Tom had a comment that Manacycling doesn't do what we think it does... and he's right. Currently, the mana that gets added to your pool is in the reminder text only. It doesn't really make any sense to have two cards say the exact same thing, but have different reminder texts.

His solution was to have the card say "When you cycle this card", but that feels bad to me, and would be yet another line of text on a lot of cards competing for the space. It does seem that we can make these cards say "Manacycling - , Discard this card from your hand: Add to your mana pool. Draw a card." Or some other idea along these lines.

It completely does work to have multiple cards with the same ability but different reminder text. See Amplify (Aven Warhawk vs Canopy Crawler vs etc), sunburst (Pentad Prism vs Etched Oracle), or suspend (creatures with suspend gain haste). We discussed this over at Senate Jurist.

Yes, but in those examples, the rules text was supporting the reminder text. For Amplify, for example, the rules text asks you to look at the base creature's creature type line. With Manacycling, what are we looking at? The casting cost? Do we always want manacycling to be becomes CC or CD in the future? What if we wanted to print a white manacylcer that added GU to your pool? What if we wanted to print becomes GWU on an artifact?

If you removed the reminder text, a player should be able to tell you what Manacycling means on this card. As it stands right now, Manacycling does it's thing, then adds two mana to your mana pool which either matches the color of the card, if the card has only one color, or is of both colors of the card if the card has two colors. That's... um... confusing. It's confusing because it does something different based upon whether the card is multicolored or not. And it locks us into using manacycling that way, always. It would be nice to see the occasional manacycler in real Magic do a become , for example.

I've not played with these, but when I read them, I worry I keep forgetting that you cycle into a card, not just into mana. But I hope it's ok when you look at the card. jmg, was that a problem ever with you and Tom?

We have yet to really decide what manacycling should do other than on two-colour cards (we had some good ideas, but not really tried them). I agree it should be reasonably evident.

One possibility would be to have a graphic "manacycling →" or whatever, which should fit on one line, so the resultant mana is always specified. (It should still always follow a rule, but it solves the problem of players not knowing what a 3-colour manacycler does, and obviously could be extended to monocolour manacyclers later).

Unfortunately, that arrow looks like an underscore, but I get what you're after.

On the subject of forgetting one thing or the other, it was usually the reverse. The thing I had to remind myself was to draw a card. If I needed to play one early, it was the mana I was really looking forward to. Later on, I'd just cast the spell. I don't really see this as a big problem... people will need the card for both reasons, forget one thing or the other occasionally, and the fact that they're vascilating back and forth often will remind them what they're forgetting.

Cycling by itself can be hard to remember sometimes. I don't know how many times I've cycled at end of turn, then drew my card on my turn, effectively discarding a card for no reason.

Huh. You seem to have moved from "This doesn't work" to "This is locked in to work the way it currently does". That's quite a shift of the goalposts.

You claimed "Manacycling doesn't do what we think it does" and that "It doesn't really make any sense to have two cards say the exact same thing, but have different reminder texts". But when I answered those points, it now seems like that wasn't actually your objection at all. Can you clarify what is the problem as you see it and what you're hoping for?

FWIW, Manacycling was originally designed to only go on multicolour cards, and to give you precisely one mana of each colour the card has. But then people wanted monocolour manacyclers, and thought it'd be less confusing to have it always give you two mana than to have the amount of mana vary according to the card's colours.

Sorry, I channeled my friend in my first post, who had a major problem with it. Very good of you to call me on changing the goalposts.

That being said, it doesn't mean the current goal post I set up isn't valid. We're locking us into one definition of manacycling. When we inevitably come back and try to make an expansion of this set, we're going to find that we can't riff off of manacycling... well... we won't be able to riff off of manacycling in that way at least.

You know what? Let's table this. It's really just a templating issue and it's going to pop up much later on anyways. What's the point in having a discussion of it now, only to have people change their opinions when we we're finalizing the set? It's good that the objection has been noted, but it's not going to have any effect on how we test the game... just how we present the game when it is finalized... so we're probably better off letting this one stew.

Seems reasonable :) Yeah, there are several ways we could write the Comp Rules for manacycling at the moment. We really don't need to go there yet. Let's bear it in mind as a discussion topic for a month or few down the line.

There's nothing Manacycling does that can't be expressed as "Cycling - , add to your mana pool", other than the fact that costs can be paid in any order so it can be played as cycling .

For some reason I had assumed that manacycling added all of the card's colored mana symbols to your pool.

Heh. SM's point is accurate, but not exactly comprehensible to new players. Link's interpretation is indeed the other interpretation of manacycling; we hadn't had to distinguish between them before monocolour-manacycling came along and people wanted that to make CC.

We could make sure to put mono manacyclers on WW cards, and then both interpretations would agree (although not "one mana of each color this card has"), and we can avoid deciding which is the official interpretation :)

I honestly don't know which I prefer. At first I didn't like "each coloured mana symbol" because I didn't think it was intuitive, but now I like it about equally with the others because it's the simplest to understand once it's explained.

I think "one of each colour of this card's colours" is best conceptually, but it doesn't work well on mono cards (cycling for is rarely going to pleasing). (That it gives a bonus to 4-color cards is neutral to me -- it's interesting, but a little complicated.)

I think "2 mana, one of each color, or two of the same, or something else for >= 2 colours" is easiest mechanically (you always get two mana), but hard to explain the exact rules where you get WW for a W card and WR for a WR card.

Alternatively, it could be "two mana in any combination of this card's colours (or for colourless)"?

Oh, "two mana in any combination of this card's colours" is a remarkably sensible suggestion. Interestingly it lets Senate Jurist give you , or , any of which might be useful in the set.

Yeah, you could use it as mono fixing if you have a splash. I'm not sure if that's good or not.

I do like the latest suggestion. I don't know if it chunks up the reminder text, but probably not by much. I do think it unfortunate that becomes wouldn't pop up later down the line (well, unless it was on a red card), but I can live with that.