For White Commons Submissions.

An example of mono-colored manacycling. It seems most appropriate, to me, to put them on the CCC cards. That way those cards can continue to be powerful draws to going mono-colored, but don't shaft you if the deck you draft doesn't do the thing you want it to do. Also, this gives us the ability to give these commons more 'power' without making them broken when matched against other common creatures.

Alex expressed some concern that 10 manacyclers may be a bit much at common, but I don't think so. This set may not be Alara block, but we aren't too far off. Alara had 15 commons that help fix mana bases (plus the occasional elf). If we had 10 manacyclers, we would also have 15 cards that help fix manabases, but 10 of them wouldn't be permanent solutions. That sounds about right to me.

Excellent suggestion. I think I agree with everything you've said here.

My only problem is how to template the ability. I can't think of a sufficiently succinct way to phrase it so that it automatically gives two mana of the same colour on a monocolour card, but two mana of different colours on gold cards. It might have to be "Manacycling ", with the implicit as it is in morph; or if that's too problematic, even "Manacycling - ", which is pretty horrible.

But none of this should dissuade us from making the ability. Let templating worry about that bit.

I think it should be the latter, so that other cards can have "Manacycling - " (if it's multicolor) or "Manacycling - " (to help the allied colors, perhaps?).

Although, it could just be "Manacycling (, Discard this card: Add two mana in any combination of this card's colors to your mana pool. Draw a card.)".

Does this even need a separate keyword? "Cycling - , add to your mana pool." Though that would let you use it as cycling if you didn't care about the manafixing.

The way action keywords work, yes you do. You can't just append an action to a keyword.

I agree monocolor manacycling is a good idea.

I don't think it'll be hard to template it. (I think it makes sense to spell out the mana you get. I'd probably prefer that in reminder text, so it's clear you get the mana and a card, but any of the other options are probably fine. You could even say "Cycling 3. When you cycle this, add WW to your mana pool", although that's much much much less pretty, so lets not.)

I'm not sure if it should be on WWW creatures or not. On the one hand, that gives WWW creatures something to do if you don't draw the right lands. But on the other hand, surely WWW creatures are exactly what you'd like to cast with the cycling ability. And I'm worried that putting the "heavy color commitment" and the "manafixing" on the same card means there's no interesting tactical decision whether to go for power, diversity or consistency -- if the WWW card is strong and also color-fixing, you want it whatever you deck is.

ETA: SM, hm, you're right, manacycling is often better (and sometimes worse) than cycling , is that too good considering cycling is usually ?

I get what you're getting at, Jack, with not desiring to put the manacycling on the CCC cards. That bugs me, too, and I removed it from my argument to not draw attention. The problem is that this is a 'strategy vs. fun' argument. On one hand, it makes people's inner Melvins and Spikes happy that you have to invest to get your CCC spells to work. It also makes your inner Melvin and Spike happier if you manacycle a spashable card to set up a CCC card. Unfortunately, while that may make many players feel better when they sleep at night, it won't make the play experience better. It is possible that we'll frustrate the crap out of players by taking the best toys in our set (the CCCs) and putting them on too dangerous a precipice. Do you draft one? Well you'll probably lose because your deck won't come together. Don't draft one? Well you'll probably lose to someone who did draft it, and his deck came together. With that extreme looming over us, I'll happily lean on the side of fun.

I think I agree with your sentiment, but I wasn't sure if it was strategy versus fun, I think putting manacycling on WWW has pros and cons for both.

Strategy pro: you have to decide when it's worth splashing a WWW creature when you might otherwise not be able to. Strategy con: if WWW are strong AND cycle, they're almost ALWAYS good to have, so there's no skill.

Fun pro: Yay, awesome! Fun con: ^&*%! The only good card in my hand is WWW and I only have 2WW available. I know, I'll cycle it for mana, no, wait, THEN IT'S WASTED BECAUSE ALL MY OTHER SPELLS I CAN PLAY WITH WW SO I DON'T NEED IT. TIMMY HATE PARADOX, TIMMY SMASH PUNY GAME DESIGNERS GRRAAAAAAAAH! :)

I'm happy for it to be fun, but I'm worried that it might not be, and maybe the manacycling should be on some other cycle of cards (I'm not sure which). It may turn out not to matter, but curently it seems like the manacycling (as opposed to cycling) may only matter if you have two WWW creatures, or you've got a WWW and WW creature and only one plains?

Jack sez: "Fun pro: Yay, awesome! Fun con: ^&*%!"

Yeah, that's pretty much the entire argument in a nutshell. :D

Mmmm.. That IS a good argument.

Of course, what you really want is to draw a WWW of the cycle. So I'm now tempted to suggest the ability be changed to shuffle the card in, before you draw. Except that's too fiddly.

Silly thing is, of course, that if the card was just Cycling: ; people in that situation would (possibly regretfully) cycle it anyway; the extra mana can be safely thrown away. But it won't FEEL that way. Evil.

I've pretty much come to the decision that this is more a development issue than a design one. Really, the Manacycling ability can go on any simple card. We're going to toss it on the CCCs, but whoever is heading development is more than welcome to move it whereever he or she wants after that.

Although, I say this, and I start wondering if I want a cycle of simple spells like Spell Snip to toss Manacycling on. Gah! Why does my Myers-Briggs archetype include a 'P' instead of a 'J'?

This card needs to do something more interesting. A common 4/3 is reasonably good, but it doesn't feel like a big reward for paying CCC.

I don't think it can get much better than this, given Ashenmoor Gouger had a drawback. I think this was fine: 4/3 is bigger than white would normally get at 4 mana - you'd normally have to pay for it - so this felt pretty useful in playtesting.

Hah! I find it funny that a 6/1 for RRR is stupid good, but a 4/3 for WWW could use some more oomf. I feel you, though.