Here's the next one:
Name the 5 single kingdom card piles, that no matter which other 9 kingdom card piles are present, can make a player get down to 0 cards in deck, discard and hand.
Knights, Bishop, Island, Black Market, Governor.
Ok. I should also have had "No matter which cards are in the Black Market deck".
The others are 4 of the 5 I was thinking of, so there's still 1 missing.
lol at Governor... because it needs to be played A LOT for it to work. Say it's a Kingdom that has cards at every cost (including Poor House for $1, and Platinum for $9. And Peddlers or 3-player game for more than 8 $8-cost cards) and you started with Shelters.
In order to leave yourself with 0 cards in play, in deck, and in hand... your opponent needs to play Governor 97 times.
Ooh i like this A puzzle within my puzzle. How few Governors are actually needed at most given the kingdom?
I calculated it to that you can do it on any kingdom with 13 Governor plays, but I forgot a pretty important thing, that probably will make it less. It has to be another day I think about that though.
If anyone else wants to calculate this, then remember that you can get a single Governor yourself (I assume we play in the real world, so if you shuffle enough times you will hit 5$), and that you can empty 2 piles before the last turn and more piles in the last turn.
Uh, no way you can do it in 13 on ANY kingdom.
Ideal case is: no Poor House, no $4 or $7 card, starting Estates. Then it takes 7 plays of Governor by the opponent to clear the Coppers, 3 plays of Governor by you to clear the Estates, and 2 plays of Governor by the opponent so you can go Governor->Gold->missing $7. That's a total of 12 plays. Not bad.
If Poor House is in the kingdom, then your Coppers have to first become either PH or Estate (or another $2). That's already 7 plays. If there are no $4 cards in the kingdom, then you can get rid of the 10 Estates in your deck in 10 more plays of Governor. Then you need your opponent to play Governor twice, so that you can go Governor->Gold->nothing, assuming there are no $7s in the kingdom.
So if PH is in the kingdom, you need a minimum of 19 plays. If there are $4s and $7s, you need far more plays.
It also gets more difficult if you start with Shelters because you can't directly get rid of them either. They will go Shelter->Estate or Shelter->Silver first. So the best you can do with that is Shelter->Estate->missing $4 or Shelter->Silver->missing $4. It thus takes 6 plays of Governor to clear these guys. However, you could buy an Estate at some point to trash Hovel, which you can then go Estate->missing $4 directly, so 5 plays. Without PH, it takes 7 opponent plays to clear Copper and 2 opponent plays to trash your Governor. The total is 14 plays.
If the kingdom has a $7 cost card, it will take an extra 2 plays to trash your Governor: Gov->Gold->$7->Province->missing $9. If Platinum is in, it takes one more play to go Plat->missing $10.
If the kingdom has a $4 cost card, then man you have troubles.
Edit: Err, wait, are you even talking about the same thing? Are you just trying to end the game, or following the original puzzle of having 0 cards?