Thank you for running the contest. It was fun.
In my playtesting Halfpenny was an excellent purchase for 5/2 splits, especially if you open a dead drawer. I'm surprised that didn't come up. Halfpenny is like Duchess though, it won't necessarily get bought.
And to pull a little bit of a Kanye, I think Relay Rider would have been more deserving of most game ready than Benefactor. Based on the feedback you gave, it sounded like Benefactor was crowding out other strategies. Powerful cards that render 3 or 4 cards obselete every time they show up can lower the fun quotient a lot more than weak cards that end up functioning like 1 blank slot most of the time.
Furthermore, Relay Rider is a self stacker card, which makes it even more important for the designer to make sure the card is weak. Since the strategy for self stacker cards is usually simplistic, buying that particular card over and over again, a well designed self stacker needs to move the interesting decision to deciding whether to dive in and use the strategy at all.
Alchemist is a great official self stacker, because it dominates fewer than half of the boards it appears on, but requires the strategy to be considered every time. Minion, especially at the time it was introduced, is not such a great self stacker, because most of the time it removes all other 5-6$ cards from consideration until the Minion stack has been emptied.
I'm not trying to trash Benefactor, it's a great card, but I think Relay Rider performed better in regards to needing no tweaks. I highly doubt it needs a buff to be relevant at least some of the time, considering how closely it compares to Wishing Well, and how favorably it comes out of that comparison.
