The gut reaction to this card is that it's super strong, like a better throne room. Well, on some consideration, I *do* think it will probably be slightly better card than throne room in general, but not earth-shattering. Maybe something like the 10th-best 4-cost.
Alright, you clearly want lots of actions when you're playing this. But you have to look a little more at *which* ones. And I think, generally, not your typical engine. I mean, this card is worthless if you've drawn your whole deck*. And as the key village to draw your whole dick, it's probably not so hot, either. I mean, you need to use it to hit to draw the deck, fine, maybe you can do that (though it's a little tough). But then what? You have no more actions coming in, and you probably don't have tons of spare actions lying around. So you get a terminal or two off and... what? Probably it will be hard to do enough to justify the time spent getting here, because you can't play enough of those actions. Of course, it works fine with other villages in this spot, but in that case, how much do you want this over those? Probably some, but not tons. Anyway, in these kinds of decks, it's going to be worse than throne room most times. Yes, you can go ahead without needing TR-TR or a village in your initial hand, which is nice, but at the end, TR is just going to have a better pay off. Of course, mixing them wouldn't be bad at all for this kind of deck.
(*actually, this isn't necessarily true, if you have some discard-for-benefit card which lets you pitch exactly two. Or a throned mandarin or something. Secret chamber, horse traders, cellar, etc. work, and I guess warehouse-like things do too, but usually in such cases, you'll want 3 actions to discard, and having those many left after drawing your deck... I mean, it can happen, but it's not going to be a common thing).
The mandatory trash problem. This is biggest with remake. Most other mandatory trashers probably won't get your deck down to having a full hand without a card left to trash. The thin you, but not often THAT thin. Even with remake, you can probably play around it mostly. I mean, upgrading middling cards isn't usually *that* bad, even if not ideal, or sometimes you can just play them all first, or in the rare case where none of those things works, you can choose to not play this. It will take some tactical finesse, and it is a drawback, but it's a pretty small thing. And most other kinds of actions will be things you want to play (especially if you have them in your deck).
Well, anyway, I don't think that's the real strength of the card. Most of the cards this week, I've been saying I think they work well in sort of big-money strats with some actions - you know, throw decent cantrips with decent terminal non-draw, add some silver and gold, buy green when you can. This fits into something along the same spectrum, but more on the engine-ish side of things. I mean, traditionally engines want to draw lots o f stuff and play it, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Here, I mean a deck where you might play 4-5 actions a turn, but never have a hand bigger than 6-7 cards, and maybe not even that many. So I am thinking just buying only actions, or almost only actions, until you go green, with a good helping of these. So open monument/fortune teller, and then grab as many of these as you can, sprinkling more of those cards in along the way. Or something along those lines. Another cantrip or two helps a lot. But just consider, if this hits woodcutter, that is equivalent, fully equivalent, to grand market. On a woodcutter! And generally, you want to hit better things than woodcutter. I must say, ironworks/workshop/armory well help LOADS here.
While we're talking about combos, there's navigator (seriously, you can set up a chain of these, and navigator is the exact kind of card that should do well in the deck I describe above). But most of all, I want to do something really sick with develop and this. I imagine that this synergy is just very nice, as if you do it right, you always seed yourself with a useful card. Of course, you need to have a spare action, which probably means a village, or maybe just one of these hitting a non-terminal. But I would like to set something up were I just chew through like 8 cards to empty 3 piles and end the game in a single turn.
Oh yeah, there's the overspend, too. This effect is quite interesting. Maybe you can get it to combo with the card itself if you ave a zillion cash, or with another buy and grabbing a mandarin. Okay, most of the time not. Anyway, combos with counting house, that is going for it. Good deck tracking could give you barons or tournaments when you need, too. But mostly probably just lets you play a key card or two a little more often. But usually, by the time it could be in the discard, you aren't all THAT far from reshuffle, so you have to watch out for that - pulling it back only to have the reshuffle get missed sorta defeats a lot of the point. Yeah, well anyway, BM-type decks could grab it to help the greening phase. Slogs could gain it too, but when are you ever going to do this in a slog? Eh, probably just a nice effect to spend $1-3 on,, and occasionally be a mad genius and go like 8 over with.
