CCDD 091217—imbue

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/12/2017 - Imbue is a mechanic where you cast a spell on a creature and that creature is imbued with the ability to cast that spell on itself once more.

It's sort of like rebound, but you've got a lot more flexibility when you get the second copy in exchange for losing flexibility on its target. Where rebound front-loads the cost for both copies, imbue splits up the cost so we can have shields-down moments.

I want to share with you the original template I used—on the right here—because it's shorter and cuter. Unfortunately, it's also rather more confusing, because paying to sacrifice one of your cards looks mighty suspicious and not all players understand exactly when an aura is unattached. So I switched over to the more explicit version you saw first.

Imbue doesn't need to be a multicolor mechanic, but it can be. Imbue Curiosity isn't so strong it needs to require two colors, but it's still a fair model how we might do that if the set wanted it.

Some of these want to act like instants and so they get flash. Others can start as sorceries and omit that.

The original intent was that you'd use the copy on a later turn, but there's not enough reason to prevent a player from using both halves at the same time.

This rare was tricky to design.

We can imbue non-creatures (though the design space seems small).

Design an imbue card in the comments below.