Pawn Shop - 1c Event
Once per turn, choose one:
+1 Buy, trash a card from your hand, +coins equal to its cost in coins, or
+2 coins, buy a card costing more than 0 from the Trash.
This is the general idea. You may Salvage cards automagically (at a lower benefit than Salvager, no +Buy), but you offer your opponents an opportunity to buy them back first from the trash (-1 coin, not too shabby, yes I think I'll take it).
This has surely a number of issues, I've thought of some of them but I've surely missed some:
1.it becomes a free Borrow when the Trash is empty of gainable cards.
2.players may not want to use it for fear of helping the next player, or conversely the trashing part may be too dominant over the gaining part.
3.could lead to endless games with Bishop and, to a lesser extent, other vp cards.
4.obscure (to me) rule interactions
#1 could be solved by seeding the trash at the start of the game, adding some sort of IF clause or making it trash something (Silver?) from Supply on use (so that you must buy that card - bar cost reduction and weird things).
#2 is hard to see if this is real without testing
#3 I'm inclined to not worry about this too much, but again trashing a card on use could do wonders here, as you'll have a net null effect on trash size.
So yeah, this is the fix I've been thinking about:
Pawn Shop - 1c Event
Once per turn, choose one:
+1 Buy, trash a card from your hand, +coins equal to its cost in coins, or
+2 coins, trash a Silver from the Supply, if you did, buy a card costing more than 0 from the Trash.
...but this long and very obscure, and it's still a free Borrow when you've got exactly one coin.
Fun (?) interactions: buying Vineyards and Trasmutes from the trash generates one coin. Fortress is a 4$ Gold. You can't buy back lost Prizes, but you can buy back that Champion that just got Swindled.
So uh, I really like the idea in principle, but I'm not sure it's feasible and fun, so your opinions and suggestions on the matter would be of great help.