Emissary
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Draw until you have 8 cards in your hand. Put 2 cards from your hand onto your deck.
I don't feel like this one poses any especially interesting considerations in comparison to most draw-to-X cards. It is likely perfectly serviceable at its cost, but this one is not going to turn heads.
Tinker
Types: Night
Cost: $5
Look through your discard pile. Trash a card from it. If you did, trash a card from your hand and gain a card costing exactly the sum of the two trashed cards.
Because Tinker is a Night card, one can (practically) always Tinker up a buy that turn. Discard-playing effects are surprisingly absent from Nocturne. This offers a fairly neat way to combine the $ of Treasures into a tempo-trasher. I do worry a bit about lucky second-shuffle Estate+Estate Tinkers, but that's really the nature of the beast. More disconcerting though is the ability for Tinker to trash the Supply to nothing with Coppers\Curses around. It might want to limit itself to trashing cards with costs associated to then.
Crime Lord
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Play this as if it were a card on the Underlings Mat. This is that card until it leaves play.
Setup: Put 3 random Kingdom Action cards costing $3 or $4 on the Underlings Mat.
Quite a bit more interesting than
Band of Misfits: Rather than giving simple flexibility, it gives unique flexibility in access to some $3 and $4 cards that cannot be used otherwise. It will be immensely Kingdom dependent, which is the nature of the beast. The thing that prevents me from loving it is my inherent leeriness of cards that introduce a great number of additional cards to the game, and there is not even a guarantee of the complexity added by Crime Lord.
Royal Library
Types: Action
Cost: $7
Name a card. Reveal youor hand and discard all copies of the named card. Draw until you have 7 cards in hand, revealing the drawn cards and skipping any copies of the named card; set those aside, discarding them afterwards.
I do like
Journeyman. The ability to mill all of your Coppers probably makes this pretty strong. It's even strong in multiples so you can drop all the other cards upon which your deck would otherwise be choking. A worthy $7 card, I'm sure. Would definitely be up there, but it is not quite as exciting as I'd prefer.
Sanctuary
Types: Action, Reaction
Cost: $5
Look at the top 4 cards of your deck. Put up to 3 into your hand. Discard the rest.
When you discard this other than during Clean-up, you may reveal this to gain a Silver to your hand.
While I do think Silver flooding is fairly underrated, Sanctuary looks like a pretty slow Smithy variant. The ability to draw the best 3 of 4 I don't think is quite a strong enough buff to climb up to $5, and that Reaction is specifically triggered by choosing to turn your $5 purchase into a Silver instead. On most boards, that ability will simply not be very valuable for a
Smithy-variant, because
Smithy-variants usually want to draw your deck. It would probably be more interesting taking a
Workshop effect into its Reaction instead of a Silver-gainer.
Consul
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left names a more expensive Action card in the Supply. Choose one: Gain and then play the named card; or gain a Silver.
The original Consul offered no choice, one had to gain and play the chosen action. This created a possible loop in which the player to your left could force you to trash cards from your hand until you trashed a card costing at least $4 (so that Consul was no longer a valid target) or the Consul pile was empty. In an earlier portion of the game, a deck with the Consul pile in it is probably in pretty decent shape since it can Consul Consuls into $5+ Actions (and you presumably only acquired Consul because there is a good source of +Action on the board), but in the late game, forcing the player's hand in trashing multiple cards or even forcibly piling out the game would probably not be very much fun, so disarming the Consul-chain is probably the right move. I don't believe I like this particular solution, though. Gaining Silver to a large extent solves the question Consul otherwise faces of the player to your left forcing terminal actions into your deck and makes the consideration less interesting.
Ultimately though, Consul is a very interesting card to think about. I like this kind of board dependence. I imagine Consul will be ridiculous on boards with cheap +Action and possibly risky otherwise. It is able to possibly force less useful Actions into prominence and I admire it for that attempt (which I think the Silver gaining again reduces the possibility for that to occur. Why gain an unwanted
Fortune Teller when you can gain a Silver?).
Dragon Egg
Types: Treasure
Cost: $8<4>
When you play this, gain 2 Spoils from the Spoils pile to your hand. If you can't, gain a Wish from the Wish pile.
Setup: Only add 2 Spoils per player to the Spoils pile.
I don't think the rules work this way. The other piles simply "exist" and the fact that a card tells you to gain cards from its pile implies nothing of the setup or inclusion of that card into the game. If a card told you to "exchange this for an Action" you could presumably choose an Action-type card that exists in Dominion to exchange. I'll set that aside for the moment though to talk about Dragon Egg as intended regardless.
I'm frankly uncertain why this puts 2 Spoils per player into the pile. If letting another player have Wishes is a bad idea, it will be significantly harder to get through the Spoils pile in 3-player games than in 2-player, because you have to absorb more stop-card Spoils (or get more Dragon Egg plays in a turn). The only way the limitation makes sense to me is to make it coherent around
Bandit Camp,
Marauder, and
Pillage.
A singular Dragon Egg provides a ridiculous +$6 economy. Any Province game would end long before a player could set up to gain Wishes, and there is no way one could realistically absorb and hold the Spoils to force Dragon Eggs to generate Wishes instead of $. Such a venture would become even more futile in multiplayer games.
I think if you want this card to work, it needs to put only one of the gained Spoils into your hand. You could also use the setup to put Spoils into the Trash and then pull them out with Dragon's Egg, which would make the setup more sensible and the Wish-gaining thing more likely (as the Spoils will eventually run out).
Rowdy Library
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Draw until you have 6 cards in your hand, skipping up to 2 Action Cards you choose to; set those aside. Afterwards, play the set aside Action Cards in any order.
The thing that is especially clever about Rowdy Library is the way you absolutely must weave other Actions into it. Much like most Draw-to-X cards, Rowdy Library is awful with itself and needs ways to reduce your handsize to make it work. When it hits (from a standard hand), it is a staggering +4 Cards, +2 Actions with inconsistent Action playing. It seems to me this will be one of those cards that wildly favors random deck-order, because its ideal lets it weave hand-reduction with yet more Rowdy Libraries that will turn immediately awful if Rowdy Libraries hit too many of each other.
Repurpose
Types: Action
Cost: $6
Trash a card from your hand. Gain a card costing up to $3 more than it, that doesn't share a type with it.
Self-criticism that this will play so similarly to
Expand is completely warranted.
Transmogrify is in fact interesting in the way it often trashes Actions into yet more Actions: Most
Remodel variants want to trash Victory->Action and Treasure\Action->Victory, so enforcing that limitation is hardly enough to allow such a large cost increase. Honestly, requiring it to only gain cards that share a type would be a more pressing limitation.
Cabal
Types: Action, Night
Cost: $5
If it's your Night phase, choose one: play a Night card from your hand twice; or put this on top of your deck. Otherwise, you may play an Action card from your hand twice.
While this is a sensible Night card, I can see why the game doesn't have a
Throne Room for Night cards: There are simply so few Night cards that have especially interesting considerations introduced by doubling them, especially at a cost of $5 where it is generally competing with other Night cards (except
Ghost). The majority of games, this will mostly be a consideration of how it will function without other Night cards, in which case its closest comparison is
Royal Carriage in how it offers greater consistency than the average
Throne Room. Unfortunately, I don't think that being unable to be drawn dead is enough of an improvement to compete. If you want a
Throne Room for Night cards, I think that Action\Night
Throne Room variant is a dead end. You need to offer some other benefit so that doubling itself is an option, and then dropping its price so that it can combo better with those Night cards.
Bookstore
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Draw until you have 10 cards in hand. Reveal your hand. Keep one copy of each differently named card and discard the rest.
10 cards is a lot of cards. Losing all the duplicates could be a big cost. Sort of like
Menagerie, this one is fairly difficult to visualize. I think it could be really fun if it worked. The numbers might need tweaking, but the base idea is very different than most draw-to-X.
Polymath
Types: Action
Cost: $3
If you don't have Deluded or Envious, take Envious. Do this twice: Choose one: Put your deck into your discard; or look through your discard pile and reveal a card costing up to $6 from it, and put it into your hand.
While this can be compared to
Mountain Village, there is often stuff in your discard pile you don't want, while this is guaranteed to get a particular card if you need it. Its limitations have all kind of piled up though in its design: It has Envious to keep you from dully pulling Golds from your discard; it has a cost limitation to keep you from pulling Platinum; and it has a "do this twice" and a "choose one" which looks pretty messy. This all makes the card kind of a trip to read. I like the concept, but I think all the work to get what is frankly a fairly situational draw effect that will often slow the game down in shuffling might not be worth the effort. I'd aim to make the card itself bigger and simpler: A cost of $5 would do a lot to reduce the number of mid-turn shuffles, and a bigger draw would make it read even more differently than
Mountain Village. A cost limiter of "less than this" without involving a state would likely be sufficient.
Smelter
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Choose one: Trash a card from your hand and gain a Copper to your hand per $1 it cost; or trash any number of Coppers from your hand and gain a card costing exactly $1 per Copper your trashed.
The dream is drawing a bunch of Coppers and trashing them with Smelter before later trashing a high cost card for a bunch of $ to end the game. It makes it look at lot like
Forge canoodling with
Salvager. I think a cost of $3 or $4 would make Smelter intensely frustrating, because a Smelter\CCCE turn will be significantly worse than a Smelter\CCCC turn. Even a cost of $5 might be bad just because of how good opening with Smelter is.
I think a cost of $6 is likely ideal, but it does start looking an awful lot like
Forge as we increase its price, so I'm not sure. I worry how many of those games will be lost by one player getting a $5\$2 split in comparison to the others with Smelter around. You don't just get 4 fewer junk cards with a good turn 3 draw, you get 4 fewer junk cards and a $4-card into your deck.
Djinn
Types: Action
Cost: <5>
Discard your hand. Reveal cards from your deck until you reveal 3 Action cards costing $5 or less. Discard the other cards and any of the 3 Action cards, then play the rest in any order.
Sort of similarly to
Golem, I'm having a hard time imagining exactly what kind of deck wants Djinn in it. Losing 4 cards of a typical hand for 3 random Action plays seems like it will only ever be "not worth it" or "game-breaking." Anything that reads +$3 immediately breaks the game. Draw-to-X is probably pretty silly. It doesn't play nice with pretty much anything else because having nothing but 3 random Actions won't leave you with enough to manage much. I think this needs a more lenient expense than losing your hand (and a matching greater cost than a mere <5>).
Returned Adventurer
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Name a type. Reveal 5 cards from your deck. Put 2 cards with that type into your hand. Discard the rest.
This draw looks pretty weak. The idea is mostly that you can target draw better Actions than you would get grabbing the first two and mill 5 cards regardless, which makes it pretty useful in the early game while you try to get your deck in order. Its similarities to
Embassy are not to be missed. It draws at most 2 cards and discards at least 3 from 5 random cards instead of giving you your choice of 7 of 10 (the on-gain which can be helpful or harmful aside). That is such a huge loss, that I'd guess a cost of $4 would be more than reasonable for the bonus milling this gives.
Sanctuary
Types: Action
Cost: $6
Trash any number of cards from your hand. Gain a non-Victory card costing up to $5 minus $1 per card you trashed (but not less than $0).
Sanctuary is
Forge in reverse: Rather than gaining a card based on the total cost of cards you do trash, it gains a card based on the number of cards you don't. Your gut reaction to prevent Sanctuary from falling into range of gaining itself is good, but I'm not sure that's sufficient: A mass trasher like this one is likely set to swing a lot of games at a cost of $6 (other the other mass-trasher Smelter at least can only trash Coppers).
Broker
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Reveal cards from the Black Market deck until you reveal two action cards. Play one of the revealed action cards. Put the rest on the bottom of the Black Market deck in any order. When that card leaves play, put it on the bottom of the Black Market deck.
Setup: Make a Black Market deck out of different unused Kingdom cards.
Broker takes
Band of Misfits to another level, adopting all the problems of
Black Market. I find cards like this that are randomly terminal are immensely frustrating. I don't think Broker would be inherently broken, because a single random play of a $5+ card is not going to decide the game (though hitting a strong trasher with an opening Broker would be game-deciding), but this appeals much less than the similar Crime Lord.
Intimidate
Types: Action, Attack
Cost: $3
Each other player with at least four cards in hand discards a card. You may then discard a non-victory card from your hand that costs at least $2 more than one of the discarded cards. If you did, each other player gains a curse.
I do love Attacks. Unfortunately, I think you underestimate the sheer cost of the Attack you've built here. Each other player discards cards asynchronously, and then you can discard something with greater value to possibly junk other players, but you're necessarily discarding something useful if you are able to Curse players. At a minimum, you're down a $3-purchase, a $2-purchase maybe, 2 cards, and 1 +action. That is super expensive, especially because you need to choose to play Intimidate in a hand with another $2+ purchase that you still haven't played (which might often be an Action with which you're simply hoping to be able to hit players). That is ignoring the political implications of the card due to that asynchronous discard.
Loot
Types: Treasure
Cost: $1
Any number of times: You may discard a Victory card to gain a Spoils from its pile.
This seems like a very swingy opener and not all too desireable otherwise. The chance of getting multiple one-shot Golds versus 1 is a huge difference in players' economies. It might balance out with Spoils going on to prevent Loot from finding Estates again. I don't think this would be good enough to skip Estate trashing, but it is probably quite good in Kingdoms without trashing--and then I worry if the early Estate\Looter collisions will be too swingy to balance out.
Show: kru5h's BookstoreBookstore
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Draw until you have 10 cards in hand. Reveal your hand. Keep one copy of each differently named card and discard the rest.
Place: naitchman's Crime LordCrime Lord
Types: Action
Cost: $5
Play this as if it were a card on the Underlings Mat. This is that card until it leaves play.
Setup: Put 3 random Kingdom Action cards costing $3 or $4 on the Underlings Mat.
Win: anordinaryman's ConsulConsul
Types: Action
Cost: $4
Trash a card from your hand. The player to your left names a more expensive Action card in the Supply. Choose one: Gain and then play the named card; or gain a Silver.
While I would prefer a different out for the Consul-chain than this Silver gaining option, Consul has a fascinating and board dependent concept that encourages players to get the most of out some otherwise less valuable Actions.
You may post the next challenge when you would, anordinaryman.