Silk Merchant
Types: Action
Cost: $5
+$2. You may trash two cards from your hand. If you do, +1 VP per token on the Trade Route mat.
Setup: Put a token on each Victory card Supply pile. When a card is gained from that pile, move the token to the Trade Route mat.
Clarification: The Trade Route mat and tokens referred to by Silk Merchant are the same as those referred to by Trade Route. If both Trade Route and Silk Merchant are in the kingdom and/or Black Market deck, use only one token on each victory card pile.
Most of the discussion on my card covered things that I would have said about it if I were to comment on it. I'm surprised nobody compared it to Trading Post, with the $5 cost, the +$2 and trash two cards.
SirPeebles mentioned an important problem which I hadn't considered, and I doubt that it would come up very often, but it is a major concern when it comes up. Still, there are a few of those things in official Dominion, like Bishop Fortress, or tight KC Monument decks. (I personally have never seen it happen, but I assume there have been cases in which, if each player were to play optimally, the game goes on indefinitely.) I would think that the problem of Silk Merchant leading to unending games would come up roughly as often as Bishop or Monument leading to unending games, so I don't really see it as being a huge issue. (There's also the Goons-Trader trick but I doubt that that ever comes up in a real game...)
A lot of people talked about the name "Silk Merchant" and was that trying to make a reference to Spice Merchant or Silk Road or what. Well, I didn't really specifically think "Spice Merchant" when I thought of the name, but I thought that things that involve trading in Dominion always trash things (Trade Route, Trader, Trading Post, and Spice Merchant). Well now I realize there's Horse Traders which doesn't fit the pattern but I didn't think of that until right now. So I thought I would name it a Trader of some kind. So I thought "Silk Trader" because silk was an important thing back then and it also made sense with Silk Road, since both like for you to have lots of different victory cards. But I didn't like how "Trader" was a subset of the name "Silk Trader" even though the effect of Trader was not a subset of the effect of Silk Trader. Like, "Worker's Village" containing "Village" in it is fine, because Village's effect is a subset of Worker's Village's effect. Of course there are exceptions like Native Village or whatever, but Silk Trader's effect was not even closely related to Trader's effect except for the trashing, so I thought it made more sense to call him a Merchant. Then I saw the similarity to Spice Merchant, but at least then the name "Spice Merchant" wasn't a subset of the name "Silk Merchant". Of course now I realize that like this whole paragraph is invalid because of Horse Traders, but that was how my reasoning went at the time.
Man, who knew you could put so much thought into a card name...