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[Markov Chain]

I believe Harvest is the only card which draws from your deck but does not care about card quality, only quantity; you want to draw as many different cards as possible.  Having a victory card on top of your deck doesn't hurt the Harvest much, as you have only three Estates and fewer than that many Duchies or Provinces for most of the game.

Fortune Teller puts a victory or curse card on your deck, and Bureaucrat requires you to put a victory card back on your deck.  Normally, this will put a dead card in your hand this turn or next, but Harvest makes it a neutral move (as long as you don't play any +Card actions before the Harvest).  It's slightly less effective against multiple Rabbles, as you may have several victory cards and have a duplicate, but at least you can plow through them; discarding two Estates, one Province, and a Silver to get 3 from a Harvest is probably as good as you could expect.  And with Ghost Ship, you can put two victory cards on top of your deck if you have them (preferably different ones), and not lose anything to the Ghost Ship.

Harvest also reduces the effect of Spy/Scrying Pool putting a bad card on top of your deck, although it doesn't do quite as well because that card is often a Copper, and Copper is the card most likely to be a duplicate in most decks.  And it lets you get rid of the curse from Sea Hag, but if Sea Hag is in play, the curse is also likely to be a duplicate.

[ftl]

I'm not sure it's much of a counter. I can see how it would work in principle, but it seems like in practice, getting it to work would be clumsy.

It only works as a counter if you're not drawing anything before you play the Harvest. But Harvest is a terminal. So, for it to work this way, you end up just playing Harvest-BM - which isn't particularly powerful, as far as BM+X go.

Or, you could play a village, and then a harvest... But for it to really counter anything, it has to be a disappearing village, if you play a drawing village and then Harvest then you're not getting any extra countering out of the Harvest since the village will have drawn the top card anyway. And if you're buying villages, you're probably building an engine of some sort, in which case you want +cards, which leaves you playing "village, Harvest, Village, +cards" and having to draw all four of those together for Harvest to work as a counter.

[brokoli]

I once used Harvest with apothecary : apothecary draw coppers, harvest discard the victory cards...

[aldaryn]

I'm not sure it's much of a counter. I can see how it would work in principle, but it seems like in practice, getting it to work would be clumsy.

It only works as a counter if you're not drawing anything before you play the Harvest. But Harvest is a terminal. So, for it to work this way, you end up just playing Harvest-BM - which isn't particularly powerful, as far as BM+X go.

Or, you could play a village, and then a harvest... But for it to really counter anything, it has to be a disappearing village, if you play a drawing village and then Harvest then you're not getting any extra countering out of the Harvest since the village will have drawn the top card anyway. And if you're buying villages, you're probably building an engine of some sort, in which case you want +cards, which leaves you playing "village, Harvest, Village, +cards" and having to draw all four of those together for Harvest to work as a counter.

You're ignoring a lot of non-drawing villages, like Fishing Village, Festival, and so on. Fishing Village, Fishing Village, Harvest, Smithy, for example, would work fine. Or more likely, you're cashing in on last turn's FV with another in hand.

Err, edit: I'm bad with lingo, I assume that's what you meant by "disappearing" village - but there are plenty of situations where you can construct a good engine with a disappearing village - or maybe that's your only option.

[CaptainNevada]

I've found Harvest is surprisingly good when I've played IRL.  Perhaps it is because I see so many things wrong with it on paper (terminal, requires an action, pot luck on what you're going to get out of it) but I've usually won in the cases where I did buy it.  It does accelerate your deck by discarding the top four cards.  I should probably use it more in kingdoms without trashing or with discard attacks (or Ghost Ship).  It may not be a great card on certain boards, but I'm beginning to like it more and more with each use.