Regenerate Target Mechanic

Regenerate Target Mechanic
Regenerate is one of the evergreen abilities that's been around since Alpha. It's a bit "too flavorful" as Aaron Forsythe might say and suffers from old, unintuitive templating. Even so, a lot of players love it, myself included, because it hits its note well enough and that note needs hitting. Can we re-invent it into something more streamlined and intuitive?

Let's go directly to the most simple implementation of the mechanic, the one that would likely be used if this were created today: "If CARDNAME would be destroyed, you may pay COST. If you do, it’s not destroyed and all damage is removed from it." That's a lot shorter than the current reminder text on Cudgel Troll and it does the bare minimum to meet our goal.

The biggest difference is in the form: Rather than an activated ability that you must play before damage is dealt and before Doom Blade resolves, we've got a replacement ability that happens at the exact moment Krosan Troll would actually die. I really feel this is important because I've never seen regeneration explained to a new player without clarification being needed: "Wait, so it's too late to regenerate this now, even though it just died?"

Next, we've also excised the two flavor riders. Normally, the act of regeneration* taps your creature (if it wasn't already tapped) and removes it from combat (if it was in combat). You already know the parts in parenthesis, but those are points of confusion to new players. Both of these make great flavor-sense. These extra clauses illustrate how the creature needs time to regenerate and can't keep fighting uninterrupted. They are good flavor, but are they worth building into the ability?
* By "the act of regeneration" I mean, of course, when your regeneration shield is consumed, not when you create it originally via the activated ability. Gonna miss that distinction?

You might ask if the last phrase is also necessary: "...and all damage is removed from it." It is. Without that phrase, regenerating your troll from combat damage or burn will do nothing. (Or, more accurately, it will prevent the original game effect of sending a creature to the graveyard for having damage on it equal to or greater than its toughness, but as soon as state-based effects are checked again, uh immediately, the same rule will do it again.)

I had once tried a more clever wording: "...if you do, remove all damage from it instead" where the instead replaces the act of being destroyed, and while that does work, it's not clear to a lot players that it can survive a Doom Blade. I also originally used the new game term "when CARDNAME dies..." to simplify things, but a creature dies when you sacrifice it and we don't want players to be able to regenerate a sacrificed permanent, defeating the cost of sacrifice.

If we can agree that this is the best base ability, the next question is whether to keyword it or what. We have a few options: We can give it a new keyword, we can replace the old one, or we can leave it unkeyworded. It's not my preference for an evergreen ability, but choosing not to keyword the ability is relatively safe and clean. What I hate about this choice is that where players have had an infallible handle with which to reference the ability before, they'd now have to use 'regenerate' informally and then often have to clarify if they mean the old, 'real' regenerate or the new, unlabeled one.

The trouble with giving it a new keyword—which I think it deserves if it will be evergreened in place of regenerate—is that there aren't many synonyms for 'regenerate' and none of them have the same impact. We could do the cheap thing and use another form of the word like 'regeneration'. That's not terrible, but we're just begging for confusion with 'regenerate'.

It turns out that we can't replace the definition of regenerate. It works for permanents (though it is functionally different and mostly an upgrade), but because regenerate was an action keyword it doesn't work at all for spells. You can't just replace the reminder text on Asceticism and Regenerate because both of those have targets. You'd have to do something clunky like "Target creature gains Regenerate 0 until EOT or until you use it, whichever comes first." UGH.

I suppose you could create an alternate form, Regenerate Once (The first time CARDNAME would be destroyed...). Part of me hates that because it feels like a hack, and part of me loves it because it's actually pretty elegant and opens up some interesting designs. The second half of me is foolish. It's a trap: The designs it opens up are permanents with regenerate once and those are riddled with memory issues. So forget that.

We've got one more chance to make keywording work. We can have two forms: regenerate with no cost which is the old keyword action and regenerate [cost] which is the new keyword 'trigger'. Asceticism, Regenerate and Cudgel Troll wouldn't change at all, but new cards would all use the new form, like Krosan Troll. This does mean players would sometimes be asked to know both versions and distinguish between them when playing with both old and new sets. We could use 'regeneration' to distinguish the new form, so they at least don't use the exact same word …aaand now we've come full circle back to option #1. Only this time I'm not so sure it's wrong.

One more bonus to using regeneration is that cards like Incinerate that refer to the original ability will also refer to the new ability, which seems pretty important for continuity.

Regardless of how we label it, the new version is an overdue improvement for a beloved ability and I thank those who asked for it and helped develop it. (I can't find the old tweets, but I know @troacctid was the genesis of the discussion.)

For those of you bemoaning the loss of the flavor riders, remember that we can still make specific cards that tap and/or are removed from combat, to feature that flavor.
The fact that not all regenerators are tied to those extra clauses, opens up new possibilities too, without excessive clutter.