Deft Trapper
Creature - Human Scout (C)
Crafty (When this enters, activate one of its abilities without paying its cost.)
, : Tap target creature an opponent controls.
2/1

Salvaged Automaton
Artifact Creature - Junk Construct (C)
Crafty (When this enters, activate one of its abilities without paying its cost.)
, Sacrifice Salvaged Automaton: Exile the top card of your library. You may play that card this turn. Activate only as a sorcery.
A skilled tinkerer can make a whole more than the sum of its parts--but sometimes, you just need some parts.
2/2

Questing Evergreen
Creature - Treefolk (C)
Forestcycling
Crafty (When this enters, activate one of its abilities without paying its cost.)
It ambles slowly across fields of ash, seeking others of its kind.
2/4

Murkwader Battlemage
Creature - Human Wizard (U)
Crafty (When this enters, activate one of its abilities without paying its cost.)
, Sacrifice Murkwader Battlemage: Return target creature to its owner's hand.
, Sacrifice Murkwader Battlemage: Target player discards a card. Activate only as a sorcery.
2/2

Doll Collector
Creature - Human Artificer (R)
Crafty (When this enters, activate one of its abilities without paying its cost.)
, Sacrifice an artifact creature: Create two Treasure tokens.
, Sacrifice a noncreature artifact: Create two 1/1 colorless Toy artifact creature tokens.
1/2

I don't think this really has that much design space, especially for commons, but I enjoyed thinking about it for that reason.

I'm not sure questing evergreen works, because forestcycling isn't an ability of the permanent, it's an ability of the card in your hand. I really like the mechanic and the cards though.

great minds and whatnot! anyway I like the mechanic. I agree it's tricky to deal with at common but I think there's enough space for at least a set's worth. I'd probably limit it to a couple colors to let it be more of a limited archetype, and you can make the activations relatively expensive for their value since you get the effect once for free, which helps to balance them.

I think based on the rulings on Muraganda Petroglyphs it might still count as an activated ability? But there also could be some line in the rules that forbids you from activating such abilities on the battlefield in a way that breaks Crafty. I think even the sorcery-speed restriction on some of these technically would prevent the ability from getting activated by Crafty, too.

I will have to add (This works.) to the end of the reminder text.

Oh, wow, cool! I like your templating for this. It doesn't work the same with my multi-ability ones but I think those are a little inelegant anyway.

Just recently I came up with this mechanic of Libe's like the same day he posted it. Designing fake cards is really hard.

I think this is currently true:



however, the main reason for that is that there's never been a reason to test it. both of these could, in principle, be negated by saying that you're modifying the cost to not do those things, so it should now function from the battlefield like normal, and to the best of my knowledge there are no existing interactions that would be affected by such a ruling, so I say it works.

yeah, I do like the multi-ability ones though. I'm on a big elegance kick so I like how my version forces me to not get too cute, but yours is certainly more flexible.

true but it gets a lot easier once you give up on outsmarting Libe.