Greetings, folks!
I've come up with this idea for a set of two cards that interact with each other. I'm just introducing the two mechanisms here, the cards haven't been tested or polished, yet. Please have a look at them. I will explain the idea below.
Siege, $5, Action/Attack
+1 Card. +1 Action. Each other player reveals the top 3 cards of their deck. If they revealed a Castle, they may pay a Castle token. If they didn’t, they trash a revealed Castle. They discard the rest.
Setup: Add a Castle to each player’s deck.
Castle, $3, Action/Victory
+1 Card. +1 Action. Take a Castle token.
Worth 1VP per Castle token you have.
With Siege in the Supply, each player starts with a Castle in their deck. This brings multiple changes with it;
(1) Each time you play the Castle, you basically score points. You can play it before your first reshuffle, and the more often, the better. (I might need to adjust the points-to-token ratio.)
(2) There's an eleventh card in your starting deck. It's a cantrip so it doesn't mess up your first reshuffle but there might be some edge-cases where this matters a lot.
(3) You start with a card in your deck that costs $3. Similar to LastFootnote's Domains, this can grant you an early trash-for-benefit bonus.
In order to stop your opponents from scoring points via Castle tokens, you need to buy Sieges (or other trashing attacks). Sieges are spammable to make hitting Castles easier but they are otherwise unreliable and weak attacks that provide no immediate benefit to the attacker (which I'm not so happy with). Siege still looks kinda stronger than Spy so it costs $5.
Two notes concerning the wording of Siege: it says "they trash a revealed Castle" so in the rare case they reveal two Castles (Rogue, Grave Robber,...) they only have to trash one; and it says "They discard all un-trashed cards" (better sounding suggestions?) so they discard a revealed Castle that hasn't been trashed, as well.
I would gladly appreciate it if you guys answer these questions:
Do the cards look interesting and fun?
Do they look practical?
Do they look balanced?