CCDD 061918—mana types

Cool Card Design of the Day
Way back when (circa GDS2) I explored the idea of new types of mana. It started with snow mana, flitted briefly through sacred mana, and ended badly at bird mana, lizard mana, beast mana, etc. It seemed like a dead-end.

Earlier this year, it occurred to me that the mistake wasn't caring about what produced the mana, but caring too specifically. First, the thing can't be parasitic, like snow or sacred were; it's got to be something Magic has a lot of. Second, it can't be so preposterously narrow as to carry about a specific sub-type. The reason being that we want to actually use our mechanic, and since we're inherently limiting ourselves to a set of mana producers much smaller than Any Land, we've got to keep the aperture open as wide as possible.

Magic has one card that's a model for this:

Remember Imperiosaur? It's printed text is "Spend only mana produced by basic lands to cast Imperiosaur." There's no reason we can't stick to that wording, but I reframed it here, to familiarize ourselves with the idea of mana having a number of possible qualities. Mana usually has a color, but can also be colorless (and technically multi-colored). If it's produced by a snow permanent (like Arctic Flats or Boreal Druid), it's snow mana ({S}). I'm not doing anything functionally new above, just using the same model to suggest that mana produced by a basic land is 'basic mana.' With that concept in place, what other kinds of mana can we care about?

It's not great for the mechanic that most creatures that produce mana are green, but nonetheless there are a lot of these (170?), at least one in probably every set.

Artifacts also tend to produce mana pretty commonly (166?).

Basic mana, creature mana, and artifact mana are the only types of mana I can imagine caring about right now. Other card types don't produce mana often enough (sorcery and instant add up to 37 ever, enchantments less and planeswalkers far less). You could potentially care about legendary mana (65) but that's still narrow for my taste. One benefit of legendary is that it appears on a bunch of different card types, including actual lands.

The next question is how to use special mana types. Imperiosaur requires basic mana (just as Kozilek, the Great Distortion requires {C} and all colored creatures require mana of their color) and that's an option but it's not one I'd expect to see on more than a handful of rares throughout Magic's life. For the Spirits above, I let the mana count double. That's fairly intuitive.

We can also simply check to see if the special mana was used and reward it.

Or we can measure how much of the special mana was used and offer a scaling reward.

I believe the design space for creature mana and artifact mana is quite limited, for much the same reason there were so few cards with {C} in the mana cost. We could definitely create a set with lots of non-land producers of the type we're supporting but realistically we're still maxing out at about six common mana dorks / rocks and a fractional as-fan.

Design a creature/artifact mana card in the comments.