Right, I’m just saying that it is at least theoretically possible for a machine to design cards based not only off of similarities to existing cards, but on the rules and concepts of Dominion itself. It’s just way harder and needs a much more advanced computer.
Maybe what you're imagining does, but it's way way easier to piece together meaningful cards using all existing Dominion concepts, than it is to write a program that "learns." It won't come up with anything novel, but then neither will the learning program.
I put work into this 20 years ago on Magic. Other people have done it since and you can go see the output of one of these programs somewhere. You just consider all of the different forms a rule can take, and all of the smallest pieces the game provides, and then randomly pick stuff. For example you need to pick an effect. One meta-effect is "Effect. Effect" - do two things. You pick that. For the first effect you pick "+N Cards." N could be a formula, any of the things you can count, but it can also just be a number, and you pick 2, to keep this paragraph short. For the second effect you pick "Gain a [card]." Then you have to pick what "[card]" is, there are all the ways you can qualify a card. We pick the choose-one meta thing and go with "[card] or [card]." For the first one we pick "costing $N" and have to pick N, and this time pick a formula, to make this paragraph longer. The formula is "number of cards in your hand." For the other "[card]" we also happen to pick costing $N, but this time N is 2, okay. So "+2 Cards. Gain a card costing $1 per card in your hand or a card costing $2."
The output is not fascinating, as you can see with the Magic cards. It's like that joke in Dirk Gently, the book, where he constrains the cacophony of notes to C and gets cacophony in C. Since we picked randomly, we got random stuff. If you look through them you can maybe find a nice one, but it isn't so much that the program produced a nice one, as it is that your brain produced it, through a slow method where you look at lots of random stuff and evaluate it. If you looked at every producible random card you'd spot all the good ones. You know? There's this logic for making the cards better that your brain knows but the program doesn't.
So then you want that logic. That was too much work 20 years ago and I don't think anyone else has done it since. I always imagined the Magic program producing things like, "Sacrifice a blue artifact: Until end of turn, creatures you control are untapped." On an Enchant Creature spell with a cost of XG. There are all these things about how Magic works that aren't just in the items you randomly pick; artifacts aren't ever blue (it's been many years and at this point a few expansions have had blue artifacts), being untapped isn't the kind of thing that can have a time period for it, an Enchant Creature should refer to the enchanted creature somehow; an X spell should use the X somewhere. But those rules are just part of it; like, if you have "Effect. Effect," well you would like that pairing to make some kind of sense, not to just be two random things, and you have to figure out, what do you mean by that, what makes sense.
There is however one basic thing you can get out of a program like this, sans the tricky logic, which is, it can help you find areas of possibilities you weren't using. You make the list of triggers for "trigger -> effect," and think of one you haven't done yet.