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[trivialknot]

Split piles were my favorite mechanic from Empires...

I don't really mind complexity, and I loved Nocturne.  But I feel it's quite different in the context of fan cards vs official cards.  When it comes to fan cards, there are just so many of them, mostly bad, so there's a sense of fatigue.  "Oh, it's another card with 8 lines of small-type font."  Even when I understand the card, it's hard enough to imagine what would happen in games that included it.  I don't want to work so hard just to understand a card that in all likelihood is terribroken anyway.

And like, I don't even play with any of these cards.  I look at fan cards for the entertainment value.  If a card is making itself difficult to understand, I don't need to understand it.

Fan cards often tend towards complexity, because they're more for the designer than for the players.  Obviously the designer already understands the whole concept of the card; they designed it, it seems pretty simple to them.  Many fan cards are also trying to draw a lot of attention to themselves, or they're trying to do all the things, or they're trying to do "theme".

The relative simplicity of Asper's cards compared to other fan cards is well appreciated.  But I would have difficulty comparing the complexity of Asper's cards to the official cards, because the context is so different.  I don't have the same expectations.

[Holunder9]

What's your opinion on Necromancer? By chance, I made a Necromancer before the official one, and both revive cards from the trash. Just that the official one has twice as many differently named cards coming with it and turns over cards to mark them as played. Is THAT your type of complexity?

Nope, it isn't. I already mentioned in my last post that I dislike Nocturne overall (admittedly mainly because it is too moneyish for my taste and not because of the numerous new mechanics).

Your Necromancer is a cool variation on trashing attacks and I like it more than the Nocturne Necromancer.

I think that the official Necromancer is a typical Nocturne card, i.e. there is a lot of stuff to read but it rarely leads to interesting play. That's the kind of bad complexity nobody likes. Everybody likes simple cards that lead to emergent complexity.

So the crucial question is always, how much text-intensity or conceptually difficulty are you willing to accept if they lead to interesting play? That's also to some degree subjective. I think e.g. that Capital is a fairly easy card to understand: "buy it, now all Actions that generate Coins are Action-Treasures."

While I like complex card I disagree that something like Edicts, Seasons or Spellcasters is less complex than Travellers, split piles, Landmarks or Gathering cards. It is always just one new mechanic that you have to learn. The question is what happens when you throw stuff together.
An example would be something like tokens and Night cards. They work great together mechanically which is why I and other folks have experimented with such cards (it also covers a design space which official cards will never cover which is why an an adamant proponent of combining mechanics from different expansions, if it makes sense). But perhaps two mechanics on one card, with perhaps even a third thrown in, could be too complex for some people.

In the end it is mainly a playing group matter. If you play Dominion with kids and family you will naturally lean towards more simple cards whereas if you play it with experienced gamers you naturally lean towards more complex cards.