Here are three different riffs on an idea for piles made up of several different cards. Unlike Knights and Ruins, however, these piles aren't shuffled. They're sorted by cost with the least-cost card on top (and you can't gain the higher-cost cards until all the cards on top of it have already been gained).
VampiresThere are 4 Vampire cards, and the Vampire pile consists of 2 of each for a total of 8 cards in the pile. Vampires gain you a card proportional to their own cost (and hey, sometimes a Vampire can make another Vampire), and they give your opponents a new kind of junk: Victim cards. The Victim cards given out get progressively nasty, and they're not trashable. However, you can get rid of them by playing them, taking a hit to some other resource(s) that turn. (Rules clarification: the Victims have negative cost, and since "up to" means the same as "less than or equal to", when someone plays Vampire Armand, you can take a Serious, Critical, or Grave Victim (or 2 Curses of course), but not a Stable one. Also, I interpret -1 Action to mean that it kills a whole Village if you try to play it with one, but it's ok to end the turn on a negative number of actions, and then they just reset to 0 your next turn like always.) Put out 5 of each Victim card when playing with Vampires. (The images are from the Interview with a Vampire film series.)
MonksThere are 5 Monk cards, and the Monk pile consists of 2 of each for 10 total cards. All Monks give you Prayer tokens and allow you to keep playing more Monks. Each of the Monks can redeem the Prayer tokens for some kind of resource (except the Abbot who just gathers together all the Monks), but not coins (Monks pray and work, but not for profit), so they can help your engine, but you need to get your payload elsewhere. (The images for Postulant, Brothers, and Prior are from some very cool beer-brewing monks in Norcia Italy. Novice is from some monks in New Mexico, and Abbot is a St. Benedict icon.)
SwordsmenThere are 10 different Swordsman cards with costs ranging from $1 to $10 (1 of each in the pile), but they're basically all the same. It's a Peddler-variant plus a potent attack - like Militia, but they can't just discard their worst 2 cards, and you can get them down to 2 if you play more than one. However, playing more than one is tough because
there can be only one (yeah, I probably should have used Highlanders instead of these awesome Angampora fighters). So, it's definitely a great card to have in your deck, but you only get to keep playing your Swordsman as long as no one has bought the next one. Once someone does, you get one more play and then it goes in the trash. At the beginning, you get a deal on this, but it's likely a one-off play. As the game progresses, you're essentially participating in an auction for exclusive right to the card. It's definitely worth more than $1, but are you going to pay as much as $10? Probably not. But if you do, you have to trash that one too. However, since you "won" the Swordsman pile, you get a Victory card of your choosing - much better than the guy who paid $9 for it.
Image credits:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Last_Rites_ca_1600.jpghttp://www.ncregister.com/images/uploads/C0131T01-Charles_Kinnane.jpghttps://www.pinterest.com/pin/546131892282758787/https://veneremurcernui.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/awesome-articlevideo-on-traditional-benedictine-monastery/http://osbnorcia.org/en/bloghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_of_Nursia#/media/File:Fra_Angelico_031.jpghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swordsmanship#/media/File:Angampora_sword-shield_fight.JPG
- Action-Reaction
