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[Ferrouswheel]

I was just re-reading Donald X.'s Bible for Intrigue, and read the conspirator entree:

Conspirator: This was the last card added to the set, replacing a horribly broken card.

The broken card had its admirers. Two of Valerie & Dale's playtesters wrote essays defending the card. But the card was often unplayable and then sometimes dominated. So some games it made worse by being a dead card, and some games it made worse by making other cards dead. Now what it did was cool, and it's fun to sometimes get turns where you make 50+ coins, which is how it got defended. It's fun to do something you don't often get to do. But it just didn't make sense to put out such a messed up card. I'll try to fix it up for a later set and well that's why I'm not telling you what it did. There was no time to fix it up when I came to my senses though. So instead it got replaced. With this card. I like it.

Did we ever find out what the broken card was?

[Ozle]

Wishing Well

[Ferrouswheel]

Wishing Well

It couldn't have been Wishing Well, WW was also intrigue, but was pulled from the 3rd set.

[Davio]

Silver/Goldsmith? 

[dondon151]

I feel like this is Diadem.

[popsofctown]

50 coins?  Not with diadem.

[theory]

This was Horn of Plenty:

Horn of Plenty: Long ago, Intrigue had a card that read, "+$1 per Action card you've played this turn." It cost $4. This was popular with a certain kind of player. But many games it was useless - you needed a bunch of pieces to put together this puzzle - and then some games it was unbeatable. You would get staggering amounts of coins out of it, with +buys from something to make them count. Some people defended it, but I killed it. I could always try to fix it up later; there was no reason to give Intrigue a broken/useless card. Intrigue got Conspirator instead, which has a hint of the original premise.

I tried a new version in a later set: "+2 Actions +1 Buy. While this is in play, when you play another Action card, +$1." For $5. The idea was to provide some of what you needed with the original card, so that it was playable in more games, while weakening it in the games where it was good. You've got extra actions and a +buy up front... but it doesn't count Actions already played, only ones played after it. You can't draw your whole deck and finally draw it and play it and yeeha. Anyway this too was broken. I tried several things, including a version that only counted differently named cards. Eventually I gave up on it.

The solution in the end was to make it a Workshop variant. You don't get to combine the money with your other money. It doesn't use up your buy though. To be good enough and not fluctuate too much, it had to count your treasures too. At first it was an action with an effect delayed until the end of your buy phase, but I turned it into a treasure worth $0. Some people just liked that there was a treasure worth $0, I don't know what to tell you. So it doesn't use an action, and works with treasures naturally. This version was still sometimes too strong, so it got the "trash it if gained VP" clause.

I had called the treasure version Produce, which was a cute pun which would be lost in foreign versions. Cornucopia seemed like a good name for it, so I took that name off of a Prosperity card (Royal Seal). Then Jay preferred that name for the expansion, which I'd been calling Harvest Festival, so I had to rename this again. I called it Horn of Plenty, which is not only a synonym for Cornucopia, it's a literal translation of it. Once again creating trouble for translators.

[dondon151]

50 coins?  Not with diadem.

Not with the broken HoP either, unless you're counting multiples played. But if you had a kingdom with lots of villages, then it's possible to get $50 from a bunch of Diadems.

Anyway the point is that the broken card was most likely a card that looked at the number of Action cards played previously, which led me to believe that it was either Diadem or HoP. I went with Diadem in my mind because I thought I read somewhere that it was tested out as a supply card somewhere but failed due to how it would be really good in some kingdoms and really bad in others.

[jimjam]

Um, you can get $50 by KC->KC.....Tribute(x10) and hitting actions.
That's like $119 easily.