Note that I don't particularly care for the card costing $5. It's just that it looks like the card is either moat or super smithy, and likely you will only buy it in the second case, so you should price it according to that fact (unless the second case is a theoretical ideal which you can only approach). This is the Counting House pricing problem, really.
qmech and Hydrad raise a good point about extra copies of the card being dead and it being hard to judge how many you need, but I am not sure if that's a comment on the power level or the skill level of the card.
As for cards that guarantee that you get a copy of the card on your next hand, there are:
-courtyard
-haven
-mandarin
-graverobber
-count
...Scavenger sorta works if you play around it.
Then, if you've already drawn your whole deck (which should happen for the first time soonish if you have enough villages), you can use targeted discard to put two (resp. one) rivers in your discard, then draw
one card (resp. reveal cards) from your deck, and you'll draw a river next turn. Targeted discards are:
-secret chamber
-hamlet
-horse traders
-young witch
-oasis (only works together with reveal)
-storeroom
-vault (probably overkill)
And then there's the sifters:
-cellar
-warehouse
-sage
-wandering mistrel
-inn (probably overkill)
storeroom doesn't really work, you need the actions for river.
I might be forgetting some, but I guess the list is not that long anyway, 17 cards out of 206. Assuming only 15 cards actually work with River, that's roughly a 1/2 chance that one of them will be in a kingdom that contains River. Is that good enough? Meh, you also need a village...
Anyhow, i feel River is a nice name, though it sounds a bit like a Victory card. I was thinking of something Village related, like Villager or Major.
I don't think there's a standard name for terminal draw (unlike the village or remodel family), so anything works. They're mostly stuff that produces resources, except when they aren't
. River seemed nice as a thing that keeps coming, but whatevs. Another idea I had was courier, or errand boy, or someone like that, who is always available.
You get to choose the name, since you came up with the "return to hand" idea. What will it be?
Nothing beats playtesting, maybe it works at $4, but back-of-napkin considerations make me think that this is a smithy-with-a-bonus for engines, so $5.
It's worth noting that Conspirator is a mini–Grand Market for engines and still costs $4.
Ha, fair enough. However, I would argue that the comparison is not perfect, because the "
for engines" part doesn't mean the same in each case, but I get your point.