I realize vanilla cards are not the most exciting card types, but I really like how much play can be squeezed out of such simple cards with no fine print. Village/Smithy chains are fun to play. Grand Market combos beautifully with itself. Spamming Worker's Villages for +Buys in Gardens rushes can be fun. Etc.
Donald has said that early on he considered all the different possible vanilla cards and recognized that not all of them would be interesting enough to have. I kind of think there IS more space to work with, but then, on the other hand, there are probably a few more vanilla cards scattered throughout the remaining expansions, so we can both be right.
So what would be interesting?
theory mentioned Grand Bazaar in another thread -- presumably that would be +1 Card, +2 Actions, +$2. I can see this being priced at $6 with no purchase restriction (like Grand Market has), because if you get a chain of these going, you don't also accrue +Buys to spend all that money with.
I think there is room for another Festival-like card, something that offers bonuses without drawing cards. This drawless property of Festival allows for some very interesting combos, such as with Library/Watchtower, and forces the player to consider the trade-off of having the bonuses at the cost of a card slot (whereas most vanilla cards are "free," and so there is no consideration necessary when deciding whether to accumulate them).
Woodcutter is another drawless vanilla card, but maybe something with a power level in between: +2 Actions, +$1. Actually, that's half a Fishing Village. How about +1 Action, +$2? Spammable, but only within the confines of your hand size, and so it's quite different from Conspirator, Grand Market, and Minion. A lot like Festival, true, but it would be cheaper, so you could accumulate them earlier, and would not double as high-rent Villages, so you'd have to pursue a more specific strategy to make use of them.
I've always kind of liked the idea of having a card that's simply "+3 Buys" or some such, but I understand why there isn't such a thing: useless on many boards, dominating on a few.
I get why you have to be careful with vanilla cards with VP tokens, as they threaten the balance of the game, but surely there is more of that kind of space to explore than simply Monument. Would "+2 Cards, +1 VP" work?
Despite my interest in vanilla cards, I think Donald was absolutely correct not to have a pure "+1 Card, +1 Action, +$1" card. Peddler and Treasury are all the more interesting for not having a basic version of themselves. In any case, the basic version would probably be the most difficult to make any kind of interesting use of, because there's no sacrifice. You get an extra +$1 without any consequences. You don't lose a card, like with Festival, nor an action, like with Smithy. You just get it. There's no way to use it well or use it poorly. Peddler and Treasury, by contrast, are so very much more interesting to use.
