Developing Village
I meant to comment on this card back when you posted it to your personal, card page, but I didn't have the time. Anyways, great looking card! This touches on an aspect of Dominion I wish I saw more with the official cards: the ability to switch your cards and thus your strategies during your turn. I like the very novel way this goes about it as well. Being able to switch a card from your hand would be very strong, so doing it blind from the top of your deck seems like a nice compromise.
Thoughts:
(1) I'd absolutely remove the overpay. It's neat, but doesn't really add anything. Especially now that it can act as a Village when played.
(2) The issue of fast pile depletion was brought up on your page and I have to agree that it is indeed an issue. Maybe this is something you like, but it could end games pretty fast. If you wanted to change it you could make it an exchange clause instead of trashing. It would function about the same. Example:
"Reveal the top card of your deck. You may exchange it for a differently named card with the same cost to your hand. If you do, +1 Action. If you don't, +1 Card."
(3) Even without the overpay I think this is a bit underpriced. Without the ability to be a village this could probably get away with being $2, but with that addition it probably needs to be $3 or $4. Not a big difference, but it would force players to be a little more thoughtful about diving on this pile. I guess upping the price could actually make this stronger though. Like if it were $3 it could be changed into Silvers on the fly. If it were $5 (for some reason) it could be a great Duchy gainer.
Anyways, really cool card. I'd like to try it sometime!
Thanks! Good feedback!
1. You're likely right, though the idea was that there will often be enough cases were you don't want to trash your card, and the overpay is a little bit of insurance so that you can still have it play as a village for a limited # of those turns. e.g. you reveal a Copper, clearly don't want a Curse, or you reveal a province. I almost want to have a poll,
"should this card have overpay or not"? and see if anyone thinks it may be valid.
2. Sure. That discussion was for the first version of the card, where you a) could trash the card for a copy of itself and b) you didn't get +1 card if you didn't trash. So you would almost always trash, since for example, if you revealed a copper, trashing and gaining a copper to your hand was definitely better than keeping the copper on top of your deck. Only in some cases, e.g. an empty pile, you don't want to deplete the Provinces, etc, would you ever opt not to trash.
I was hopeful that this 2nd version actually mitigated that as you won't be trashing / gaining every time you play.
3. My thought was for $2, you could use it to "develop" your starting estates into these. And also to keep the price a little lower, so you would want to overpay for a Villager or 2. If I do end up dropping the overpay, it could make sense to up it to 3.