So it's been a few months and i've played some amount with the new cards.
Here are my updated lists of unambiguous bans that are way over the line, definite bans that took me time to come to, watchlist cards that I might want to ban in the future, and non-banworthy cards that I feel were mentioned:
Unambiguous - just way way WAY too strong:
Estate master.
Weakling. I played against this today. It came down relatively early in stage 2. For almost the entire midgame the table policed it, and no big stacks were available for it to trigger. Then in round 11 there was 5 food on traveling players that wasn't taken and they got 4 vegetables in one round, and thus the floodgates opened and it gave like 10+ vegetables.
Craft brewery.
Definite:
Writing chamber: It's always 7 points and you don't have to work for them. At worst it fills your farm and compensates for goods you don't get. At best it's compensating for card negative points.
Chapel: The minigame of "who can take the chapel space the most for large amounts of bonus points" is already silly. The fact that for other players to compete in the chapel minigame they need to hand you like 4+ grain collectively is ridiculous.
Summer house: Gives way too much reward for just ignoring farming.
Craft teacher: I realized that with this card I was going out of my way to build bad guilds with no intention of ever having more of the guild resource just to play occupations more efficiently. This is just too good.
Walking boots. I've been trying to figure out ways to make this card good. Unfortunately all the ways I can think of to make this card good break the flow of the game in very annoying ways. We banned carriage trip and this is more offensive.
Watchlist:
Pulverizer plow: I haven't actually played enough games to see this get played. It's also more incremental an effect than most of the definite ban candidates.
Hayloft barn: This seems like a really really good deal. It's still too early for me to be sure it's banworthy good.
Nightworker: Breaks the flow of the game. Not sure it does so enough, and in a sufficiently surprising way, to be banned (although I would like to see clarification on taking multiple actions starting with the nightworker action).
Artisan's district: I have yet to see someone really go off with this yet. The potential is scary though.
Collector tier:
Collector: This should be on the watchlist if I was honest but I don't want to ban collector because I like playing with it too much.
Not banworthy:
Most growth addition cards - autumn mother/bed maker etc. They don't seem to be that strong on average.
Forest clearer: It still seems very strong, but there are way more egregious things than this.
Acquirer: In the hands of some expert players this seems very good, but I'm not sure I want to be banning cards only experts can use and it doesn't seem that egregious to me. Unlike collector this also doesn't really work if you spend time growing, so it's fairly committal to small house strategies (or absurd food engines, but everything works with those).
Lazybones: As far as I can tell it's pretty good if you play it, but people don't want to play it.
A note on big country unban wishes: One of my big issues with big country is that on average it makes the game more, not less, about building lots of rooms and pushing growth.
The main way you counter a hard-line 2 room player will be to have tons and tons of actions to out compete on the full board the 2 room player leaves behind. If you don't fight hard for grow vs a hard-line 2 room player you're going to be in an awful squeeze between the 2 room player and the probably 5 room player and likely struggling for third. So while big country isn't building rooms the other 3 players have to fight for grow to beat it. This is not to mention that there are significantly more ways for a hard-line 2 room player to sneak extra actions in than when it got banned (at which point there were none).
A lot of the above notes on big country also apply to little peasant.
Edit: I just played another game and an opponent had the minor "Recruitment" (D021) and while I think most growth enabling occupations aren't that strong it's ludicrous to have a minor that can do it as easily with no condition. This one should probably be banned - would put it in the unambiguous pile.
