CCDD 040417—Repurpose

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/4/2017 - What if you had a spell with a static effect, that you could upgrade to a variable effect at the cost of a card instead of mana? Repurpose is loosely inspired by the Shoal cycle.

Spells with {X} in the cost are considered too complex for common and it's certainly true that repurpose will expend some comprehension complexity, but it won't raise the same questions as Blaze because it tells you exactly what X is, rather than implicitly expecting the player to choose its value.

At common, these are intentionally balanced so that you generally want to play these straight up, and only want to repurpose them when you really need the greater effect; Paying two cards for a single spell—even if the combined effect is under-costed in terms of mana—isn't something you want to do often. Madness decks excepted, obviously.

If you hadn't noticed it before, the strange ability on Morphomancer's Monster will have called your attention to the fact that all of these cards are being careful not to allow a player to automatically win the game just by repurposing something huge like Draco. (Though Growth and Monster push this envelope further than the rest, and probably too far.)

Our rares also try not to be auto-wins, just not as hard:

I tried to keep all the cards repurpose 2 for consistency, but making 2 saprolings, this one was just too weak with a high mana cost and too abuseable with an appropriately low mana cost.

Any mechanic that asks you to discard cards is going to appeal more to spike than tammy. My hope is that the possibility of a huge effects will help timmy appreciate at least the rares. And I think some jennies will enjoy the more obscure combinations this discard-enabler makes possible.

What do you think? Too complex for common? Too rarely useful?
Design a repurpose card.