If you are arguing that +Buy is usually superior to +Action then I agree with you. The challenge of beating Big Money is that it always buys something that will aid it from the beginning of the game to the end. Most action cards, on the other hand, have a limited shelf life. As you note, +Action cards like Village have limited usefulness early in the game. +Buy (without help) likewise has limited usefulness early on unless you can profit from a giant deck from Gardens. However, an action card that links a +Buy with some other effect that can build up treasure you can pull ahead of Big Money with little trouble.GDJustin said:Card drawers, specially something like village that gives +actions, should pretty much never be an opening play.
The first action card a player buys should be a terminal action, because it'll be the only action in their deck when they reshuffle. There is no need to buy anything that provides +more actions until later turns.
So:
A card-drawing deck basically just allows people to stuff more of their not-so-great deck into their hand. It's much more powerful to just have a very very lean deck, so that it SEEMS like you have 15 witches because they're coming out constantly, but really you have 1-2.
With card-draw strategies you need... more everything. more +cards, more +actions, and (this is frequently overlooked) more +buys. My wife is very fond of Smithy and similar cards and ALL THE TIME she's like "HAHA I have 14 gold... oh... and only one buy"
I'm increasingly finding +actions to be a little overrated, because of how situational they are. I've already explained why they shouldn't be purchased as an opening move. But even later in the game, it seems player turns end with them having more action than they need, instead of more action cards than they can spend. If you DO have more actions than you can spend, you probably should have bought more silver and gold instead.
"Big Money" (the only buy Silver, Gold, and VP strategy) wins because everything in your deck works toward your goal of sweetening your deck to buy expensive VPs, with the exception of your starting Estates. It results in a deck with a fairly high income (the percentage of cards in the deck which help you buy things) and it gets there fast. Its great downside is its limited degrees of freedom- you are restricted to only one activity per turn, one Buy. Thus Big Money is restricted in the number of advantageous moves it can make per turn. The challenge, therefore, is to either make a higher income deck (Chapel, by ejecting the low-quality cards from Big Money), or to make a deck which allows for more advantageous moves on average than Big Money AND can translate those extra moves into VPs.
Remodel is so fantastic because it turns an Action phase into a specialized Buy phase without the bloat AND it gives you flexibility to change your deck to match the state of the game (early, mid, or late). Card draws like Cellar are nice but easily overdone- as you say, you end up with twelve cards but still only one Buy. +Buys are nice when coupled with + [X] Treasure: the Woodcutter is fantastic for this. For example, two or three Woodcutters can be bolted right on to a Big Money strategy and kick it into overdrive in a few turns. And Mine is a specialized Remodel that keeps things moving very fast, since the Treasure cards boomerang back into your hand. Even the Workshop can help by keeping the pace up in the early game.
The general theme is to pick up actions cards that do something great in the early game and don't become a burden until as late as possible (or at all). Stuff that only gets good later in the game, like Market, Village, and Laboratory, should be avoided.
