Cool Card Design of the Day
8/27/2017 - I was working on a keyword called 'emulate' which would let you play cards from your hand as copies of the spell with emulate. Some iterations were exactly that, others cost more or had a reduced effect. One had a variable effect based on the card's real CMC, so that you could pay more and get more out of your copies (or pay less and get less)
Ultimately all of those executions suffered the same problem. Emulate is too recursive and noninteractive. Games are less interesting when we cast the same spell over and over, and less fun when there's nothing we can do to end such shenanigans.
How can we salvage the core idea—to let you discard useless cards to cast more of the spells you need right now—without promoting boring and frustrating games?