It's not bad and I won't complain if it happens, I'm just hoping there's a more interesting option. Splice gives spells lasting power and lends the faction an identity in itself. Rebound is just "some spells trigger your instant/sorcery love an extra time," which is fine but shifts focus away from the instants and sorceries themselves in a way that another mechanic might not.

90% of the time, this will just be

Destiny (You may cast this card its destiny cost if a creature you control attacked this turn.)

There's nothing wrong with rebound, it's just not particularly exciting.

We need a spell mechanic. We also need one recurring mechanic. Since we have enough original mechanics as it is, it's probably best if those two are the same mechanics. Hello World mentioned split cards before—I think that could be great, if for every split card we did one was clearly from Illpyre and one clearly from Frostwynd. A Fire // Ice reprint, perhaps?

Thinking along the lines of splice. What makes it good for the set?

- Ties instants/sorceries together
- Gives spell decks flexibility and staying power

Why is it bad?

- Hard to deal with in hand
- Repetitive

My solution is a mechanic similar to splice, but that only works a single time from your graveyard. In other words, a discounted flashback that piggybacks on your spells.

Rekindle [cost] (As you cast an instant or sorcery spell, you may exile this card from your graveyard and pay its rekindle cost. If you do, add this card's effects to that spell.)

Destiny (You may exile this card face-down imbued on target creature any time you could cast a sorcery. That creature gains ": Turn the imbued card face-up. You may cast it for its destiny cost.")

But then, if we're doing that, we might as well bring back Cipher instead. A better implementation of the same basic idea.

Shouldn't the spell mechanic be doing the opposite? i.e. encouraging to play more spells and fewer creatures?

Sure, that's a good point. Split Second, perhaps?

Beyond that, I'm out of ideas.

Yo, I missed this post before. I think that's the best solution to this problem that anyone's suggested yet!

Crystallized Breath –
Instant
Put a 1/1 blue Elemental creature token with flying onto the battlefield.
Rekindle

I like it because it doesn't make you regret casting it when you could have saved it for a splice.

If splice is voted out, this is the card I'm adding to the spoiler. Same with Eater of Dreams for Salvage Titan, unless anyone can come up with something better.

(multi)Kicker?

Maybe the kicker is always "Exile an instant or sorcery card from your graveyard." I like the idea of using spent spells as currency.

And I was wondering if you missed rekindle, thanks.

OK, so I know I said this vote would be open until Monday night, but I'm going to close it in about eight hours or when I wake up, whichever comes second. I consider this problem solved, and think it would be cool if the slot for recurring mechanic were left open.

Rekindle seems too close to flashback. And splice is fine.

As for rebound only having a bit of synergy with instant/sorcery triggers, what's wrong with that? Do we want to make a set where there's a linear spell deck, a linear artifact deck, a linear enchantment deck, and a linear creature deck?

I don't consider being close to the most popular mechanic Wizards ever came up with to be exactly a bad thing.


I'm counting that as a Yay for Splice.

If it needs to be said, I withdraw my Yay for splice in favour of a Yay for rekindle.

Is there a reason we need a spells mechanic? We don't have a creature mechanic, a land mechanic or an enchantment mechanic. [Type] bringer and mastery are both type universal, and Oblation can reward any type, despite only being able to work on permanents. What makes spells so special? Besides, do we really want to reward "17 spells.deck"? I'm not sure if making them so self-sufficient is necessarily a good thing.

For what it's worth, I'm not too fond of "flashback but worse" as a mechanic. In part because stapling words onto another card is highly unnecessary when you could just cast it like flashback, but also because it's just flashback but worse.

Crystalized breath isn't nearly as cool as a wannabe flashback.
It was cool because it was splice.

I think MaRo said it was designed and concepted as an enchantment, but enchantment equipment creates rules issues, and wouldn't fit on the type line. The rules assume any enchantment attached to a creature is an aura. (this is necessary for some other effects)

Regular limited play is "play lands, play creatures." You could call attacking and blocking the creature mechanic: it's synergistic with other creatures, it interacts with your enemy's creatures. I think the best way to emphasize type matters in a set is to DOWNPLAY creatures as a type.

As for enchantments, I'm not against a new enchantment mechanic. But I don't think we need one, because auras can already enchant any permanent, including other enchantments.

The problem is, every spell-bringer creature is one less spell in the deck. It's anti-synergistic. I thought the bringers were just going to be a non-keyworded common cycle anyway.

Mastery is even worse for spells; every mastery spell is one less artifact, enchantment, creature, or land in the deck. Decks that want to turn on mastery don't want to play many spells. I would argue that mastery is the "permanent" mechanic, emphasizing the need for a "spell" mechanic.

Oblation, well, I don't like oblation at all. I don't see how it fits into the theme or helps develop any strategies.

They're not permanents, and rarely interact with each other. It's hard to make them synergize enough that you'd want to play a lot of them without a unifying mechanic. They've also never quite been the focus of a set the way artifacts, enchantments, and lands have.

Yeah, why not?

It could be cast from the yard, if you wanted to add extra spell triggers.

Define worse. It can be costed whatever you want it to be. Like, is it better to pay to flash back a firebolt, if you could play a spell and flash it back for that turn instead? It's only worse than flashback if you don't have a spell in hand, otherwise it's better.

I'm not married to the mechanic. I do think the best way to do spells matter is to count, cast, or exile them from the yard—there, a spent spell acts almost like a permanent.



The goal as I understood it was to emphasize the different card types through several playable archetypes. Each type would have its subset of cards that care about its own type, and another subset that would care about other types. Then there'd be a subset of cards that would care about all types (mastery, goyf-like cards). So there would be a set of decks that revolve around each type, and a deck that wants to play a variety of types, and decks in the middle that want some types and not others.

Does this line up with what other people see the set doing?

Final Tally:

Splice: 4/6
Colored artifacts: 3/5

The tribe has spoken! Rekindle beats out Splice, and Eater of Dreams beats out Salvage Titan.

We now have three original keywords: Mastery (permanents), Oblation (permanents but can interact with spells), and Rekindle (spells). I think that's a good balance.

Wait a sec. The people may have voted splice out, but that doesn't mean rekindle has been voted in.

Yeah, I agree with storyteller and I'm not super enthused about Rekindle. Maybe just drop Crystallized Breath and do a double round for blue? Or a bonus round to redesign it?