It may be harsh but I think spy deserves it. The value of a spy to your deck is roughly equilivent to ( the # of dead cards in your deck) * (average card value) assuming that you never buy any terminal card draw which is a major assumption. That means that spy improves your starting deck by less than if you had bought a copper! (not 100% certain on my math but it seems right).
This is true of Village and Menagerie as well. (Actually, it's
more true of Village and Menagerie, since you're ignoring the attack portion of Spy, which provides a benefit you're not even considering here.) Does that make these cards worse than Copper too?
You don't evaluate a card's power by how bad it is when you misuse it. How bad it is as an opener is not just a minor consideration, it is
no consideration. It's irrelevant, and the fact that it anti-synergizes with terminal draw is fairly irrelevant, too. You simply don't use the card that way.
But remember that the ratio of dead cards decreases as you buy better cards so the chance of spy hitting something bad in either yours or your opponent's deck also decreases.
Then Spy retains its utility throughout the game. You
want to hit your opponents' good cards, so you can skip them. Later on, after you're both choking with green, the Spy's attack stops working as well just in time for it to do a better job helping your own deck out again.
The fact that it's a cantrip (not catnip ) that sometimes fails when chained doesn't help it either.
I agree, but again, not a persuasive argument: Menagerie, Apothecary, and Cartographer are all cantrips that can fail, too. They fail less often, but then again I don't dispute that these are all better cards than Spy.
I did overlook spy as part of a kings court/terminal drawer combo which it is indeed worthwhile to buy a few spies. Kings Court is a major game changer though and can make alot of cards better than they could be alone.
This, at least, I agree with. King's Court changes things up in a big way, and Spy is simply one among a great many whose power similarly explodes.
To put spy's power into perspective, imagine it was an alternate version of fortune teller that gave you your average card value instead of +2$ and the attack only worked ~%50 of the time. Would you spend more to buy it over fortune teller which is already one of the weaker $3?
Fortune Teller is a terminal. That fact is a factor in how good a card it is overall. Spy a cantrip, which means its attack doesn't have to be as strong for the card to be competitive or even superior as a whole. So once again, an extremely unfair argument.
Would I spend more money on a version of Fortune Teller that didn't give me +$2 but did give me +1 Card, +1 Action? Unless I had a lot of spare actions, like in a Fishing Village deck, boy I sure would. Spy, by contrast, has a (usually) weaker attack in exchange for a little cycling power in your own deck. Sounds about right to me.