Another custom card I've playtested and like. It's a $2, so not a game-changer, but minimally useful most of the time and very useful some of the time. What I like about it is that unlocking its power, while board-dependent, is more a question of strategic play than just automatically picking it up whenever the right other cards are on the table.
Alms
$2 - Action
Reveal your hand.
If you have no Action cards in your hand, +2 Cards.
If you have no Treasure cards in your hand, +2 Actions.
If you have no Victory cards in your hand, +1 Buy.
I got the idea from a post on BGG which I can't find now, or I'd link it. But while the same idea, the bonuses were all different, and I didn't like how they worked, so I changed them.
Why are the bonuses what they are?
If you have no actions, then two scenarios are likely: (1) You're playing big money, in which case a terminal +2 Cards bonus is probably more useful than it usually is; (2) You've just played some sequence of action cards resulting in unused actions leftover, in which case the +2 Cards lets you fish for another action card to play as well as extra money.
If you have no treasure cards, then probably your hand is full of actions, in which case +2 Actions would be really helpful. Alternately, you have no non-victory cards at all, in which case getting +2 Cards, +2 Actions gives you a shot at bringing your turn back to life.
If you have no victory cards, well, this is quite common in the mid-game, so this is the smallest bonus. But it's still potentially useful, because often the mid-game is exactly when you want that +Buy.
If you're having a tough time visualizing a typical use of the card, most of the time you'll get +2 Cards and/or +1 Buy. It's usually easy to drain your hand of action cards, so as to qualify for the +2 Cards bonus, and usually the only Victory cards in your deck before the mid-late game is your starting Estates, and even those might get trashed. +2 Cards, +1 Buy seems like a nicely balanced $2-cost card anyhow.
The hardest thing to get is the +2 Actions, because few hands have no treasure in them and fewer are able to get rid of the treasure during the action phase if they do. Good combos, therefore, include Black Market and Vault. You can also discard strategically with cards like Warehouse and Hamlet, but in those cases you'd usually rather keep the treasure cards in your hand anyhow. However, if you do draw a hand full of actions, +2 Actions is, as I say, probably exactly what you want at that point.
There's another case where that comes into play: in the end game, you might easily draw Alms with four green/purple cards. In that case, getting +2 Cards, +2 Actions might well rescue your turn from the brink of uselessness. This is particularly nice if you had a good drawing engine (say, Labs or Village/Smithy or Minion) that used to draw well and now chokes on green. Alms might restart an engine that's sputtered out.
Despite the card's potential (+2 Cards, +2 Actions, +1 Buy if you can empty your hand before playing it!), the usual case is in the $2 power-level range or even slightly worse, so it's definitely not overpowered at $2. But its potential, and the strategic play required to access that potential, has made it a very fun card during playtests.