What about just increasing the search space to 6 cards and. leaving everything else unchanged? It buffs the filtering ability. ty, keeps the spirit of the card the same, and if you don't find any Victory cards then you can use the deck reordering to improve your next hand a little. And hey if it still sucks, at least it'll miss so many reshuffles that you hardly notice! Maybe some of the basic Scout combos like Great Hall would get too strong here but honestly I find it a bit hard to imagine. I mean they might be dominant but no stronger than a good Menagerie or something.
The 6th card is a can of worms. If none of the 6 are Victory cards, you have a chance to manipulate the contents of your next hand. It also gives Scout incredible reordering power for a chain-drawing deck (on par with Cartographer). Five is enough.
Not just your next hand. It gives the potential to play with the hand AFTER that. Which is insane, and why cards that seek through your deck for a variable amount of cards always discard, rather than put back on your deck.
Of course it's very possible you guys are right, but I'm not sure it's this absolute. These abilities still come at the cost of hurting your current hand, a drawback which no longer has any compensation whatsoever in terms of filtering or immediate card draw. And your ability to manipulate the hand after next is quite limited: you get to hand one card over from the previous hand. Nothing you couldn't do with Courtyard; you're just doing it a turn in advance, which confers no special benefit. To the contrary, you'd rather improve the current and next hand than improve the next hand and the hand after that, because earlier hands are more critical!
The only time I can see the "turn after next" thing being really beneficial is that if you draw your SuperScout right after a reshuffle, you're almost guaranteed to put together a 2-card combo of your choice either next turn or the turn after, as long as you didn't draw either of the combo pieces along with the Scout. But hey, you can get the same from Scheme even if you DID draw one of the combo pieces early, and without having to trash your Estates first, and without the handsize-reducing effect. So I don't see this as overpowered at all.
But I can see where it might potentially be too strong in combination with cards that like to know what's coming up next. Anyway I'd be surprised if Donald X. didn't see Scout as weak and try some of this stuff out, so I'll defer.
Edit: I would however really like to see a card that can rearrange 6 or 7 cards deep, in order to counter attacks that look at the top of your deck. That would be fun, even if it had to cost $5 or something. But then maybe you'd have too much AP, and in a way it's basically just like a Secret Chamber that you have to play one turn earlier (and that doesn't suck).
