CCDD 073013—8 Cost-Reduction/Added-Value Keywords

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/30/2013 - I made the mistake last week of wondering how I could represent chaotic mana before going to bed. These ten cards are the result. Sleep is overrated anyhow, right?

Most of these cards are clearly unprintable, but they add ideas to the entire group that can only accelerate progress toward the few usable ideas that might emerge.

The original goal here was to allow the player to pay less than the spell's full cost at the risk of failing to cast the spell at all and wasting that mana. This isn't the normal cost-reduction mechanic because it's unreliable and it's most useful when you're either desperate and need to get lucky, or when you've got nothing better to do with your mana. Both of which are times I'm happy to help a player out.

Cast from the Hip was the original execution that sparked all these various iterations. Unfortunately, it's wordy as hell. In plain English, you can try to cast Goblin Grat Rider for less than full cost, but for each mana you cheat by, there's a chance you'll fail and waste your effort.

Tamper features the exact same mechanic, but with a shorter and arguably more intuitive template. I still don't think it's short or intuitive enough.

Maybe the option to reduce the cost by any amount is what's putting it over the top, but a maximum cost reduction of {1} doesn't seem worth the text (and limits the number of tights spots it can get you out of).

This is one of the wackier implementations. Competitor Coupons lets you pay any amount, but the less you pay, the less likely your mana will have any effect. It's a little weird tying the result to another card this way, and that the full cost of Cheat Death is irrelevant, but it's the shortest version of the original vision I came up with.

"{X} + the revealed card's CMC >= this spell's CMC?" seems to grok fairly well, but it still proves mighty wordy in Magic-ese:

You may have noticed wherever I had you reveal the top card of your library before, it then went to the bottom. It can't stay on the top because you could try to cast these spells for {1} to see what's on top, and if you do find a good batch, just cast them all. For Gift of the Angel, I replaced reveal-and-bottomize with exile, which is a lot shorter. I was reluctant about that because casual players hate removing cards from their deck, but if it's just one card, that's not terrible—and it feels like a more tangible cost to this gamble than the loss of mana.

The spells above risk mana, but not cards. Wildcast ups the stakes by twisting that around. You might be able to cast Desperate Theft without paying anything, but you'll lose the card if not. I'm thinking these stakes are too high because while players frequently have excess mana, there's no such thing as excess cards.

The next batch of cards step further afield from the original concept, exploring more tangential how-far-will-your-mana-go mechanics.

Lucky moves the uncertainty from whether you cast your spell or not, to how strong it is. It's also set up to appear all-upside: The random element can only improve your result.

Using red's Coal Stoker rebate concept, kickback could refund you all, some, or none of the mana you used to cast the spell. There's no chance in terms of whether the kickback spell works, but whether you can chain into multiple spells is uncertain.

Like kickback, there's never any doubt whether your manaflow spell will resolve, but it's unclear if you'll win the bonus round and chain into something 'free.' In this case, you can get a free spell. Manaflow is pretty similar to cascade. Since you only get to look at one card, it's harder to use (or break) and so the maximum value can be slightly higher, I think. 

You'll notice that some of these mechanics, use 'play' and some use 'cast' (thus including or excluding land cards, respectively) mostly based on theme, but that's a dial that could be tweaked in Development.

Overcharge is a kicker variant that lets you pay extra for a chance at a free spell. I actually like that quite a lot.

Searing Vision is even simpler, and something I'm confident we'll see in a few forms over the coming years.

Mean Attack appeals to the logician/mathematican in me, but it's entirely unprintable by today's standards of grokkability. Even so, I really like that you can play it for cheap, gambling for a relevant result, or reduce the risk and increase the EV by paying more.

Again, most of these are unprintable. My question is, which ideas stood out as worth tinkering on?