Herald: Another trap card. Besides the Village Idiot I expect a lot of Herald Idiots to emerge. If you think it can replace a Village in engine decks you're going to be very disappointed. You really need a very dense and trashed down Action deck for this to work.
I doubt the result on Herald. I find on average it is substantially more powerful than village, although I only play it with gainers or trashers.
I don't doubt the results w.r.t. the point Geronimoo actually makes, namely that you can't expect Herald to just function as a Village substitute (something that similarly holds for Ironmonger), but I agree that looking at Herald as just a Village in the first place doesn't do the card at all justice. Because first of all, when the card does actually hit, it's not just a Village, but basically an activated City (minus that it forces you to play one particular card right away), and secondly, you aren't at all forced to just randomly buy the card and hope it hits some of the time, you can actually make it likely for this to happen, and you're free to ignore the card when you can't. The most obvious way is trashing. It doesn't even have to be extreme trashing, as a $4 cantrip that's an activated City even half the time is already pretty sweet. When you have the option to trash aggressively, though, the card can become absolutely bonkers, as now you can rely on it for
both +Actions
and +Cards. A nice example is
this game I played last week, where Herald was both the only Village and the only way to increase your hand-size, and it still allowed me to pull off a Bridge mega-turn.
Some other ways that make it more likely to hit are Cartographer (also included in the game above, though not until very late and I botched its execution by discarding cards I actually wanted to keep), Apothecary, Wandering Minstrel, and, when you're drawing most of your deck, Warehouse: discard some actions and then play one of them with Herald.
