Editing Gondola

Gondola's benefit-on-gain can beneficial in a number of ways. One more obvious use is if you happen to draw an action dead, such as when you draw two terminals in a money strategy. As such, the presence of Gondola on the board can make it optimal to purchase slightly more terminal actions than you normally would in a money strategy. Usually the best approach in this strategy is to buy a similar number of actions as you normally would, but simply purchase them slightly earlier than they normally would. This limits the higher risk of collisions to earlier in the game, before the gondola pile runs out, and leaves you with a regular money deck with a lower risk of action collision by the time the pile runs out.

Gondola also provides a powerful synergy with some cards that normally cannot be played during the buy phase, but are beneficial if played then, even if you had the actions to play them. Probably the best example is {{Card|Tactician}}: if you buy Gondola, then use it to trigger a Tactician in your hand, you effectively evade the forfeitted turn, while still benefitting next turn. This can enable a powerful double-tactician strategy in which you start each turn with 2 buys, buy Gondola and then a province, and play Tactician again. Normally, treasure harms a double-tactician deck but as long as you are able to keep buying Gondola, you can keep playing tactician in the buy phase. This strategy, however, depends on gondolas still being available so your deck must be resilient enough to function well as a single-tactician deck when the gondola pile runs out. As such this strategy is also dependent on whether or not other players are also buying or gaining this card, and it tends to be strongest when you are the only player doing so.