Cool Card Design of the Day10/26/2015 - An alternate casting cost mechanic that rewards mono-colored play. It has a variable, and I imagine the block that introduces it would only set the variable to one or two specific values. It's possible this is undevelopable, but I'm optimistic.
Combat tricks that can appear for free are a huge problem, especially at common. There's no way they can be signaled to the other player, so they're a constant looming threat.
ReplyDeleteIf you were to go down the route that you have written here, you'd need cards like Patrician's Scorn (which has an effect carefully chosen to not be useful in rapid succession), and they'd need to be almost 100% sorceries.
If we want to make this a LITTLE more developable, it could be done as follows:
Honed 3 (You may cast this spell without paying its mana cost if you control three or more untapped basic [land type here].)
This means you have a signal for instants (leaving all that mana open), but still rewards you if you can spend the mana after holding it up for the spell. On sorceries, it'd be very similar implementation - but encourage people to cast spells second main, which is something we want them to do anyway. So, seems like a good iteration.
The big issue with this version is that if the instant spell costs less than its Honed number (which if often will) then you have to hold up a lot more mana on your turn for their turn in order to cast it for free, which might feel bad.
I'm assuming this means Mutagenic Growth is considered a mistake now (though it was reprinted in MM2).
DeleteWas it a big problem on Convoke instants? A red creature left up doesn't seem like much of a telegraph for Crowd's Favor to me, but I didn't play M15 limited.
I *like* combat tricks that can be free.
My inspiration was partially Qasali Ambusher (and partially devotion / spell mastery). I wouldn't expect this to work for every set, and there's definitely an argument for keeping it off of instants that mess with combat math, but I'd want to playtest it both ways to learn when and how to use it.
DeleteKind of want honed to appear on instants and only be used as alt. cost when you could cast a sorcery.
ReplyDeleteOn-board with this iteration.
DeleteThat seems a clever idea.
DeleteI could definitely see that. Curious to hear what you like about that. My instinct says that 'free' is less useful on sorceries, except where it combos with other things you'd spend your mana on.
DeleteFree is always useful. I like the tension of free coming at the cost of playing something at a less opportune time. Also I was iterating on inanimate's attempt to make it more developable.
DeleteWhat about just Affinity for Plains on colored spells?
ReplyDeleteSeems reasonable, though mathier.
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