Spent to Cast: Ruminations

"Spent to Cast," aka Ogre Savant Ability, aka Sunburst, aka cards in the Shadowmoor/Eventide cycles including River's Grasp and Moonhold.  These cards care about the mana that was spent to cast them. Sunburst doesn't care what mana was spent so long as it's different and it provides one of two set effects related to that. That makes it different enough that it discussed in depth elsewhere.

Spent to Cast encourages splashing other colors. It usually requires mana of one color to cast, but gives a bonus if another color is spent. It's popular on instants and sorceries and when it's used on creatures, it often confers a one-time effect , even if that effect is just to keep the creature, in the case of the Simic, Azorious, and Rakdos implementations (where Spent to Cast acts like strange Evoke instead of a strange Kicker). This avoids memory issues in much the same way that Sunburst does with counters.

Cons

The spell taped to a creature issue sometimes results in cross-color abilities: Court Hussar has a very blue ETB effect, but has a white ability, one you only get to use if you pay white mana for it. While it's an interesting approach, it ends up being a blue card with vigilance, just like Azorius Herald is an unblockable white card and Crypt Champion is a black card with Double Strike. That particular approach to the color pie might not work in a core set.

Crypt Champion itself raises an interesting point; while Crypt Champions can't reanimate one another, these strange evoke creatures are very resistant to being cheated into play. This might discourage new players and even cause uncertainty when the appropriately colored mana is spent on an ability that puts them into play (Quicksilver Amulet or Birthing Pod). This is either an opportunity for education or a dangerous point of confusion.

Monday's Pitch: The Boxes Precinct

Fuck! This was supposed to go up last Monday. Bear with me, Blogger does this "I know you clicked, 'Post,' but I wanted to keep this blog our little secret forever," bullshit. It's saccharine and disturbing, Blogger! Quit it!

What about a story told from the perspective of the unused Magic cards that sit obsessively in long boxes? Not even the pauper-level cards, but the real, unusable, passed-over stinkers that aren't worth the cardboard they're printed on, along with a few overlooked gems put in for variety?

Imagine, a player's hunt for a particular, elusive card that they just know is in their collection anthropomorphized as one of these cards as a...noir/semi-noir detective. It spans from the long boxes to the utility pile, to the dregs of half-completed decks, and--the Valhalla for Magic cards--played, constructed decks.

A buddy-buddy cop format might also be cool, pairing something like Shauku's Minion with a planeswalker card like Jace, the Mindsculptor in a good/evil playable/unplayable combo only united by their common purpose in finding a missing card.

Monday's Pitch: Collaborative Star Trek

There is a collaborative board game based on the new Star Trek movie where you try to get a planet to join The Federation while averting a civil war, warding off Klingons, and...doing one more thing that I can't quite remember right now. I imagine it's a lot like Shadows Over Camelot, partially because I just got through playing several rounds of it, but also because it sounds like each of your objectives is analogous to the quests from SOC and you're trying to beat them all before time runs out, though ST: Expeditions[1] as an artificial time limit of 30 turns instead of just being designed to slowly push your head below water until you simply can't breathe anymore (like SOC and Pandemic).

But I was pawning through some cards from the terrible, terrible, terrible Star Trek CCG[2] and I was thinking about how the character development, mission accomplishment, dilemma overcoming, interpersonal relationships, and point-based victory (instead of defeat-based paradigm) is a great way to do Star Trek. Don't get me wrong, the ST CCG was [3], but it failed by being too thick with flavor and not enough with game. It was a game people enjoyed, but it just didn't play well. They had missions right. They had dilemmas right. They had winning with points via accomplishing Star Trek things instead of just destroying stuff. They had skills that drove the system; not just job skills and technical skills, but things like 'youth,' 'empathy,' and 'music'; humanitarian things[4] that made people who they were. Also, barbering[3].