I don't feel at all qualified to make a sound judgement here.
Avenue/Flower Seller: Oops I probably should have asked for people to say how many of the card there is, ah well. So my worry here is that with only 8/12 Flower Sellers available and Avenue giving 3 Flower Sellers at a time it seems pretty easy to hoard Flower Sellers, kind of like what you can do with Experiment sometimes. Adding more Flower Sellers just makes too many points available. I think the concept is great but maybe Avenue needs to be changed to make it work well.
Courier/Message: This one is nice and simple, I really like Message although I wonder whether a terminal Silver is the best thing to have paired with it. I guess it's a tiny bit like Flag Bearer where you're buying this terminal Silver for some temporary draw.
Demagogue/Assasin: This one is hard to evaluate for me, I appreciate that Demagogue isn't a great early game card so it isn't an auto-open. One thing that I find is worrying is that the Assassinator doesn't get their card back if the assassination fails so it's quite swingy, I wonder if it would be more fun if they got the card back if the Assassin whiffs but not if it hits? I'm also not sure this is great with 3+ players, it seems frustrating to have your Demagogue trashed by an opponent's Assassin that came from your other opponent's Demagogue. The flavour is great though.
Day Worker/Night Worker: I think Day Worker is a cool workshop variant and Night Worker is a clever way of getting actions into play for Day Worker although it is kind of similar to Ghost, although I praised Message which is basically Lab so I guess I can't criticise that. I wonder whether Night Worker needs to be gained to hand, although I guess it costs $5 so it probably does.
Architect/Redevelop: I like Architect, I guess if you just put +2 Cards on a base set card I'll probably like it... but I like how it can gain Silvers and also draws so the condition to get Redevelop makes sense. Redevelop is scary but it's quite hard to get so I guess it has to be, it also seems like the fun kind of scary to me.
Ox/Yoke of Oxen: I love the concept of a card that you can combine like this. Terminal +1 Card is generally frowned upon though and I think the card might be good enough without any +cards. It's not like Woodcutter for $4 is the worst thing ever and combining them seems like quite the upside.
Archaeologist/Excavation Piece: I like this apart from the weird scoring on Excavation Piece, I don't see why it can't just give a flat vp value. I'm not sure Excavation Piece needs to be a Treasure either really.
Factory/Worker: I like this one too, Bank was getting lonely as a building that's secretly a treasure. I like how the workers give your opponents some interesting decisions to make but they seem like a pretty hefty disadvantage so I wonder how often this is worth going for.
Oak/Acorn: This has some great flavour with the on-trash and the acorns growing more trees. It does seem really strong for $4 though. I think it really should cost $5, the Acorns gaining more Oaks I think is what pushes this over what a $4 should be allowed to do. It's such a delightful design though, I really love it!
Sail Boat/Passenger: I like this one a lot too, nice and clean design and seems like it opens up some interesting decisions, looks well balanced at first glance to me too. I guess you could say that it's playing it a bit safe, but really I don't see what's not to like.
Consorts/Royal Favour: This seems like a well balanced Throne+ with lots of decision making. The +1 Card on Royal Favour doesn't read too well but I understand why it's there, I'm kind of grasping to find criticisms here though.
Lunatic/Conjurator: Lunatic is pretty much Masquerade. Conjurator is double Necromancer. I don't know, with Lunatic being so similar to Masquerade and Conjurator just being better Necromancer I'm not sure this is doing much new? And Lunatic doesn't entice you to trash other Action cards either so I'm not sure it's the best fit really.
Plotter/Gunpowder Plot: I love the flavour here, although you should have to gather 11 Villagers, not 5. I didn't actually hate the +1 Card +1 Villager as much as others, saying that you have to play a Ruined Library 5 times is kind of not how it worked because Ruined Library doesn't give +1 Villager which can do things other than get you to Gunpowder Plot if you need it too. But this new version seems kind of bonkers for $3? Villagers are really powerful!
Superstitious Witch/Witch Bottle: This is cute, but I imagine it has a similar thing to Chariot Race but maybe even worse. You know, your opponent draws a Witch Bottle at the right moment and blocks all of your Curses and you don't and oops now I have 3 Curses which make it even harder to draw a Witch Bottle and then things spiral down from there and you're left questioning why you ever played this game. Just a personal bias of mine.
Treaty/Domain: I really like Treaty actually, a very nice little trasher to open with. Domain is maybe a bit too generous? I do like that it entices you to trash it to tie it back to Treaty though.
Painter/Painting: I'm not sure about this Ally thing, I did ask for a card not a card-shaped-thing. So it doesn't really fit what I was looking for, sorry.
Visionary/Vision: My gripe with this is that Visionary is kind of a non-card, like I'm not sure I can justify putting this ahead of the designs that have 2 interesting cards.
Manager/Intern: I don't understand why this has a Debt cost +3 Cards +$3 seems like something that you'd open with every time to me. I like the idea of the card apart from that though.
Excavation/Refinery: I'm not sure why people are saying Excavation is strong, it seems kind of weak for a $6 to me. Well ignoring the Refinery part at least. I'm not a fan of the blind trashing part of Excavation, given your deck will probably be fairly built up by the time you can afford a $6 it seems like it'll backfire very often and Lookout is very unpopular for its semi-blind trashing so I think it's best to not do that kind of thing. The setting aside part of Refinery is unfortunate, thanks Capitalism.
Executioner/Gallows: I think this falls into the pitfall of doing too much at once. It can provide draw, Gold gaining, +Buy, +Villagers, Militia attack and Cursing all in one! The only thing it's really missing is trashing. Discarding your hand is a big cost of course, but it's not so bad early on given that Gallows is probably better than anything you could buy anyway and later on you might be able to start doing things with +$ giving Actions (like Gallows) where discarding your hand isn't so much of a big deal.
Spoiled Brat/Coal: I think it's on-record that I'm not a big fan of Knights at all? Sorry I know it's just my own personal bias but this is just not for me. I think posting cards that you think appeal specifically to the judge is an underrated aspect of this contest's metagame honestly.
It was really tough to decide a winner, I was torn between quite a few and it was painful to whittle down my list of top contenders.
The winner is
Architect/Redevelop by
Aquila. With
Consorts/Royal Favour and
Sail Boat/Passenger as the runners up (and a lot of others very close, you probably know who you are based on my comments).
