Set: Seaside
$4 Action- +1 Buy. Trash a card from your hand. +$ equal to its cost.
One of the drawbacks to taking forever to make progress on a top list is that your opinions change over time, and I've been pretty high on trash-for-benefit of late, this here being the primary example. The obvious use is to trash your crap cards and get better ones, but there are some other nifty tricks to do with it. You can think of it as a Swindler on yourself- use it to turn the Chapel or Witch you don't need anymore into a Haven or Lab, stuff like that, and then still buy whatever else you were gonna buy that turn. Alternatively, it's good for draining a pile quickly to end game- one of my favorite dick moves is to trash my Provinces and buy new ones with the money generated.
It's a debatable opener- trashing an Estate AND scoring $2 is pretty nifty early, but if you miss your Estates with it, it quickly becomes less useful. Perhaps you could pair it with some sort of slingshot and then clear out even the outdated cheap actions, but most of the good slingshots are also $4, so good luck with that. It works pretty well in the midgame, as there are probably some low-level actions you don't reeeally need and they can ramp up your buying power quickly....almost too quickly, sometimes. It always sucks getting $9-10 in a 2-buy turn, but it's a nice problem to have. Late game is where it particularly shines, as in endgame you should be willing to completely wreck your deck to get a couple of extra provinces/colonies, and if you are willing and able to pay the price, there are few cards better at guaranteeing you hit that mark.
It works particularly well with Hoard- +Buy lets you buy more Victory Cards and thus more Gold, and then you can trash those Victories later to clean out your deck and get some monster turns going. It's one of the few trashing cards that works okay with Golem, as even on a terrible forced usage, the worst-case scenario is that you can buy it back, and there's usually SOMETHING you can do without in exchange for big bucks. There are better cards out there for dealing with Curses, but a trash is a trash.
All in all, a pretty dandy card. Not useful on EVERY board, but often quite handy and rarely outright bad for you. This should be higher.
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~Tommeri Uranius Bombaldi the Fourth, esq.
(aka not Krakenprophet)