Before renaissance and menagerie came out, I did a similar thought experiment. The goal was not most setup overall, but to have as many piles of cards as possible and generally be as confusing as it could be for new players, all without touching Black Market:
Kingdom Cards:
1, 2) Page and Peasant each add 4 extra piles. Peasant also adds the 4 vanilla bonus tokens for Teacher, and the Tavern Mat.
3) Druid adds Boons, Will-o-Wisp, and the three set aside ones.
4) Fool gives us the lucky coin heirloom, and Lost in the Woods.
5) Young Witch. Obviously. It's basically a free extra pile with all of these $2 cards.
6) Bishop adds VP chips, and is a Prosperity card, allowing us to add Platinum and Colony. Bonus points for caring about costs, since we'll be adding a potion cost card in a bit. For extra setup, could get out the VP mats since this is from Prosperity rather than Empires.
7) Marauder gives us Ruins and Spoils. It's also from Dark Ages, allowing the use of Shelters.
8 ) Tournament gets us prizes.
9) Exorcist gets us the other two spirit piles
10) Vampire gives us Hexes, states for said hexes, and the Bat pile.
11) Finally, Possession, for potions, but also because of all the rules wackiness and various errata. Who knows what this card does anymore?
As for landscapes, I went with the following:
1) Inheritance. Only three things here can't be Inherited: Possession and Vampire cost too much, and Vampire and Exorcist are Nights, not Actions. This was also done pre-2019-errata (since, ya know, no renaissance), so there was all the shapeshifting to consider, and bonus confusion points for things like exchanging an estate for a warrior, or being unable to reveal am estate if you inherit a bane card.
2) Mountain Pass. Read it a dozen times and still be confused about it. Also, what the heck is debt?
So, the final tally:
11 kingdom piles (10 standard + Bane)
11 base cards (7 standard, Platinum, Colony, Potion, Ruins)
14 non-supply piles (8 traveler upgrades, 3 spirits, Spoils, Prizes, Bat)
10 landscape piles (Boons, Hexes, 3 set-aside Boons, Deluded/Envious, Miserable/Twice Miserable, Lost in the Woods, Inheritance, Mountain Pass)
Total: 46 piles of cards on the table
Bonus:
4 replaced starting cards (3 Shelters, Lucky Coin)
2 mats per player (Tavern Mat, Prosperity vp mats)
5 player tokens (4 vanilla bonuses, Estate Token)
VP tokens
Debt tokens
This could get even cwazier now:
1) Replace Fool with Border Gaurd. We lose Lost in the Woods and Lucky Coin, but we add two Artifacts.
2) Replace Inheritance with Way of the Mouse - Pixie. We lose a player token, but we get a new Heirloom to replace losing Lucky Coin above. Besides, most of the rules confusion with Inheritance was lost anyway with the 2019 errata, so now we get all sorts of new wackiness where the 9 leftover boons are shuffled and can be cycled through, but you can never receive them because Pixie can't trash itself.
