My entry:
Great Cathedral • $4 • Project
At the start of your turn, choose one: exile a card from your hand; or put a non-treasure card from exile into your hand.
Cathedral meets Island and Save.
It brings a lot of versatility at the start of your turn.
The first option (exile a card from your hand):
- For junk or weak cards, works in a similar way as Cathedral, getting rid of one per turn (Cathedral to trash, Great Cathedral to exile).
- For VP cards, works as a permanently princed Island, put them away without lose them. This enables start greening earlier.
The second option (put a non-treasure card from exile into your hand):
- Makes exiling not compulsory. If you don’t want to unmake a good hand, you can choose get a card from exile, even if it is a junk, like sometimes we choose gain a curse when attacked by Torturer.
- With a hand with terminal collision, enables Great Cathedral act as Save, with more control: exile one terminal, get it back in a turn you want to use it.
Many good options, but you can do only one per turn, so it’s not overpowered.
Cathedral effect is better in first turns, Save effect in midgame and Island effect after start greening.
Since the Cathedral effect is better when starts early, I made it $4. If it costs $6, it would be slow in cleaning comparing to good cheap trashers. If $5, a player with 5-2 could take advantage. So $4 and all players could open with it, if they want.
Open with Transport – Great Cathedral could seem too strong at first, you can play a Goons at turn 3, for example, but also you can do it if you open Transport-Transport. So, I think it’s fine at $4.
It speeds up Transport and Camel Train, since you can play in your next turn cards exiled by them. It’s also very good but not extreme, effect is similar to when you topdeck a gained card.
Great Cathedral can’t put treasures from exile into your hand, so you can’t use it as a kind of an early Crypt, can’t get to hand the golds exiled from Camel Train gain (which could be too strong in first turns) and can’t combo it with Way of the Camel or Stockpile (which could be also too strong, a Hireling that always gives a gold or a gold with +buy).
-- Edited to change cost of the card to <8> (see post below) --
New changed entry:
Great Cathedral • <8> • Project
At the start of your turn, choose one: exile a card from your hand; or put a non-treasure card from exile into your hand.
The cost at <8> make it available to all players on turn 1 and make it not strictly better than Cathedral. Also it leaves <1> to be paid on turn 3 if bought on turn 1, so the cost to buy it on turn 1 would be: buy nothing more on turns 1 and 2 and reduce your payload on turn 3. I think it makes it a less obvious opening strategy over others available on kingdom, especially if it has good trashers.