The Secret History of Condottiero If you were involved in this thread
here, you probably deduced that Condottiero was my card. I got into a discussion with eHalc about
Soothsayer (LastFootnote's card) and whether the decisions you were forced to make justified the wall of text on the card. In order to keep your deck from being junked, you had to discard treasure every single turn until the end of the game. If you whiffed once, or bought a Province on turn 15 instead of discarding down to $7, then end result was the same as if you never bothered with the effect to begin with. Other people disagreed, but it seemed obvious to me that the optimal strategy was to completely ignore the discard option on nearly every board, in which case they had something identical to a $4 Witch. I also had a personal prejudice against Duchess, apparently, because I did everything I could think of to kill the ''In games using this, . . ." clause.
I tried to come up with a scenario where I would be willing to use the discard, with the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to keep it up for the whole of the game. What I realized is that it could be useful when you're at the bottom of your deck and you have a spare Copper. If you can delay the Curse for a turn or two, you can cause it to miss the reshuffle. The variant I liked best (although obviously it took liberties with the spirit and the letter of the original card) was to gain the Curse immediately no matter what you did, but give you a free reshuffle if you decided to discard. People had already suggested renaming the card Loan Shark, and this seemed to still be thematic with the new name; you delay the painful part of the card by giving up money when you encounter it.
We already had our share of $4 Cursers filling the Witch-with-a-nerf role, but there was still space in the Looters. Maybe it was that the extortion theme fit better in a military setting than a mystical one. For some reason, the card seemed more interesting to me giving out Ruins than Curses. So that gives me "Each player may discard a Treasure. If he does, he puts his deck into his discard pile and immediately reshuffles.
Each other player gains a Ruins."
It needs to do something for your economy as well; if you slap a +$2 on that, it might be playable at $3 or at $4, but still missing something. I could add more bonuses to the top; +Buy is a good way to turn a weak $4 into a strong $4, and +2 Buys is something only Dark Ages can do. Later, when I was actually typing up my submission in a PM, I started thinking about what I could do to make my card less vanilla. On-trash effects were on theme, and one of those would help my card stand out in the crowd, right?
I thought about what I'd like most when I buy an attack card and then proceed to lose the Curse split: if I don't clear out the junker as well as the junk, I'm gonna fall too far behind. A Woodchopper that benefits other players is better than a dead Sea Hag, but it's still not a power card. Obviously a Sea Hag that has the option to self-trash is too good, but why not give you a free trash when you do get rid of it? (As it turns out, on-trash effects do
not make a card unique in a DA fan card contest.)
When I decided to submit the card, I started flipping through a thesaurus to find synonyms for words like mercenary and soldier. I considered 'Landsknecht' for a while, but nothing else was good. Wikipedia turned out to be my savior here; the condottieri were mercenary commanders contracted by the city-states in Renaissance Italy to fight their wars, and they quickly gained a reputation for cutting deals with their enemies in the field. It might be a little over the Margrave threshold, but it was just so perfect that I couldn't resist.
The thing I liked most about it was that it's kind of a gateway drug to playing Chancellor. It gives you an immediate, concrete problem that can be solved with a reshuffle, and tossing a surplus copper from hand is a much lower opportunity cost than choosing to buy a terminal silver over a real one. I ended up not voting for it, as no one else seemed interested in it. The main criticism was that there was a semi-interesting idea buried under a lot of bloat, and that isn't false at all. Depending on how well it did (and whether repeat entries are encouraged or discouraged) I might submit it to the next DA contest with one little buff, rather than two.
Fun Wikipedia fact for people from the Hinterlands contest: there's a very old card game called Lansquenet (named after the German landsknechts) which is literally just the European variant of Oicho-Kabu. You play a card and then reveal copies from the top of the deck, going bust on the first match.