Cost of Doing Business

Let’s start off with a disclaimer: there are no new card designs in this post. If you happen to be a Wizards of the Coast employee, read on!

We’ve been discussing design space that could complement the mechanics we’re currently exploring for Tesla. Iteration and some versions of Cogs care about Converted Mana Cost, a term Wizards doesn’t generally put on commons. Now we could certainly spend most of our complexity points for the set here and print them anyway, but this is actually a more general problem for Magic, so first let’s try to solve it. How can we make the concept of cost comparison available at common under New World Order?

First thing's first. What exactly is the problem? New players don't understand what "converted mana cost" means. It's opaque terminology that stops them from playing the game while they try to figure out what their cards are asking them to do. The problem is twofold. The first issue is that it sounds complicated. "Converted?" Converted from what? To what? What cost is it referring to? It looks a heck of a lot like Setessan Griffin has two "mana costs" on it.

But even once someone understands what they're looking for, it's not entirely trivial to find. First off, the relevant number doesn't appear anywhere on the card. Deriving it is not all that tricky and players need to learn to do that anyway, but how are they supposed to know if it changes when they Convoke a spell or cast it with Bestow? Clearly if we want to make this space available at common, something's going to have to change.

The most obvious approach is to do the same thing that Magic 2015 did for power and toughness setting effects (which Chah suggested all the way back in 2011).

Is there a wording that clearly conveys what we mean by “Converted Mana Cost?”

This looks clean and easy to apply to a wide range of templates, but I’m not confident that players will get the right interpretation. With a card like Lash Out are players going to assume that {G}{G}{G} “costs less” than {4}? Perhaps we can clarify that the number is an amount of mana and not a cost unto itself.

This seems like it ought to work, but it may disrupt intuitive understanding of spells on the stack — why wouldn’t Stormscape Familiar keep Sun Titan from triggering Kurgadon under this wording?

Both of these terms do an excellent job of conveying that we’re looking for a purely numerical value, but I don’t think either is really useable. How do you use “amount of mana” to word Spell Snare or “how much mana” to word Clash?

These wordings might make it clearer that it’s a fixed number (especially if we opt for reminder text); we could even go with “base mana cost,” but the whole “converted” part is less clear. Some players might think they’re looking for an exact match.

Seems awfully redundant, but this is actually pretty clear…

“Casting cost” is a stand-in from ye’ olden days, but we might be able to get some additional clarification from something like “total cost,” “base cost,” or “numerical cost.” However, whichever we go might with, it's hard to see how we could word something like Dispersal Shield without an X, which many (myself included) would argue precludes it from common anyway.

Well, that’s my two cents, I don't see a clear winner, but I suppose if the answer were easy Wizards would have implemented it already. The data we really need is how players who don’t know what CMC means interpret these wordings. If you’re going to be around any newer players in the near future, please show them one of these examples and see how confident they feel that they know what it means. That info would be a great boon to all of us, and eventually to Magic in general.