Okay, so here's a crazy idea for Sarcophagus:
Memorial - Action - $6
Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it. If it's an...
Action card, play it twice;
Treasure card, play it twice at the start of your next Buy phase;
Night card, play it twice at the start of your next Night phase.
So it's basically King's Court with a built-in Crown, but the Crown is Crowning a crappier card.
Oh, and it can gain (cheaper) Victory cards.
OP? Not sure. Do I like it more than Sarcophagus? Maybe.
I like it. Definitely more unique than Sarcophagus.
Couple of quick comments:
1) it's a bit awkward when you gain a card, but then don't play it until your Buy / Night phase. I need to add a set-aside to prevent the card from being covered up by intervening actions: "Play and trash an Action card from your hand. Gain a card that costs less than it, setting it aside until Clean-up. If it's an.."
2) This actually feels a bit weak, since you are downgrading a card and playing the weaker version twice. I'm contemplating making it play the card from your hand twice, trash it and gain a cheaper card, play that twice. This might be too strong, though. Another counterbalance idea would be to not trash the original card but to gain 2 copies of the lesser card and play them twice if they are an action, otherwise they go to your hand. At that point it probably shouldn't be allowed to get 2 duchies if you trash a 6-cost Action using it, otherwise the only thing people will do with Memorials is use them to trash Memorials for 2 Duchies.
3) Another stranger element (that I'm keeping for now) is that currently if you gain a Werewolf with a Memorial, you play it four times (twice as an Action, twice as a Night card.) The same is true for Crown. However, I'm keeping it that way.
and finally 4) If you Memorial a Memorial you get these weird action chains where you play Memorial on Memorial, the second Memorial plays another card, trashes that card, gains a card and sets it aside to play it later, then trashes itself, gains a card and sets it aside to play later, then plays set aside cards or waits till the appropriate phase.
One thing I could do is just make you play the Night cards and Treasure immediately, but that is a bit weird (a *bit*) and Night cards generally are much less powerful if you play them too soon.
Edit: actually, the only Night card that really suffers a lot from being played in this manner is Crypt. And technically if you played Treasures in your Action phase before playing Crypt in your Action phase, then you could use Crypt on the Treasures.
Another idea that's totally different would be to have memorial function as a King's Court that can only play one thing; the way it works would be like this:
Actually Remembering Something Memorial - Action - $6
If a card is on your Memory mat, play it three times, then return it. Otherwise, put a card from your hand onto your Memory mat.
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Memorial has the card types of the card on your Memory mat.
If Memorial is a Victory card, it's worth 3VP at the end of game.
Edit: updated for better wording.
