My intent was to test Tinker, and see if it was a reasonable concept. This seemed like a good board for it, as it had lots of similar cost cards, and even some 2 cost ones to swap out estates for. It even has tinker's evil twin: Swindler.
I opened Swindler/Tinker; in the hopes of colliding Tinker with an estate to make an Embargo, and using Swindler to start polluting my opponent's deck. I wanted to embargo the treasures, as unhindered BM should beat this deck. In the end, it was a very close game, with the Tinker deck narrowly beating a Hermit-BM strategy.
I feel like I have a reasonable handle on how to use Tinker now, and what his strengths and weaknesses are:
Works With:
- Strategically timed cards (Smugglers, Counting House, Tournament, Potion to a lesser extent)
- Engines, especially draw-your-deck engines and megaturn engines
- Tactician
- Cards at similar price points
- Good $2 cards (for turning Estates into)
- Draw-up-to cards
- Limited use cards (Sea Hag, Chapel)
- Cards that benefit from being trashed (Rats, Catacombs, Squire, etc.)
- It is useful for cleaning up curses
Conflicts With:
- Silver
- Lack of powerful drawing power
Ultimately, Tinker has a lot of uses, but it is a fairly weak card. It is essentially a dead card in your hand, and in most cases is not useful until at least the mid game. In order to get it reliably paired up with cards you want to exchange, you need quite a bit of drawing power; a lot in fact. Drawing most or all of your deck is probably a good idea.
In most cases, it would be faster and easier to just buy what you want in the first place, rather than use Tinker to swap cards for what you want. Barring really good $2 cards on the board, or trading coppers for Ruins in a Scrying pool deck, you will almost always be slowed by down by Tinker. Use it wisely and it can help you, but buy it carelessly and you will suffer for it.
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