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« on: May 20, 2013, 10:17:32 am »
The main purposes would be to power up your own trash-for-benefit of victory cards - and discourage your opponent's - that's Rebuild, Golden Decks, endgame Apprentice/Salvager, and anything with Feodum - but not much else. Normally if you're Remodelling or Expanding, you're turning expensive Actions and Treasures into Provinces, you won't buy a Duchy just to Expand it, you can buy something useful for $5 and Expand it anyway. It wouldn't really discourage other sorts of TfB because they can just not buy or play a Garbage Collector, and then you never get to use all those Actions and Treasures that you grab.
The main problem is that in kingdoms without trashing, which are rarer in these Dark Ages, but of course they do happen, it's a dead card. Dominion cards are designed to be self-contained - e.g. Graverobber gives you a way to grab cards from the trash, so it also gives you a way to put cards in the trash that you'd like to grab. Therefore, it needs some way to trash cards - how about trashing cards when you play it? Then there's a problem, because if there aren't other trashers, then your duration effect is mooted as you'll never collect cards your opponent trashes with it (they'll collect them instead).
If it's a pointless card without trash-for-benefit of Victory cards, then it needs to be in the kingdom with at least one other card which trashes Victory cards for benefit. The obvious solution would be to force that condition by saying "in games using this, add another pile of card X" where card X is some other card you have to design, either in the supply, or not-in-the-supply which you gain by doing something with Garbage Collector - not buying anything when you have a Garbage Collector in play? Having a Garbage Collector in play at the beginning of your turn (so your opponent didn't knock it out with their own one) might be more interesting. Of course you could say that card X is either Rebuild or Bishop, but then it doesn't work for people who don't have either DA or Prosperity (maybe that's OK with you).
I thought about a similar card to this, which just stayed out until the start of your next turn, and simply collected every card to your discard pile, no choice. Obviously it would be cheaper than yours... while less powerful, it would have more use-cases, since remodelling/expanding Gold->Province, Remodel->Grand Market, etc. are more numerous/common situations than using them on Victory cards. Furthermore, it's a hard counter, and also powerup, to trashing attacks like Swindler/Saboteur/Rogue/Pirate Ship, and Knights especially, because if you have one in play, you get to keep the cards they hit, and also their cards that you hit - they hit your Knight, or you hit their Knight, and you keep both Knights. It's also a defense against Thief/Noble Brigand, and solves the problem of having a Mercenary but nothing to trash with it.
