Opportunity Denial

Opportunity Denial – A Disruption Evaluation Framework

A glaring hole exists, I believe, in the game strategy literature surrounding the evaluation of hindering your opponents’ strategies and goals. As a concept, it’s obviously known, and it’s known to have value, but the amount of value it has is poorly understood. There’s no framework for knowing how to compare it to advancing your own game plan. In this article, I seek to fill that void.

Opportunity Denial

               The basic concept of these evaluations is something I call “Opportunity Denial”. Effectively, it can be summed up as: “The value of thwarting your opponents’ goal is equal to the difference between the value of the goal you have stopped and the opponents’ next best goal”. Effectively, it’s the flipside of opportunity cost – the value of your own prospective choice is tempered by the value of the next best option in that case, and the value of your denial works the same here. In short, denial is more valuable when your opponent doesn’t have any other good options, and less valuable the closer your opponent’s best unstopped option gets to being as good as what you’re preventing.

Examples

Chess

               Chess is a game where this concept is already fairly well understood (albeit, not by this name). The biggest case of this is with space. A space advantage is often referenced as a good thing, though not often explained. Why is it valuable? Because it constricts your opponent’s pieces – generally, they can’t go to squares attacked by your pawns, and it’s hard to get behind enemy pawns safely, so having advanced pawns means your opponents have fewer squares for their pieces. This is a big denial insofar as they don’t have enough good squares for their pieces, which means that as more pieces get traded off, the less you are denying them, as they have more options per piece overall, and so your space advantage is good for less and less.

               A similar situation presents itself in deep endgames with Kings blocking each other. The opposition is a big deal because it lets you deny your opponent the opportunity to advance. As long as the opponent has another piece to move, then this doesn’t matter as much, but as the number of other pieces goes down, the more zugzwang comes into play, and the opposition matters a lot more.

Magic

               In Magic, the concept gets referred to as playing on a different axis. For instance, you can imagine a limited deck of 20 Plains and 30 Swords to Plowshares. Such a deck is never going to lose to most limited decks you’ll come across, which must win only through a pretty limited number of creatures beating you down. However, once your opponents bring any other kind of way of winning – a bigger deck to deck you out, a hexproof creature, a non-creature threat like a planeswalker, etc, then you’re just cold. Often in limited, winning though other means isn’t really viable, so you might be fine (assuming you can guard against them boarding in a hundred extra basic lands and milling you out that way). But in constructed, this is a very bad idea. This is because even though you’ve shut down the creature plan hard, you are only denying them on one axis, and there will be decks with other axes. This concept is exemplified even more by cards that do this on their own, like Moat or Ensnaring Bridge. These cards can take care of creatures pretty well, but they aren’t exactly busting a lot of formats. Part of this is because those cards can be answered, but a big part is that they don’t cover everything. Bridge needed a deck like Lantern Control, which completes the lock by stopping alternatives from getting in hand, in order to really make a huge mark.

               This is why most control decks end up playing Counterspells – a counter can answer basically any spell. Even in these cases, there are some things you can’t answer – too many spells per turn, uncounterable spells, lands – which is why particularly in the older formats, with lots of options, pure control decks don’t end up doing super well all that often, and also why they tend to do particularly poorly in wide open new formats, because they don’t have a narrow list of threats such that they know exactly what they want to answer.

Ticket to Ride

               Generally placing trains, or picking up certain colors of cards, simply to block your opponent isn’t a great strategy. This is because they can usually just go for something else, besides what you blocked, and be in totally fine shape. The closer you get to the end of the game, or the more you’re sure they have some particular route they need to complete, the more it can start to become reasonable.

Multiplayer Games, generally

               In this case, your opponents’ collectively are analogous to one opponent in a 2-player game. And in this setting, attacking a single opponent tends to be a poor strategy, precisely because each of the other players is unaffected, so your collective opponents’ next best plan – in this case, beating you with more or less any other player – is hurt relatively little. Where it becomes more reasonable is, predictably, when that particular opponent you’re attacking is much ahead of everyone else.

Dominion

               The most obvious case of this in Dominion is Contraband. Contraband isn’t such a good card usually, because you give your opponent the power to deny you. That ability is reasonably powerful, because at some point, there’s usually going to be a specific card you need – Victory cards if nothing else – at which point Contraband is pretty useless to you. And besides this, there are almost always other options which are nearly as good as a $3 +buy treasure for 5 anyway (and usually, stronger).

               However, the concept comes up in many other situations more commonly. There are a couple of other cards(/landmarks/events) which are pretty direct in this respect.

Take, for instance, the Landmark Defiled Shrine. With N tokens on it, buying a curse is exactly like buying a victory card worth N-1 points, right? So if there are, let’s say, seven counters, then it’s the same as  buying a (0-cost) Province? Not exactly. First of all, there’s an issue about piles running out – usually buying a province will hasten the end of the game moreso than buying a curse (though I guess that’s not always true). Moreover, though, there’s some amount of denial to each play. When you get the curse, the points leave Defiled Shrine, meaning that you’re effectively stopping your opponent from making the same play on their next turn. Some people say that this is like a 12 point swing. But when we look at this under the paradigm of opportunity denial, we can see that this is not the case. First of all, you haven’t denied them anything if they weren’t going to buy a curse anyway. But even if they were, they now get to spend that buy on something else, whatever the next best thing was. So it comes out to the full 12 point swing only in the case where they were otherwise doing nothing with the buy.

Let’s compare that to buying a Province. Every province you get is a province your opponent can’t get in the long run. But getting a province now doesn’t do much in terms of the overall number they can get until the game is about to end. Is buying a province, therefore, a 12 point swing? No, it isn’t either. First of all, your opponent may not be going for provinces at all – if they have access to VP tokens, or alt victory cards, or some other way of winning the game, then it doesn’t make much difference. Additionally, while buying the province is a long term denial of the Nth province (where N is how many remained before you bought it, plus how many they have right now), that only tends to matter as N gets low. In other words, denying them the 7^th province doesn’t matter so much – it’s the 5^th and the 4^th where it starts to become pertinent. And the fastest way to deny them those may not be to buy one straightaway.

The same logic from the Province case actually applies to any pile that is running out. Think about a case where there's only one pile of villages, and generally the best deck to go for is some kind of draw-your-deck-using-terminals-then-play-a-bunch-of-payload thing, which is often the case. In such a situation, having more of the villages means you can play more actions - more draw cards, as well as more terminal payload cards. Fantastic. But is it worth it? It's easy to imagine a situation where, let's say the fifth village will eventually move you from two provinces per turn to three. And you already have five, so you're set there, but there's one left, and you're trying to figure out whether to deny your opponent. Let's also assume that it will cost you a turn to get the village (because if it's free, then obviously you should do it). In this case, the answer is pretty clear that you should not bother with denial - you're costing yourself a turn, and your opponent will get to cut some gains (one less village and a bit less payload, since they can't support it), which means they're actually getting off the ground faster. Between all that, you might still be ahead, but it's hard to imagine you'll be more ahead than if you just went for your own greening phase. The more interesting question comes up when it flips you from single province turns to double. This reduces time from greening start to four provinces by two turn cycles. Spending time on the village which is superfluous for you costs you one turn, and them not needing to build as much means they can cut this one village, along with probably one draw card and about two to three payload cards. One thing extra for you plus 4-5 for your opponent looks like more than enough turn cycles, but we have to remember that probably some of these things get bought on the same turn anyway, and the extra village does also help your reliability (probably more so than the extra cards hurt it). So all in all... it's actually a close call, and depends on the specifics. But certainly the value over not denying isn't super high.

Vehicles: Analogy and Analysis

One of the two hot new mechanics from the upcoming Magic: the Gathering set, Kaladesh, is Vehicles. There's a lot of hype, a lot of discussion, a lot of comparisons being made. In the end, it's pretty hard to grok quite how they'll play - we don't have experience with them at all. But let's try to start breaking them down.


Comparison One: Equipment
The thing I have seen Vehicles compared to most often are Equipment. I think this is largely from a conceptual level - both are artifacts, both require creatures to do anything, both take two cards to make one larger creature, both represent tools which augment a person/creature's ability to perform tasks, especially from a real-world perspective. But while there are a number of parallels, there are also a number places where the comparison doesn't really work. The most obvious is probably that, once you cast the Vehicle, it doesn't require more mana to do its thing, rather a creature. Also, with a vehicle, the only attribute of the 'base', small creature that matters is its power.

But the biggest difference comes when an opponent kills the combined giant monster. With equipment, you just move it over, and presto change-o, you have a new giant monster. Or, at least you did back when they would print substantial buffs on equipment, from cards like Vulshok Battlegear or Vulshok Morningstar. Because that was such a huge advantage, so hard to beat, they've generally stopped doing that - equipment tends to be much weaker nowadays. (Similarly, you used to be able to move equipment to have effect on both attack and defense, but that's dampened by weaker equipment and higher equip costs).

You can't do this with vehicles; kill the vehicle, you're left with [a] smaller creature[s]. And that's it - there's no way to go big again. So of course, this makes vehicles in some way inherently 'worse' than equipment... except that R&D understands all of this, so the development team has thus balanced the cards... accordingly? It remains to be seen if they're actually stronger or weaker in practice, I suppose, but the point is that you actually need to look at the rates on the cards to know for sure. Gaining Life is 'inherently weaker' than doing damage, but W for gain a billion would be stronger than Shock.


Comparison Two: Bestow
So bestow also has many similarities to vehicles - again, you're using 2 cards to make one bigger creature, investing a reasonable amount of mana to get this, but in two chunks. And in this case, if you kill the big creature, you're left with a small one, just like is the case with vehicles. This analogy still has the smaller creatures total attributes mattering though, which is still different from how vehicles work. 

Comparison Three: Emerge
The last comparison I'd like to draw is with Emerge creatures. We just saw these, of course, so they're fresh in everyone's mind. And once again, we're using two creatures, and a requisite amount of mana split into two chunks, to get one large creature in the end. Emerge is a better analogue to vehicles in the sense that, in the end, your big creature is just what's printed on that big card. But vehicles lack the on-cast triggers of emerge cards, and Emerge creatures,  when killed, leave nothing behind. They do, though, point out nicely that how the cards are balanced by the development has the biggest impact on the cards' strength, and not just the inherent mechanic. If the emerge creatures didn't get you card advantage from their cast triggers, just putting two cards in for one big body would be pretty bad. But they did give us these effects, and the cards turned out strong.


Analysis
So I think all three of these provide decent analogies for Vehicles, but as I said at the top, none are perfect, and you really need some independent analysis to go on. I'm going to try my hand at this, but I do want to note that I'm going to be talking about general/generic case here, which applies more to limited than anything else - in constructed, you're obviously only aiming for good case scenarios.

The first thing I want to note here is what I'm calling "Effective Power" - on a board where your opponent has no creatures, your vehicle is hitting them with only their power minus their crew cost, since you have to sacrifice attacking with that much power in order to animate your vehicle (best case - sometimes, you sacrifice more). When you do this subtraction, their at-first-gaudy numbers start to look significantly worse.

On the flip side, of course, when you're squaring your vehicles off against opposing creatures, they still trade with the full force as printed on the card. In this case, they're an excellent deal. Thus, we get to a simple conclusion/motto: with vehicles, trading is good, racing is bad. (No, the irony that vehicles don't want to race is not at all lost on me).

Still, this isn't exactly a huge secret, so of course when you're playing against vehicles, you'll be working cross-purposes to that. When someone activates a vehicle and attacks, the best response is generally going to be not to trade with it, but either take the damage, or chump block. Attacking with a vehicle is going to open up a weakness - you're tapping what's probably a significant portion of your board presence, leaving yourself open to a crack-back; this kind of play leads to, you guessed it, racing (so the flavor isn't all lost, I guess?)

So in order to get advantage with vehicles, you have a few options:

1. Be so far ahead that they HAVE to trade/can't race
2. Have the board so clogged that they can't crack back
3. Use them on defense more than offense

To expound on the last point a bit, having the vehicle back on defense means you just have a big creature threatening to eat anything small, which means they can only attack with very large things themselves, which mitigates the fact that your effective creature count on board is lower than if the vehicle were just a creature. Or, they go really wide and just accept losing some creatures, at which point they have to flunge with a LOT of stuff, at which point you get to milk the natural defender's advantage for all it's worth. You might have an objection that one of the advantages of vehicles is that when you attack with them, you get to dodge sorcery-speed removal, and by blocking, you give that up. This is somewhat true, but in order to get you to yield that, they have to be attacking with something large enough that your other creatures can't handle it. So for the privileged of using that sorcery-speed removal, they have to 2-for-1 themselves, with a pretty good creature as one of those two, to boot. It is worth noting, though, that this is a pretty real downside of activating just to have your vehicle "bounce", so you might want to avoid that where possible.


Of course, I would be remiss to not note that the Development team has understood this play pattern, where vehicles tend to inherently be better on defense. They have compensated for this by giving very many of them offensive-minded abilities. Trample, Menace, Haste, Attack triggers, blocking restrictions on opposing creatures... even flying is generally more useful on offense than defense. Look at the vehicles in the set, and you'll see that a huge percentage of them have something like this, and you'll see it's pretty clear that there is this inherent defensive nature to the subtype. These inducements will probably make it right to attack a lot of the time, but they of course won't always. And it's extra worth noting that, on the few vehicles which don't have these kinds of incentives, blocking is going to be the go-to way to be.


To learn more, you really need to look at individual cards... but that's a separate post.

Dominion: The Aggro Pile Deck

Aggro Pile:

One of my favourite strategies is to go for speed. To end the game on my terms. To take hold and bring it to an end before the opponent can really deploy their long-term strategy. Speed, not power.

This means three-piling. You need a few things for this to go right: the ability to get piles out, the ability to control when they empty, score enough points (and know how many that is), in the process. Usually, it also means doing something to slow your opponent down, as even mediocre Big Money decks are capable of scoring a reasonable number of points fairly quickly.

But WW, isn't this just a slog?

No. In a slog, at least how I'm thinking about it, you’re trying to get a matrix of VP points that is insurmountable. Your win condition is to get so many VP the opponent can never come back. In, contrast, aggro-pile decks aim to get the piles out and end the game before your opponent’s (typically superior) deck can get going enough to catch up with you. Your deck is not about scoring all the points possible, but rather about having all the pile control you can get, and having just enough pop to score a little more than the opponent.

Typically, you’re going to want your opponent to help you out in emptying at least one of the piles. Most often this comes from junking attacks (where, if they skip it, you’re going to crush them anyway - this is weakened significantly by the very strongest thinning). However, there are also some piles that just naturally you want to empty pretty fast - Fishing Village is a classic example.

Indeed, you generally need a combination of 2 enablers and/or naturally-emptying piles, and you will have time to knock the last one out by yourself. So Ruins AND curses works well, or a card like Fishing Village with either kind of junk, or some decent to nice gainer with a fast-emptying pile or junk.

Most often, you’ll be piling out with Duchies as that third pile. And you tend to start just hacking away at them near when there are a few gains left to 2 empty piles, and simply ride them hard until they’re gone.

It’s also possible to actually just blitz out piles, though this is quite a bit rarer. Ironworks is a key enabler for the rush, particularly with some Kingdom VP pile it can gain, since actually having 2 of your 3 piles be VP gives you obviously more points, which translates to a little more time. Stonemason is another big card here, as it can get rid of piles very fast. Same goes with Procession.

When playing against this kind of strategy, you typically want to not do something too fancy - that tends to be the number one way that Aggro Piles actually gets the time it needs. At the same time, you don’t want to touch Duchies at all, unless you’re either winning on the spot, completely locking them out (e.g. taking the penultimate Duchy with a substantial lead), or just contesting full bore in a mirror. 

Big Money tends to be a pretty bad matchup for this kind of deck, so you need to have a plan of defeating that as well. Indeed, Aggro Pile is a deck style which must always be very reactive to what your opponent is doing, and in most cases actually needs to have some kind of bailout plan as well - either you are an engine with an eye towards clamping down on the piles, or you have some kind of reasonable Big Money/Slog game-plan in case they go for points straightforwardly. It tends to be important to develop these fallback plans before comitting too hard to Aggro Pile.

Key Enablers in rough order from best to worst:

Junk: Ill-Gotten Gains (two piles by itself), Marauder, Young Witch, Cultist (which can sometimes be a second pile, but being this expensive is very risky), Mountebank, Sea Hag, Familiar, Soothsayer (though this is often more suited to Slogs)

Gainers: Stonemason, Procession, Ironworks, Border Village, Armory, Death Cart, Squire, Salvager, Workshop, etc. I want to point out City, as well, because if you can turn the corner on them at the right moment, it's often possible to slam down e.g. the Estate pile.

Empty-able Piles: Ruin, Curse, Stonemason, Fool's Gold, Squire, Hamlet, Duchess, Pawn, Pearl Diver (etc), often board-dependent, but things like Fishing Village, Ironmonger, etc that people just snap up at every chance because the cost is so low (and they’re so good)....






Example Games:
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151124/log.0.1448393618472.txt
Marauder, Cultist, Familiar - junk is flowing, you have multiple piles that are going to fall, so you can really start playing for the 3rd pile. I think Marauder over Cultist is very important here, since the spoils are good, drawing is less good (with a deck full of junk), and chaining is quite unlikely (and also has a chance to skip your Familiars. The important point is that treasures are good, which is very common in these kinds of games. My opponent shouldn't have bought the Duchy, but it's very unlikely they can get to 2 Colony and a Province in time, anyway.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151127/log.0.1448643955753.txt
Here we have IGG. Trader provides some defense, but also a combo. Jester helps, and FV isn't too bad, either. Notably, Duchess provides a great 3rd pile as well.
  
http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151127/log.0.1448655452593.txt
Young Witch can make both Curses and Banes empty, and with Familiar available, this is a good bit more likely. Hamlet is another third pile, and so some jockeying for positions should have happened. Pile awareness here allowed me to steal this one.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151208/log.0.1449533322065.txt
Again, Curses and Ruins both running, Hunting Party is one of those stacks that tend to run, and we even have Stonemason for more shenanigans. 

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151230/log.0.1451490645872.txt
This one is all about piles that want to run (Highway, Market Square, Minion), plus the obscene power of Stonemason. In these kinds of games, you need to be very aware of what you need to do to run the game out, as well as what your opponents can do for the same.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160107/log.0.1452205936848.txt 
Another example in the same vein as the previous.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20160107/log.0.1452191577234.txt
An example of the Procession style here. Very often you can process into process into mroe stuff into more stuff, emptying out LOTS of cards in a single turn. Note that you need to green pretty early to defend against your opponent doing do.

http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?http://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151119/log.0.1447972595341.txt
You didn't expect me to leave you without an example of a classic Ironworks rush, did you? The raw speed and power is on display here, since even facing down Goons on a Colony board, and totally uncontested (which is correct unless you want to mirror and contest fully), I'm able to knock out all the piles (and even nab a duchy) for a blistering 54 points and end the game in a mere 16 turns.

Governor Theory

Governor is an incredibly complicated card, and not one that I hope to cover in a single article. On the other hand, I also have seen lots of players playing it as well as discussing it in what I believe to be very incorrect ways recently. And strong players at that. I'm here to try to posit what I think some key rough guidelines are, though I want to stress that I don't think I'm some master on the card, and while "every situation is different" is something you can say about Dominion in general, I think it applies a bit extra to a card with so many different options as Governor.



The Options

Draw 3 is almost always the most powerful of the benefits. The other two vary depending on exactly what kind of deck you're playing, and what point of the game you're in. But opponent drawing one is also significantly the worst of the drawbacks for you, and it is not to be underestimated.


Draw 3 on the non-terminal is like playing 2 Labs in terms of what it does to your hand, while an opponent drawing a card is like them playing a Lab. Net, you're getting a Lab effect, very roughly. Of course, there are questions of whether the returns from this are diminishing or compounding, as to which is more valuable. In general, Lab is a fine but not great card. This option is, of course, heightened when your opponent can't take advantage of their cards in a meaningful way.

Gaining a gold is sometimes fine, occasionally good, sometimes mediocre, rarely bad. However, what we're really looking at here is the difference between Gold and Silver. Maximizing that difference usually happens when cards (drawing) are at a premium. Also very relevant here is that the cost difference can be a boon with trash for benefit cards - including the third mode of Governor.

The Remodel option is often clearly the worst. Non-terminal remodel can be decent, of course, but you really need good targets, and often giving the opponent a free Upgrade is quite bad, especially early in the game. They can (usually) get rid of a copper off of this option, whereas you can't. So in the early to midgame, you want to pick your spots - 3s into 5s are often quite good, and Estate into 4 works as well IF there's a particularly good 4 for your deck.


Obvious Situations

Governor is clearly very good when there's a discard attack available (though watch out for Moat or Lighthouse), or Possession, etc. Just take the cards and be very happy at your hyper-efficient draw card. There is some depth to these situations, but I'm not going to cover them here.


"The Governor Deck"

The classic Governor strategy, and one which some players seem to think monolithic (and strong and thus boring) is to A) get as many governors as possible, B)draw a bunch of cards and gain some golds, then C) draw a zillion cards, Remodel Golds into Provinces, win the game. Another problem people have with this is that it can be quite coin-flippy as to who wins, based on whoever gets that one turn at the right moment.

However, I think this deck is both not so strong, at least without help, on the one hand (though not really weak by any stretch), but more importantly, consistently mis-played. In general, I find that people choose to draw far too often on this plan. I almost never choose to draw until I think it's going to be the last relevant turn of the game. When you do reach such a turn, it is of course safe to draw, as they can't take advantage of the extra cards if they don't have a turn to use them in.

Let's break down why I think drawing too much is a trap, even though in general Lab is probably a better card than "Gain a gold, each opponent gains a silver, +1 action". With this particular deck, when I am gaining gold, and buying something good, my deck is improving pretty significantly. Later in the game, I flip to straight remodelling, which makes my deck worse, and theirs a little better, to be fair, but with the explosiveness that is possible, the points are pretty significant. Furthermore, the silvers tend not to be so great for the opponent. Gold isn't super hot, either, but the big leg up it has is that it has good applications from merely costing 6.

Generally, drawing means you are playing for a big turn. This is going to often require multi-governors, and things to remodel. This means a lot of cards, so you need to draw a good amount. Usually, you end up spending a couple Governors to do so. If I play that way, then my opponent will have more cards in their hand to start, which means they need to spend less of their Governors for draw, which means they have more in reserve to spend on other things. That's a big game for them. Instead, if I sit there and just gain gold or remodel, now they need to use more Governors to draw, which means less to remodel with. The silvers also make it harder for them to line up Gold-Gold-Gov-Gov - it just takes so many cards. Whereas if they are going to try to draw to do this, I have pretty reasonable chances of just having Governor to remodel and be able to buy a second Province anyway.

Timing
A massive skill in these games comes in trying to judge when you need to "go for it" and try to get your big multi-province turn off, and when to punt it down the line. The things to keep your eye on are the count of Governors and of 6-costs (traditionally Gold, but something like Border Village is very very good) in both decks, whether they've yet been seen this shuffle, total cards in both decks, and the Province pile. In general, I don't like making a move until you're likely to be getting enough provinces to either end the game or that your opponent can't realistically come back in one turn - keeping in mind that these decks tend to be pretty bad at getting multiple of any green card other than Province (though your mileage may, of course, vary). Every time you draw rather than something else, you give half a Governor draw back to them. Given that they draw less, that means you're drawing half again less, too. This effect compounds (though obviously there is a limit). So over the long run, you're leaking less value to them. The other benefit of gaining Gold is that, after a while, all those silvers tend to clog them up much more than your Golds (which are especially good because you want to remodel them).

Earlier in the game, drawing can be a little better, but you have to be very careful, very tactical. You want to be getting a tangible advantage from it without giving them a commensurate advantage. Particularly, you're usually looking to maximize the 5s in your deck (specifically Governor, at the least). So if drawing is likely to get you more 5s without doing the same for your opponent, then go for it. Typical ways to do this are looking to remodel a silver into a 5 and buy another. You really need to be aware of what you're likely to draw, and have a decent understanding of your opponent's deck, too. If you're really on top of things, you can sometimes mess the opponent up by triggering bad shuffles for them - this is a level above what I see almost no one be able to do, at least on a consistent basis, though. This whole line of play tends to close out when the Governors run, though, since that's when silver starts to get worse and gold get better.


Improvements on the Governor Deck

A straight Governor deck can actually be reasonably clunky and end up playing a bit Money-like. It's significantly better if you can engine-ize it. So get your trashing going, get other sources of draw going. Then you are free to use your governor as payload, gaining Golds and then remodelling them, and also perhaps a little bit of supplemental draw/stability insurance. Yes, this is good even if it means getting fewer Governors. In all honesty, you don't need so many Governors if you go this route, and though you obviously would like as many as you can get, it's not as important as the other stuff. Cards like Upgrade, Junk Dealer, Stables, Wharf, etc. get priority, at least for a while. Lab is probably not good enough to be on that list (though you will want Labs once the Governors run out) - just to give a general impression.

Miscellany

• If your opponent can't use the extra cards because they somehow only have 1 gain, you're much free-er to draw, as the worst they can do is 1 Province.
• Governor is significantly weakened by Colony, just because you can't remodel into it - this makes the gaining Gold a lot weaker, which in turn makes the whole card a lot closer to Lab, which is fine but not stellar.
• You can beat Governor by going for Big Money, but it needs to be very good Big Money, as you're letting them off the look in terms of drawing quite a bit.
• Be cognizant of the opponent being able to upgrade into points. This means changing the order in which you do your Governor options sometimes. Sometimes that means Remodeling then drawing (though that can be risky because it cuts you off from draw+draw into extra Governors, but track your deck and know what you need). Sometimes it means Remodeling into something to SEE if they Upgrade, and then being ready to buy (or not). If you're talking about the last VP card in a pile, knock it out on your first Remodel, getting your other points later.
• Usually you don't want to buy different cards just to be able to Upgrade into them - it isn't worth it. Just be aware of the different VP cards out there at different costs.
• Drawing is also better against Draw-to-X. The other options (especially Remodel) can be used WITH draw-to-X. 

Game Log Examples

• http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151127/log.0.1448666748092.txt
  This game is a good example of how building up an engine, with trashing and non-Governor draw, can really get the job done, even in lieu of many Governors.
• http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151206/log.0.1449436309497.txt
  In this game, there isn't much other engine besides Governor (potentially Minion). However, I'm able to win despite losing the split 7-3 because of how the game plays out (and good luck on draws after the point the Governors run out). Big point here is that my opponent greens too soon, and is left with too little economy left to finish the game out.
• http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151213/log.0.1450016138249.txt
  Another game that shows how building a classic engine can be extremely effective. I get a Junk Dealer to thin down and supplement with Stables before moving in on the Governor to close things out.
• http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151215/log.0.1450143366761.txt
  In this game, an engine built with Governor supplement is fast enough to defeat even a Rebuilding player.
• http://gokosalvager.com/static/logprettifier.html?https://dominion-game-logs.s3.amazonaws.com/game_logs/20151217/log.0.1450358488753.txt
  An excellent demonstration of principles. After some mutual ambassadoring, we both build. I am able to get a more consistent engine, and even though the raw power of Governor allows my opponent to still get 4 Provinces quickly, I'm always on top of things, maintaining high quality of deck to be able to put it away at leisure.