That's a good idea. Except... I can't really claim to be promoting the game. The tournament assumes you're already familiar with the game (it needs to, otherwise you have to allow slow play, which means you can't schedule games easily, and then people can get frustrated and too few games may be played to determine a winner). Still, I can give it a shot.
Tunnel is "bad" for the same reason that Cache is bad. You can use it to get gold but you're still diluting your deck with other cards. If you use a tunnel for gold only once, you've increased your $/card by less than buying a silver would have. If you use it twice, it's equal to buying a silver. Tunnels don't even increase your buying power right away, you'll have to go through a reshuffle after activating it before the gold will appear in your deck.
That being said, I don't think tunnels are really bad just overrated currently. If you can discard and cycle your deck to activate tunnels, you're well suited to having a deck with high variance and the 2VP from tunnels shouldn't be overlooked. However, on some boards tunnels + discard is too slow compared to alternate strategies and I see people going for them even when they should be ignored.
- More ways to give curses
Every expansion to date has this
- More ways to remove curses (important for balance)
i.e. More trashing. Every expansion to date has this
- Ways to punish people that have curses in their deck/hand
Many people already hate the Cursing attacks because of how damaging there are. You really want to make them MORE painful?
- A new type of curse (hex?) that is more powerful, but also more difficult to give out and less spammable.
Again, -1VP and deck/hand clogging is already damaging enough.
- Ways to utilise curses n your deck to some end (as stated above, difficult to balance, it would have to be more about mitigating the negative consequences than giving 'bonuses' as such).
This is just trash/discard-for-benefit and it already exists in many forms.
An expansion like this would bring nothing new to the game apart from putting many people off because of the increased aggression.
I'd like to see pairs of Kingdom cards that are always in the Supply together. I think a lot of interesting design space could be opened by allowing a Kingdom card to reference another specific Kingdom card. It might work better for a full-sized set, though. 13 pairs of cards is a lot more variety than 6 pairs of cards.
