Harvest

Harvest
Info
Cost
Type(s)	Action
Kingdom card?	Yes
Set	Cornucopia & Guilds
Illustrator(s)	Alayna Danner
Card text
Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck, then discard them. + per differently named card revealed.

Harvest is an Action card from Cornucopia & Guilds. It is a weak terminal source of virtual coin that discards 4 cards from your deck and gives you – based on how many differently-named cards it discards.

A weak and unreliable card, Harvest was removed from the second edition of Cornucopia & Guilds and replaced with the conceptually-similar (but more useful) Carnival, which provides terminal draw instead of +.

FAQ

Official FAQ

• Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck; if you have fewer than 4 cards (after shuffling), just reveal what you can.
• Discard the revealed cards, and get + per differently named card revealed. For example if you revealed Copper, Silver, Copper, Estate, that would be +.

Strategy

Harvest is a very weak payload card. It is both expensive at and has a high opportunity cost at that price, while often (unreliably) providing only the equivalent of a terminal silver or terminal Gold. Terminal space is often better spent on stronger effects, and Silver and Gold can easily replace what Harvest would have generated for you.

On top of its cost and low ceiling, an additional problem with Harvest is that it encourages you to have multiple different cards still in your deck or discard when you play it. In engines that can best handle terminal stop card payload, for example by having plenty of spare terminal space, draw, and a Throne Room variant to double play that payload, you’ll typically draw your entire deck before playing your payload, leaving no cards for Harvest to discard. With sifters such as Forum, it’s possible that you’ll be able to discard some cards for Harvest. However, discarding those cards means you’re likely not playing them, and it’s unlikely that an efficiently built deck contains three or four different cards that you do not want to play. Even in engines using cards that benefit from Harvest’s discarding, such as Village Green, Harvest is still an expensive, unreliable, and largely low-impact addition.

Versions

English versions

Print	Digital	Text	Release	Date
		Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck, then discard them. + per differently named card revealed.	Cornucopia	June 2011
		Reveal the top 4 cards of your deck, then discard them. + per differently named card revealed.	Guilds & Cornucopia (2017 printing)	March 2018

Other language versions

Language	Name	Print	Digital	Text	Notes
Czech	Sklizeň
Dutch	Oogst
Finnish	Sadonkorjuu
French	Récolte
German	Ernte			Decke die obersten 4 Karten deines Nachziehstapels auf, lege sie dann ab. + pro aufgedeckter Karte mit unterschiedlichem Namen.	(2019)
Italian	Mietitura
Japanese	収穫 (pron. shūkaku)			山札の上から4枚を公開し、捨て札にする。公開したカード1種類につき+。
Polish	Zniwa			Odkryj 4 wierzchnie karty ze swojej talii, a potem je odrzuć. + za każdą odkrytą kartę o innym tytule.	(2011)
Russian	Сбор Урожая (pron. sbor urozhaya)
Spanish	Cosecha

Trivia

Official card art.

Secret History

Once I had the variety theme, I had to make some cards that really highlighted it. I tried drawing cards until you hit a duplicate, and then I tried getting all the non-duplicates from your top 5 cards. Giving you instead of the cards was what worked out.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of the Cornucopia Cards, June 2011

Retrospective

Harvest does the flip over cards thing, and I would try to fix that up, see if I could make a version that did not make your good cards go by.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, What Donald X. Might Do With a Dominion Time Machine, June 2012

Why is Harvest terminal?

There's no story to Harvest being terminal. It was a descendant of terminals. I didn't make it not-terminal. Very few cards are intentionally so narrow; it wasn't intentional, it's just weak. If the set weren't out I would tweak it or replace it; there would be lots of options.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, Dominion Discord, January 2020

Second Edition removal

The one complete dud in Cornucopia. The randomness isn't attractive, but since all it does is make $, whatever, it's easy to do better. $5 payload cards need to compete with Gold; it's in every game.

—Donald X. Vaccarino, The Secret History of Cornucopia & Guilds 2E, February 2024