine adventurer could prove to give you a guaranted amount of coins based on your deck while skipping everything else.
I feel that the biggest loss was woodcutter. In a game with base cards woodcutter is pretty much a sure buy early unless you can get festival or market and now there are less buy cards in the base set.
spy was a pain in the ass, specially when you had a lot and revealed a victory card or curse, the next times you used spy you would need to click keep again and again. Sentry is better in my opinion and it's faster because it's not an attack so games are now more fluid with less attacks

[007Bistromath]

I always got more mileage out of Spy by not automatically keeping bad cards, actually. If you're chaining several of them together, it's worth it to dig under that estate to dump the silvers and witches it was protecting. Even with only two spies, if it's a copper, I might dump it, because if I get another copper it's way more of a problem for my opponent. I pretty much only put junk back on the last spy.

[LastFootnote]

I always got more mileage out of Spy by not automatically keeping bad cards, actually. If you're chaining several of them together, it's worth it to dig under that estate to dump the silvers and witches it was protecting. Even with only two spies, if it's a copper, I might dump it, because if I get another copper it's way more of a problem for my opponent. I pretty much only put junk back on the last spy.

Well not to make a habit of contradicting you, but I think you actually just feel like you got more mileage out of Spy that way, when in reality you were helping your opponent. Or at least not hurting them as much as if you'd stopped on the first Victory or Curse cards.

[007Bistromath]

Definitely not. It's a bit of a gamble, that's true, and it's certainly not worth it early in the game. But later on, it works fine. Think about it from the perspective of the guy being attacked. I don't care if there's an estate in my hand; I'm at the point where, in three or four cards, I've got five coins and some cool cantrip. Then I see all that stuff just fall off the top of my deck. It's a tactic that works best when there's good trashing, because it interferes with efforts to optimize.

[Ingix]

You only think it works fine because you clearly remember the few cases where you actually did remove a few of opponents good cards, which was exciting for you and thus made a big impression on your memory. You just don't remember as well the many cases where you removed good and bad cards in equal measure. You probably also forget the cases where you removed a victory cards and a silver, to leave another victory card on top in the end (which feels as it was good for you but in reality it was good for opponent)

If you remove a bad card on an opponent with a spy on the grounds that you have still 3 more spies in hand and that you can then remove good cards as well, you set yourself up to *on average* improve opponents deck. Just as often as you remove good cards (or even a critical card like a witch), you will remove average cards and get him the critical cards sooner.