I’ve been doing a little comparing and contrasting between Barrister and Penny Pincher. Both have their pros and cons.
One thing I really like about Penny Pincher is that it’s so much more likely to steal a Penny than Barrister is to steal a Domain. This is for two reasons. First it has a larger search space (a hand, rather than 2 cards), and second there are twice as many Pennies to steal as there are Domains. Barrister compensates for this by performing another attack: leaving dead cards on top of your opponents’ decks. But that makes Barrister way more wordy and complex than I’d like. Penny Pincher is way simpler, which is a huge plus.
Barrister’s attack also has some advantages, though. I think it has slightly less of a first-player advantage. If Player 1 steals the Penny in Player 3’s hand, Player 2 is going to get fewer Pennies on average. It’s minor, but it’s there. Also, even when a player has no Pennies left to steal, Barrister still attacks that player. This one is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s sort of nice that Penny Pincher whiffs elegantly. If Barrister were simplified to not topdeck junk and instead just trash Domains from the top 2 cards and discard the rest, it would be pointlessly milling opponents’ cards once you had all the Domains.
Let’s talk about Domain vs. Penny. Although it makes the mechanic more likely to be relevant, I think that having two Coppers replaced with Pennies/Domains is too much. At 2 players, it’s probably fine, and more compelling than having just one per person. But at 3 or 4 players, I think that it will probably just completely dominate the game in a not-fun way. 6 Pennies = 36 Victory Points, as much as 6 Provinces. 8 Pennies = 64 VP. I’d rather have a card be weak in 2 player games than be out of this world crazy in 3 or 4 player games. Also, unlike buying Provinces, pinching Pennies doesn’t bring the game any closer to ending. Add the fact that Penny Pincher doesn’t give you any resources (like Monument gives Coins), and you’re potentially looking at a situation similar cards that easily produce unlimited VP tokens. All players vie for the advantage over this special VP resource and nobody is incentivized to end the game.
Now you could fix this by tweaking how much VP Pennies are worth. But at [1 VP for every 2 Pennies in your deck], it scales weirdly. [1 VP/Penny] gets you {0, 1, 4, 9, 16}. But [1 VP/2 Pennies] gives {0, 0, 2, 3, 8, 10, 18, 21, 32}. Maybe that’s not a deal breaker. It is a bigger swing between having all the Pennies in a game vs. not having all of them. You could alternatively have a threshold. “At the end of the game, if no other player has more Pennies than you, +X VP.” That could be fine. I really like the simple elegance of [1 VP/Penny], though.
The only actual difference between Domain and Penny on a per-card basis is their cost: Domain costs $3 and Penny costs $0. Domain also used to cost $0, but now that I’ve tried it at $3, I’m never going back. At $3, Domains make nice targets for trash-for-benefit cards like Remodel and Mine. This gives a small but significant reason to want Domains before the end of the game. It gives you more of a reason to go for Barrister even in a 2-player game where the Domains are only going to be worth 4 VP maximum.
I was wondering if I could adapt Penny Pincher’s steal-from-hand aspect to Barrister and eliminate the other part of the attack. It would make the card much simpler. But I think it works against the Domains-as-Remodel-fodder aspect of it, and I’ve really grown fond of that. So probably I’ll leave Barrister as-is for now.