Thursday's Card:Danse Macabre
Types: Action
Cost: $4
You may play an Action from your hand for none of its effects. If you do, +4 Cards and +1 Action.
When you buy this, trash it.
When you trash this, gain 2 cheaper cards of different costs.
Here's a card that has received some discussion, and one I'd like to think more about. I think the card has many interesting facets, and is really weird, but I'm not sure if it's "weird in a bad way" or "weird in a Dark Ages good way". I'm still not sure whether or not to vote for this, so maybe some discussion will help!
Let's consider the two cases: boards where you can gain this, and ones where you cannot. On boards where you can't gain this, is it likely to ever impact the game? Essentially, when you buy it, it will usually give you a $3 card and a $2 card. This will most likely only be useful with strong $2 cards for the board - Chapel and Lighthouse come to mind, but also Hamlet, Courtyard, and Squire. If those aren't around, this will rarely be bought, and if no $2 are present, it will be almost never. However, this could be huge with Chapel, where you could get Chapel and 2 Silvers before the reshuffle. So, Danse Macabre will usually have little effect if it can't be gained, but rarely a decent one. Reminds me a bit of Duchess, I guess?
Ok, now how about games where it can be gained. Here, I worry that this would just stack way too well, especially with Workshop-like cards that can gain a ton of these. 2 Labs is nothing to sneeze at, especially from a card that you can mass easily and use the "wasted action" on another weak card. If this were to win, I could see tweaking the vanilla bonuses -- maybe something like +3 Cards, +2 Actions would be more reasonable? Maybe it's ok as it is. I do like that this can be a counter to Ruins, which is nice.
How often can Danse Macabre be gained? How many cards can gain $4 cards? I made a quick look through the expansions, and get the following list (I may have missed a few):
3 Base
4 Intrigue
0 Seaside
2 Alchemy
3 Prosperity
2 Cornucopia
4 Hinterlands
8 Dark Ages
2 Guilds
1 Promo
That's 29 cards out of 205.
I don't know if this is how it works, but it seems like it would be able to be gained in about 3/20 games, or about 15% of the time. That seems pretty low. Note that this doesn't count cards like Jester or Smugglers, which require an opponent to have gained the card before you can. It does count Hermit, which can gain Danse Macabre after a Highway.
This seems pretty low, so you definitely want it to be interesting enough when you can't gain it. EDIT: As some have pointed out, this leads to about 75% of games having cards that can gain Danse Macabre. This is much more reasonable.
All in all, I like how different the card is. But, I would advocate for buffing the on-buy bonus (maybe 2 cards costing $3 or less?) and nerfing the on-play slightly. The on-buy just feels too weak to be interesting
in the majority of games where you can't gain this.EDIT: For probability