In the wiki article on Raze I read a quote from you in the trivia, "For a while we tried a card in the Apprentice/Salvager family that gave you a mix of +1's of your choice for trashing a card." You said it was "cwazy". Could you explain what the card did, how much it cost and what was so cwazy about it? I would think the idea sounds fine. What were your experiences with such cards?
The initial card was cost $2, trash this or a card from your hand, per $1 the trashed card cost, your choice of +1 Action +1 Buy +1 Card +$1.
It did everything for you - it got rid of junk, drew your deck, gave you the +Actions and +Buys you needed, made $. There would be games where you had a way to get cards to feed it and you would have all these crazy turns, where you sat working out, okay I trash this Gold and take +1 Action +1 Buy +4 Cards. Other cards got in on the act and did their own broken things and got fixed or taken out, and this card kept trying to survive and acted like the other cards were the problem. They were not though.
On the surface it seemed reasonable because you are down a card or action compared to Apprentice. But the flexibility was huge. And as LF notes the +Buys were surprisingly powerful; there kept being combos where you cashed in on that one way or another. Like at one point Quest didn't require discarding, just having the cards. You could gain a giant pile of Gold and then burn through it next turn to draw your deck and make lots of $ and Buys. There was the duration card that gained you a Gold if you bought the named type (applying to everyone else too but to you on two turns); same deck, takes a lot of +Buys one turn, gain infinite Gold and explode.
The card was fun, that was part of why it hung around so long. It's great getting that immense flexibility. It's fun trashing good cards and having it be the move. The decks where you gained lots of Golds and ate them were high skill.
I then tried weakened versions and they were also too strong. I tried a card that just gave you +1 Action and +1 Buy per $1 the trashed card cost; those were the two things not covered by previous cards. And I had another version that was just +Buys but a different size/shape. It turned out that with no broken combos, the +Buys were still a problem. Just +Actions didn't seem compelling but I tried that too, just in case we liked it.
It's possible there's some doable thing along these lines - drop the +Buys, make it expensive, no self-trashing. Trader's "gain a Silver" can try to get in there. There is also the issue though of how it compares to other cards - it doesn't want to just look awful next to Salvager and Apprentice. The flexibility doesn't look great next to always getting an extra Buy or Action.
Anyway we gave the concept endless chances.