I was responding to a "neat and useful" message when I realized that there might be a hole in the wiki.
It occurred to me that a great deal of the time, certain cards/combos rely on getting two or more specific cards to match up in the same hand (or at least during the same action chain.) It also occurred to me that there are a number of ways to get that to happen, but that they should be enumerated.
So, first of all, is there a generally accepted term for this phenomenon? I know that cards in the same hand are often referred to as "colliding" but more often than not that's use to indicate a negative connotation, such as colliding terminals (crash!) Should we be using the same term for getting cards to meet up that want to meet up?
The list of cards that want/need intentional collision is pretty long. Some of them are absolutely required (Treasure Map), some are strongly implied (Urchin/Urchin) and some are simply beneficial (Market Square/self-trasher.)
In any case, here's the list of ways to collide (match?) (meet?) cards that I can think of, loosely categorized:
1. Draw your whole deck
Kind of a no-brainer. If you can draw everything, all your cards meet. Included for completeness.
2. Trash everything else
See item 1. If your deck is very small, everything meets, so this is basically an extension of 1. Again, included for completeness.
3. Sifters
Cards like Warehouse and Inn and Forum may decrease handsize or keep it the same, but they give you an opportunity to match up cards much quicker than waiting for shuffle luck to do it for you, and can be faster than trashing down in the absence of multi-trashers. If this were a wiki article, I'd refer to the sifter page.
4. Diggers
The wiki does have a digging page. Some diggers like Hunting Party/Sage/Golem can help action combos meet up, though I'm not certain it's faster than just buying more copies of the pieces you want to match.
5. Waiters(?)
This is a group of actions/events that's almost guaranteed to produce a match because they set aside a card for the next hand in one way or another, continuing to set them aside until the two or more cards that want to be together are together.
This category includes Save, Haven, Courtyard, Archive, and arguably even taking advantage of topdeck attacks like Ghost Ship or Haunted Woods. You could possibly include Prince in this overall category, since it ensures that the Princed action meets up with its mate in a future hand.
Perhaps this concept deserves its own article on the wiki? It's one of those things I suspect people look for when evaluating a kingdom: If certain cards rely on synergy to be good, are there enablers in the kingdom that allow the match to happen quicker than it would by chance/draw/trashing?
I notice that the wiki has pages for "trasher" and "sifter" and "terminal draw" and "digger"(digging) but no article on this category of card that sets cards aside so that they can meet up with their combo pieces, unless I'm missing it.
Comments? Any mechanisms for matching up cards that I neglected? Any cards that could be listed explicitly in a wiki article for this purpose?