Has anyone else noticed that the recent blocks all have a main keyword and a main ability word? This may need to be changed to "if it's not your draw step" or something similar.

Interesting mechanic, but isn't relevant without any knowledge of what's on top or on the bottom of your library. That makes Johnny like it, and Timmy and Spike hate it.

What I'm trying to say is that unless cards with Enlighten include other ways to play with your library other than enlighten, many players will be annoyed. I don't think we can get away with the simplest execution with this keyword. If every enlighten card included one extra sentence, like "Play with the top card of your library revealed", or ": Put a card from target player's graveyard on the bottom of their library", then it seems fine.

Though, the fact that I had to raise the cost to put a card from the graveyard to the bottom of the library to 4 is rather interesting. Would you think it fair if you could replace a draw with a card from exile? Because that's the rough equivalent of what's going on here... many cards that put things on the bottom of one's library are equivalent in cost to exiling them. may simultaneously be too cheap, and the most expensive we can push this before people complain. I don't know.

Also, would this be better if, instead of a replacement effect, we just used ": Put the bottom card of your library on top of your library."

I really do like the idea, though. I like the concept that your deck is gaining flying.

I think you've misread his ability, though maybe I'm misreading your comment.
The last half of the ability is just what floated into my head because I wanted this guy to draw a card without triggering himself. I just made it the bottom so it seemed like slightly less of a dodge.
My basic idea here is like "Draw-fall" instead of landfall. Enlighten is only the card-draw trigger (Outside of your drawstep?), not the rest of this guy's ability.

Ah! So Enlighten roughly reads "Whenever you draw a card, do X". That's much better than an entire mechanic based upon drawing cards from the bottom of your deck.

It's funny. It is quite possible that that's an excellent mechanic for all the same reasons that Landfall was an excellent mechanic. My only problem with Enlighten, as it stands, is that its a little bit win-more mechanic, and a little bit "abusive finisher with an already crazy deck". See also: Psychatog. But, I think if you designed the rest of your cards knowing what to avoid, then it should come out fine. And there are a number of opportunities to increase the amount of cards "drawn" without card advantage. See also (though, too goofy for modern Magic): Sindbad.

I'm still up in the air as to whether or not to limit it to outside your draw step or not. I think that, if most of the cards required you to pay for the effect, allowing the ability to activate every turn might be okay. However, with landfall, activation every turn wasn't necessarily guaranteed, and card drawing is already very good. Perhaps the trigger should be "Whenever you draw a card, if it's not your draw step, do X."
Actually, maybe it should even be "Whenever you draw cards," so that multiple card draws at once don't trigger that many times.

I like the name and concept of "enlighten", as a sort of "I'm more sophisticated than you" mechanic. However, I don't know if it's a good idea to tie it to card drawing; I can see the fun side, but I'm concerned that it's most useful in decks already packed with card draw and cantrips, typically blue control decks, that may just get even more consistent and uninteresting.

Other possibilities would be to tie the effects to casting a spell: that's still pretty good (the exact mirror of landfall) but doesn't encourage card draw more than other cantrops.

Or to have the triggers be different, but feel the same: give people a dream of chaining together a "whenever you do X, do Y", "whenever you do Y, do Z", etc, etc.

I like the idea of casting a spell, though not having different triggers. Having the same trigger is what ties an ability word together. If I remember right, one of the GDS2 entrants was criticized for having different ability word triggers.

They already have a mechanic that triggers off of casting a lot of spells. It's called 'Storm'. :P

I don't think I like the prescribed restrictions on Enlighten. It seems to me that if we're unwilling to use Enlighten in it's most simplest form "Whenever you draw a card" than we shouldn't settle for any other method "As long as it isn't your draw step". Doing so would make the mechanic more wordy, and probably wouldn't make it any less abusive, since we'd have to ramp up the power of the Enlighten cards anyway, to match.

I got a completely different idea. What if we based the multi-color tribe around having a lot of options? That seems to be the number one reason why a person would play with all five colors anyways... because he's/she's trying to toolbox a lot of different 'best of' cards - one for each color, or color combination. It makes sense to me, then, to parallel our design to that common strategy; supporting a strong toolbox design by:
1). Making a lot of strong toolbox cards.
2). Making a quasi-mechanic, or a common method to find those cards in one's deck and
3). Finding ways to reabuse the same card over and over (within reason of course).

Perhaps a mechanic that tied points 2 and 3 together? An ability that either allowed you to tutor a card from your deck, or return a card from your graveyard? Maybe one that could only get cards that were a different color than the base spell to encourage multicolor?

Strictly an Example
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Sorcery
Deal 3 damage to target creature or player.
Toolbox - When you cast ~, you may pay . If you do, either return a non-red, non-green card form your graveyard to your hand, or search through your library for a non-green, non-red card, reveal it, put it in your hand and shuffle your library.

There's probably too much going on in the example, but you get what I'm going for...

Ah, but R&D doesn't like repetitive gameplay. Still, I could go for either version of Enlighten, and I'd be open to something toolboxy, though perhaps not exactly what you've suggested.

So we want enlighten to function similar to landfall in that it has the same overall trigger but can have different effects ?
If we do, I think we should follow Landfall's example and have Enlighten on creatures do the same thing on all creatures, a different thing on enchantments (though what the enchantments themselves do can vary widely, it would just be what Enlighten does that would have to be the same), etc

I don't like repetitive gameplay, either. A missing phrase from "Toolbox: the Mechanic" was "Exile this card". But the mechanic was already too bloated, and I didn't want to bog it down with rules. That doesn't kill the repetitiveness, I know, but it does stop the "I just cast these two spells back and forth until you are dead" sort of response that Buyback offers.

But for all the 'R&D hates repetitive mechanics', they do printed them often enough. Transmute, Retrace, Recover and Splice into Arcane are all repetitive in their own way. The problem is that while, in theory, every game is its own unique and flavorful play experience, many players want their decks to consistently do the same thing over and over again. That's why we're allowed to play 4x a card, instead of singleton. It's more a matter of making the repetition fun.

On the subject of Enlighten, though, Camruth may have a good point. I think Wizards may have gone a little overboard with the +2/+2 thing, but it certainly made it easy to grasp... and it only happened at common.

I've been wondering about this again. If we're having Enlighten as our Aer ability word, I want to have quite a few cards with it at common. So far I've got Aeran Priest, Psychomancer, and probably Nimbus Elf. I'd say I want at least 5 commons with it if not more; and that's already a full fifth of the gold commons.