If I intend to be playing against decks that are going to be waste landing my lands and null rodding my moxes. I play COW in my decks. Since I already have COW in those types of Metagames I can't justify not playing strip mine over LoA. However, if I intend to be playing in a meta where I don't need COW, I play LoA, because obviously it is a more control oriented meta/ or, so I'm assuming.
That seems fairly sound.
I would like to add, that you can basically consider LOA a win condition. Think about it, asside from combo, LOA is a "must answer" for all other decks. When your LoA hits the board, you know they thier next black tutor will be for waste/strip, because if left un-contested, LOA will provide enough fuel to ignite a win. The reason LoA is good is because it gives you inevitablity in the match-ups where you can't win with a single slaver activation. against combo, it generally only takes one. If you can power down that drain/Academy/mega-mox
you need to drop the slavery bomb against combo then you basically win, because you either decimate thier hand, or straight up tutor for necro and gg. In that matchup both stripmine and LoA are basically not worth a land drop. So that arguement is not really that valid, because if they go turn 1 Gemstone Brainstorm (think think think) --- pass. Playing Stripmine is a major gamble. You have to hit that perfect sweet spot of: they NEED that gemstone to win in the next 2 turns. They could either A) have no shuffle effect for the next 2 turns and no way to win in which case you will have drain up quicker if you drop a colored mana instead of a stripmine. or B) hit the gas and have the win in hand that doesn't even need that gemstone (but they couldn't win last turn because they didn't have a
up - but they have a new landdrop ready). So if you don't end up in that sweetspot then stripmine is not really that good.
On the other side, there is the non-combo matchups that cannot nessisarily be won by a single slaver activation. In those matchups LoA is the "High Trump." Spesifically this is Fish (includeing SS), Slaver Mirror, Gifts, Oath, Stax. In these matchups how good is stripmine? perhaps in oath it keeps them off double angel (leaving you with a 3 turn clock instead of a 2 turn clock), and there is a slight off-chance that you can lock out stax under its own turn 1 3sphere. But outside of that that, stripmine is inferior to drawing cards in any of these matches. Now we get into the duress arguement. All of these decks may be running duress. and ofcourse that hurts LoA and does not hurt Stripmine. But does that really matter? they didn't really answer LoA, they just delayed it for one turn. A single Thrist or Repeal can make up that loss. They still are faced with a "Stop LoA or loose" condition. The LoA puts pressure for them to stop you now, or else... Stripmine just hinders thier development slightly.
In all actuality, the best thing you can do with stripmine is hit thier LoA! so that really says something about how good LoA is.
