Conclusion
As a side note that doesn’t have any impact on my assessment of the card you present, I am curious how it come that you sometimes come up with early versions of cards that look like border line crap, but soon after you present a version that looks amazingly better.
Yay i got third place!
To answer your question: i find that trying to come up with the "perfect card" doesnt really work for me. So what i do is: See the contest theme; Generate different card ideas, in this case 4; Share the most interesting ones on the Dominion discord variant server; GET A LOT OF FEEDBACK/thoughts; Edit the heck out of the cards based on the feedback; At this point in the process, post the current version here; Update here as i change the card; ping pong between feedback and editing and posting here, i often update the card during the week, so the first version here can be said to have "2 days thoughts" on it, while the final submitted version can be said to have "5 days thought" on it.
I do it this way because im quite ditzy, and i just kinda get stuck on the crap phase otherwise: In a way im utilizing the collective Variant brainpower, as ive gotten feedback from RTT, Spineflue, Carline, and uhhh like lots of other people. Is this cheating btw?
Anyway, for some reason your questioning there made me laugh, lol!