Do you really think the Tribute change is OK? It seems too powerful to me. I mean, I guess it is checked by the inherent unreliability -- maybe I just want cards but I keep getting coin instead -- but counting duplicates just makes all possibilities so strong. +$4, +4 Cards, or +$2 and +2 cards... all are great and worth more than $5. I am discounting the effect of Curses and actions though.
I guess it's probably too strong when you hit 2 Coppers early. But otherwise it doesn't matter that much, so it's probably okay. Goes from being weak to being strong early, but I don't think it's ridiculous. Maybe it is though. Haven't tried it.
No card is a strategy by itself. Except Rebuild and sometimes Jack of all Trades.
No card is ever a
good strategy by itself. Sometimes simple seems good because you beat people doing something too complicated that they don't do it right, but if you buy just 1 kind of card, most of the time you're doing it wrong. Exceptions might be terminal draw cards, since sometimes the risk of dead-draw outweighs the other benefits of adding different cards.
And on the topic if it's a good idea to change so many things: it's probably not. If you change 20 cards at once, then you just get a completely different game. Maybe this is what you want, since then you get to learn what's "good" again, but if you haven't really learned how to use the existing cards yet, you might as well do that instead. It could be just as fun, and then you're learning the same game as the rest of us! You say that you don't like "niche" cards, but maybe you're underestimating the size of the "niche".
Some specific examples:
- A lot of people think Counting House is just never good becasue they tried it like 3 times when it wasn't and then gave up. But there's actually a large proportion of time when it's actually good. Like any Colony game where you can't trash/cycle away your Copper.
- I've started using Bureaucrat a lot more just recently, after playing
thousands of games. In addition to being good in slogs, it's good in a lot of engines when your opponent greens before you. Like Rabble, it punishes early greening. Gain a Silver is worse than +3 cards for an engine, but the attack part is often just as good, so it works as a late add if the Silver gain doesn't hurt you that much.
- In big draw engines where you can't/don't trash your Copper, Coppersmith is stupid-good. If you think this "niche" is too small, maybe you're not just missing out on Coppersmith, but a
lot of good light-trashing engines that don't involve Coppersmith...