I have a rebuttal against this judgement. I did write a big ranty paragraph but really it boils down to you severely undervaluing the deck culling attributes. The net effect of this card is to increase your hand size by 1 and Exile a (usually) bad card from your deck. Which is significantly more than just +2 cards. The whole bringing cards back from Exile part is just a mechanism to do this Lookout-esque effect, it's much more succinct than "reveal the top 3 cards..." wording and has the added benefit of allowing the Exiley swappy stuff and interacting nicely with other Exile effects.
Thank you for making me see something I clearly did not. You are not the first person who questioned what I wrote for Gaoler; Carline also argued in this card's favour. Right off the bat, I'll say that there was a lot of cards to judge this week and I was already running late. But most importantly, I'll say that I ain't no professional. Mostly just an amateur who's here to have a good time. I don't go too far into Excel sheets filled with Dominion analysis and stuff like that. So yeah, chances are, my thoughts should be taken with a (big) grain of salt.
That being said, I do try to compare proposed stuff here with already existing cards. Here I was thinking like: "Oh yeah. So Masquerade makes you draw 2 and trash something. Gaoler's kinda like that, but it Exiles instead. It has a better controlled draw, but it doesn't junk your opponents". Or I was thinking about Lookout too and how it also gives a +1 Action where this does not. It's a little bit of information overload. So this is how I came to the conclusion that the card was overpriced. I couldn't put an extra 2 lines of text on my feedback here, because, well, there was still 26 other cards to skim through.
To hopefully make a constructive point about judging I would suggest that judges don't put so much weight on whether they think a card is over or under costed a little. We aren't play testing these cards and evaluating Dominion card strength just by reading them is really difficult.
I'd argue that it's worth evaluating a card as a whole. Name, flavour, cost, effect, etc. To me, I see that as something that's all tied in together. Like, if someone, for instance, figure out a really cool effect for a card and just name it "Whatever" since they figure "hey, the effect's where it's at anyway", then I think it lowers the overall quality of what they are presenting. Likewise, the cost of a card is part of the integral idea. I think it's challenging that, balance wise, this part requires extra care and effort. Especially when we have existing Dominion cards we can compare them to. It becomes sort of a mini puzzle on itself. If we were to (mostly) discredit parts such as a card's cost, then there would be no need to put one in the first place.
Mind you, a card whose cost I thought was off-balanced was never enough for me to completely ignore it. Look at the card Oki from last week. I argued that it was somewhat overpriced, yet it is one of the finalists. This proves that all my attention did not just go into that factor.
I hope this isn't too cheeky but given I wasn't very happy with the judging of Gaoler last week, it's back! If that isn't okay I'll withdraw it.
Given the fact that we are allowed to re-enter a previous entry for this week's contest, I don't see why this would be a problem at all. It's all within the rules.