Interesting!
I feel like the shuffled nature of those two piles make it difficult to incorporate into a strategy. You normally get your smithy's fairly early on, and you're likely to buy this and just have them trash themselves. I don't think the low price is worth such a drawback. Unless I am swimming in +Buys, I would rather build my draw engine with moats. I think you can make this more enticing by providing some sort of benefit +1$ or something. This might have to make it cost 3 though. Or perhaps it has a on-trash clause ("when you trash this +$2" for example), so now you might choose to self-trash a card, and it makes it less devastating when they don't line up. As written right now, your engine can snowball away from you. You get unlucky on one shuffle, and all the sudden your engine is gone, and that doesn't seem that fun. Adding some other benefit would help with this feeling.
Thanks for your thoughts – I appreciate your taking the time. You make good point about what makes this a difficult card to build a reliable engine around in most circumstances. I'm guessing we disagree though about what makes a well-designed, well-balance card. A $2 card not solving all of your problems is not problematic as I see it. Under most circumstances, you wouldn’t want to build an engine around a one-shot Lab (Experiment) or even a one-shot Lost City (Encampment), but that doesn’t mean they’re not a useful pickup in many circumstances, or that they are not well designed. The same is true for a one-shot Smithy. Actually, I would argue it would be bad if you COULD easily build a reliable engine around a $2 Smithy in most situations. And then, sometimes, Workers Village, Squire, Hamlet, or similar +Action/+Buy-rich situations arise, where if you plan well, you can build a fairly solid engine around Anvil/Hammer.
The history of this card is that it started out as a regular 10-card pile of Anvils, where you would reveal an Anvil from your hand or return the Anvil you played to its pile. This was too easy to build an engine around. It had the problem of not really being balanced at any price. The addition of a second card, Hammer, shakes up the dynamic and makes it balanced at $2.
Essentially, I went through the same thoughts as you did in the development stage, and agree with the substance of what you’ve written. We simply disagree on our conclusions. For now, I will leave the card as is. Thanks again for your thoughts.