CCDD 112117—Gem token

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/15/2017 - Sometimes treasure tokens let us cast a spell a turn or two early and that's fun and powerful. Powerful enough that access to treasure is limited at low mana costs, especially at common. Which limits how often treasure tokens are used to make up for missed land drops or to fix your colors when you'd otherwise be color-screwed. And that's a shame, because Magic often lacks that kind of smoothing.

If treasure didn't accelerate your mana, it could be much cheaper, and more common. Let's explore that.

A gem can fix your mana once, just like treasure, but because it's only filtering your mana and not accelerating you, it's safe to create gems on cheap spells at common, where that color-fixing is most helpful.

Decks frequently work their way out of color-screw, so what good are gems then? That's where the second ability comes in: When you don't need color-fixing, gems give you deck-smoothing. That's less impactful than a clue (which is still important because we want to keep these cheap to get) but still very useful, especially when you're land-flooded.

I didn't add a mana cost to the looting ability because it's not inherently necessary, but it may well make sense to add {1} so that it aesthetically matches the fixing ability, or even {2} so that it looks worse, which could be relevant if a player is trying to decide which mode to use and we want to emphasize the fixing ability.

I don't love putting two abilities on a token. It helps that they're both about converting resources. But it also means even more text on cards that generate these tokens. Still, gems promise to turn so many non-games into actual games, it's worth at least considering.

Design a card that makes 1 or 2 gem tokens in the comments below.