Thinkaman: Some great observations all around. I'm not sure I entirely agree your aversion to mixing money and villages, though. Villages are engine cards, and the ultimate goal of an engine is to accrue money, so if the engine cards themselves generate money (see: Minion, Bazaar), then that's a good thing, right? But you're right that it would be one of the last choices for a Village-type card, because the modest $ boost isn't worth the drawing loss.
Which makes me wonder if perhaps the better incarnation of this idea isn't the copper-giving-extra-actions that Servant's Village is but the next level up: +2 Actions, +$2. Now it's silver-giving-extra-actions. It would probably be priced at $4 (one up from Silver) and thus still easily affordable as the Village-component of a drawing engine. But in offering +$2, the loss of the +card doesn't seem nearly as bad. The burden is off the engine to produce as much as it would with a vanilla Village.
Wait. That's just Festival without the +Buy, right? So maybe it's not worth doing that after all, although the $4 price point is a world away from $5, especially if the particular engine you're building needs any of the $5 drawers, like Torturer, Rabble, or Council Room. But I dunno.
Anyway, just to reiterate, the wording mishap on Squire isn't really a mishap at all: Watchtower and Library both use the same wording.
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Novice
No real comments on this one except to say that I don't think it's broken. Yes, you can suck down Fishing Villages nicely with it, but the fact that it consumes a card slot means there's a limit to how much you want to spam them. And even if you do and get away with it, once you've got all the $3 cards you need, then they're just dead weight. So I think it's fine in terms of balance. Not sure what percentage of boards you'd want it on, though.
Renew
Probably more desirable, all-around, than Chancellor. The cantrip effect means it's less of a burden on your deck as a whole. However, the non-optionality of the effect is a small monkeywrench. I actually like it for that reason: if you don't want the discard effect, you can't play the card, and you've got a dead slot in your hand. That, in my opinion, offers a more interesting strategic question than Chancellor does.
Assassin
I really think this is too strong for $2. It's just brutal. Think of how troublesome Envoy can be in plucking out your linchpin. But all the cards Envoy draws are extras you get to add to your original full hand. This card hits your
actual hand, potentially wiping out the turn in a way not even Militia/Ghost Ship can touch.
By contrast, I've tested
this card (also originally named Assassin, but which I renamed and tweaked later) quite a bit:
Mercenary
$5 - Action/Attack
+$2
Each player with 4 or more cards in his hand reveals all cards in his hand except for one of his own choosing. You choose one of the revealed cards for him to discard.
At this point, after playtesting, I'm happy with this version of the card. Differences from your card: (1) +$2 instead of +$1; (2) you only get to discard the second-best card, not the first-best; (3) you can only hit them twice, whereas your version has no limit; (4) your version has the opponents replace their cards.
It's quite a bit different in the details, really, but not obviously weaker overall. I suspect the attack portion of yours is worse overall, even if you don't stack it. Yet your version costs $2 to mine's $5. Not that we have to be consistent with each other, but surely they can't both be balanced.
That said, it's a great idea. In mulling over my card, I never even thought to counterbalance the attack by having the opponents draw to compensate. [Edit: I see now that Thanar had that idea in that thread, so credit there as well.] That feels cleaner to me than an arbitrary limit on stacking. But I still think second-best will play better than first-best and either way will require a price increase.