I decided to try a card that junks itself.
Stockpile is a cheap Gold, but after you use it a couple of times, it's empty and worth $0. Luckily, it can "restock" itself, but at the cost of a Curse.
Changelog:0.1 Stockpile, Restock - initial
0.2 Stockpile - can now "restock" itself (Restock card removed)
Secret History:
I went through several iterations to get to this "initial" version. First it was just a one treasure card, earning tokens via overpay - it started weak and tokens made it stronger; or you could remove tokens to make it weak again, but with a strong one time bonus. But the text got very tiny, so I tried a split pile. It was not clear to me, however, if it was ever worth buying the 2nd card to trigger the bonus. So it came back to one card again, until I realized I could reverse the token effect - start strong and get weaker. I first tried that with a dependent card to restock it, until I realized how silly that was, and it could just have the option to restock itself.
Questions:• The main questions I have are all about the numbers: is the cost right? is giving a Gold effective? (I tried +$2 at a cost of $2, but usually you do have $3 and would just get the silver.) Does working twice before being spent seem like the right amount of times?
[this question applied to v0.1]
• Should restock provide some positive when you call it to provide some incentive over just trashing stockpiles? (originally, Stockpile was worth $1 when it spent, but I changed it to $0 to further encourage usage of Restock.
[this question applied to v0.1; v0.2 just uses the Coin tokens]
• Is there a better name than "Spent token"? I did think about just using the Coin tokens, since that's what I'll probably do in practice.