15. Junk Dealer
This is better than upgrade basically because it helps you maintain 5 much better early on whilst trashing, and I think this is generally of higher importance than the later benefit of upgrade gaining for you later. It's reasonably close, but cantrip trash a card and still being able to hit the amount you want is pretty bananas.
14. Hunting Party
This card gives such a strong fast baseline with HP-X. But you know, that's not the best all *that* often. On the other hand, it's just a great engine card anyway, with many different cards, even if the incremental benefit isn't as high. You know lab is good? This is usually better even for your engines. Yeah...
13. Jack of All Trades
Just powers through so much stuff. It's really hard to stop this guy. One of the very best BM enablers, plays well with others, and not too bad in a decent number of engines, too.
12. Cultist
It's like a cross between lab and witch. The on-trash benefit, I don't know, I am probably underrating. Ruins are quite a bit worse to give out than curses, which is why in general this just loses out to:
11. Witch
The draw isn't nothing here, and the unconditional curse-giving is something you see on very very few other cards (sea hag, familiar). This is a card that I feel is far more ignorable than I used to, because strong trashing engines get around it - which knocks it down from 'almost never' to 'extremely rarely'.
10. Chapel
The supposed most powerful card for its cost which will ever be printed. Really good as it just trashes you everything really fast, plays clean up really well against junking attacks after that happens, yeah. So very fast.
9. Doctor
Biggest. Overrate. Ever. The idea was that it's a chapel which, though slightly slower, let's you get stuff when playing it, too. Well, that's true - if it works.
8. Goons
An almost-every-time card. Actually, though, if you can't chain these and have some other discard attack (margrave, anyone?), it can be gotten around. And if you can't just play gobs of these on a turn (and you need a strong engine with lots of villages for that - so while this is a great finisher, that other stuff ends up being more important a lot of times), it is only really really good.
7. King’s Court
Does ridiculous stuff with most other actions - or really just most other cards. Basically if you can start off with KC-KC-Something-that-draws, you are in good shape for your turn.
6. Steward
It trashes you, and then it's useful, really useful actually, on the back end. It's even pretty good for BM. Coins are the least important option, but they still help a lot - particularly in engines where some stewards get used to draw the deck and others provide payload.
5. Wharf
The best draw card. Moat now, Smithy later. Or, Council Room on average. But collides a lot less in multiples and doesn't have the labbing-opponents drawback. Basically you play BM-this like an engine and win against most anything not using Wharf. Or you play engine-with-wharf and REALLY win against anything not using this. Or you play it in slogs... you know, it's just extremely rare to find a board where getting wharf isn't a good idea, and it's not rare to find one where "won wharf split" doesn't give you great chances of winning the game.
4. Masquerade
It draws and trashes, so good. And the passing edges up with some stuff - discard attacks, we look to you.
3. Mountebank
Smash in with two junk cards against their engine, this is seriously annoying to deal with. Sure, it has some counters (counting house, trader), but on the other hand, it is incredible raw power. And it doesn't stack *that* well, but the first copy is so good, it don't matter.
2. Rebuild
This just puts a clock on the game and eats through the comeback potential. Basically, you are virtually forced to outrace this if you want to win, and it's pretty darn fast and very hard to slow down.
1. Ambassador
You may have noticed a theme amongst many of the other top cards - they trash or junk. This is just crucial, particularly in the engine world we now live in. And this does both, in a very will-imposing way.
Expect my updated list with comments on what I feel are the most significant differences soon (but not tonight probably).