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[Davio]

This was my entry for challenge #5 and it got ranked quite low.

Seer / Laurel
$5 - Action
Look at the top 4 cards of your deck. Discard any number of them. Put the rest back on top in any order.
+1 Card for every card discarded.

I'm not upset about its ranking, because, well, I only spent a few minutes talking about it.
But I would like to know why you guys think it's a good or bad card. Is the price too high?

I thought it would be strictly better than Smithy which draws 3 blind cards. If you discard 4, you then draw 4 blind cards and this cycles 8 cards!!!

I did think I had a nice mechanic and a nice card, so please tell me what you think.

Why is it horrible? Why is it overpowered? Or was it just too boring?

[One Armed Man]

Thought experiment - Don't look at the cards and discard them all.  You've just played a Council Room that trades +buy for not labbing your opponent.  +4 cards is too good for BM, even at the 5$ price point.
But it gets worse, because this card lets you abstain from discarding some of the cards! If you made a choice other than discarding all four, then we must assume you made a choice even better than super-councilroom.

What I said:
You could just discard everything and draw 4 cards or keep one or two Gold. That is about all I see this doing.

It is way better than Smithy. Keeping a card is a large penalty (-1 card), so in nearly all cases you want to discard all the cards. At that point you get to draw 4 cards right away, which no other card does without penalty. Giving the choice to draw 3 or less than 3 is "a little better than Smithy"

Near-sighted Seer
$5 - Action
Look at the top 3 cards of your deck. Discard any number of them. Put the rest back on top in any order.
+1 Card for every card discarded.

Other Seer
$5 - Action
Look at the top 3 cards of your deck. Discard any number of them. Put the rest back on top in any order.
+3 cards.

[Kelume]

Agreed with the above - consider that in a Province-capable deck, your average card value needs to be $1.6 for a given 5-card hand. If you meet that requirement, then it is even preferable to discard Gold (two random cards give $3.2 of value), so you would pretty much always want to discard 4.

The odds don't quite work out exactly as stated so you would probably keep gold, but this is just an illustration of how much it hurts most decks to keep anything at all.

While it's strong I wouldn't necessarily say it's overpowered, and (like most of the custom cards) the more I think about potential situations, the more I could see some where it presented an interesting choice, but by and large, this one seems to just boil down to "cycle 4 cards, +4 cards".

[Davio]

I had fiddled with the number before submitting it, but thought it had to be 4 to be better than Smithy.

It's only just now that I realized its massive cycling. 

Oh well, live and learn.

[zahlman]

I had fiddled with the number before submitting it, but thought it had to be 4 to be better than Smithy.

One thing I've figured out is that sometimes you just can't balance a card properly by just changing the one key number on it. Sometimes you simply have to rework the mechanic, or give a little extra something else, or give opponents something, or...

[popsofctown]

Way overpowered.  Vanilla +4 cards is maybe ok at 5$ but probably not.  And this is even better.