This thread may be used to suggest new flavorful names to replace the Instant card type (if you agree that it wants a new name). As you can see on the card that I made for this topic, the first name I came up with is Fastcast.

More importantly, I do not suggest to turn Instant into a supertype which means "you may play this card at instant speed". I'm now against that idea and do not recommend that usage for any card game. The speed aspect may seem a superficial reason to split two functionally similar card types, but it is not. In fact, that speed is a fundamental reason to keep Instants as its own card type. Permanent types rarely need to be cast at instant speed, but for one-time effects, it is in fact its own category and thus not only deserves its own card type, but smooth gameplay and templating demands it.

Interrupt?
Reaction
Spontaneous

those are still too functional and too specific and don't give the magical feel. like Space: the Convergence article used Strategy and Tactics to replace Sorcery and Instant, respectively. So the new name for Instant should be a magical counterpart to Sorcery.

Why are you against Instant being a supertype? It means that Flash could be removed from the game. I'd actually be for it in a reinvention of Magic.

as i explained already, it's useful for card games to have separate categories of one-time effects. just as there are many types of permanents. moreover, the removal of flash is irrelevant. it shows that lack of such a a supertype doesn't prevent permanents to be cast at instant speed. it also takes up too much space on the type line, which is more restricted in text than rules text box.

changing instant into supertype doesn't reinvent magic one bit. on the contrary, it would more likely hurt the long established flavor and mechanics built on the distinction of sorceries and instants. not to mention the huge errata and confusion that would come about for negligible benefits.

In no way do I think that in real Magic Flash should become a supertype. I was saying that if Magic was built from scratch, I could see myself supporting making Flash a supertype instead of an ability. There's no reason for there to be more than one type of "spell." There are different permanent types because the flavorful and mechanical difference is relevant. Instants could easily be sorceries with flash with little mechanical relevance and perhaps even with improved "flavor."

Magical terminology is somewhat lacking in terms for fast magic. The word 'Cantrip' is already overloaded in mtg.

Could go the other way, and have sorcery for instant, and sorceries become rituals, chants, or one of the other many words for long preparation magic.

You say "permanent types rarely need to be cast at instant speed", but there's a long history of creatures and other permanents that do have flash, for good reasons: the original King Cheetah was interesting enough, but there've been plenty more compelling ones since then, from Celestial Crusader to Grifter's Blade, from Leonin Bladetrap to Guardian's Magemark, Cho-Manno's Blessing to Sulfur Elemental, and so on and so on.

So you claim that instant-speed sorceries "is in fact its own category" and "smooth gameplay and templating demands it"; I'm with you on that. But I don't see why you don't think that instant-speed creatures, artifacts or enchantments aren't also "their own category".

I agree with Link: If Magic was being redesigned from the ground up, then I think Flash (or some other name) should clearly be a supertype. In real Magic, I don't think there's much that can be done. "Instant speed" and "whenever you could cast an instant" are sufficiently much part of the game's terminology that I suspect any change to the word "instant" now would be even less likely to stick than the renaming of EDH.

More suggestions then:
Folkcraft, Witchcraft, Ceremonial (for the slow side)... Gnosis? Isn't quite right; but suposedly captures 'instinctual' which can be levered into meaning speed.

comparing fewer than 200 cards with flash versus over 1700 instants is a joke. flash is a bonus thus dont need a supertype. you can make a set without flash permanents. but you cant make a set without instants. even portals proved that with a very clunky workaround. instant speed one-time effects is a crucial part of any good card game. hence the original creators had the forethought to separate slow and fast effects into their own card types. consolidating them would be a bad idea.

you shouldnt consolidate card types just for the sake of it. technically one only needs 2 card types: permanent and effect. would that make the game better? just because theyre similar doesnt mean they should share the same type or supertype. else we could have a supertype for cards that make mana. after all, mana-making creatures and artifacts should share a supertype with lands because they share a similar ability.

actually there was another original card type for one-time effects that was later consolidated when timing rules were streamlined. now i wonder if we could reintroduce a third type, not necessarily of the same kind as the obsolete type. mana source was interesting; at one point they were interrupts. perhaps a new type that doesnt use the stack and cant be responded to (removes all interaction)? oh yea i was also thinking of an Ability type that is not a spell, but does go on the stack.

i scanned through several thesauruses, but really cant find a good replacement for instant. strategy and tactic are perfect for modern or space setting. but there's no similar pairing for magic. cantrip sounds okay but not very familiar. maybe just "trick" would do.

Ability kinda works; Power? Mystic? Gift?

All already kinda overloaded, though.

Incidentally, the drive to unify flash to remove a card type is just part of a natural desire to categorise and orthogonalise. If flash-creatures means creatures at instant speed; well, flash-sorcery should mean sorceries at instant speed. And yes, I'm aware that 'at instant speed' becomes a very silly term in that case :)

Humm, here's a very non-magical suggestion: Use the ":" symbol, which is what intrinsically means "Whenever you like"

Or how about just flat use the word "Magic"? Leaving "Sorcery" to take on the baggage of slow. (Or rename that ritual or something)

I point out that ArsMagica never came up with anything better than "Spontaneous" for fast magic. And they tried really hard to steal words from both real magical traditions and fake ones alike.

'Hex' or 'Glam' (as in short for Glamour) work for me. You kind of want the word to be short, to infer the speed of the spell. Though, I got to admit that "I glam that" doesn't sound so great. "Hex in response?" sounds fine, though.

As for "you cant make a set without instants", I'd argue that. I think Magic is better for including instants, but only by a small margin. Truth is, it really chunks up the game, and causes no end of rules issues. I think Hearthstone does a good job showing that a game without instants can be, if not better, then at least much faster.

As for the concept of removing "Instant" and just making everything with Instant become a sorcery with Flash... it's an idea. It's not even hard to make backwards compatible. Just errata all cards that currently say 'Instant' to now read 'Sorcery with Flash'. Future cards would probably only care about Flash or Sorceries. Some cards would end up better/worse, like Blood Oath, but it isn't like we haven't seen rules updates do that before.

I kind of wish there was an appealing way to do it in reverse, where Instants would be made 'sorcery speed'. I know no one would like that, and I'm not really suggesting it, but it would help stop people from looking at cards like Divine Light and making the obvious mistake.

i havent tried hearthstone, but i read some opinions that hearthstone is nowhere as deep as magic. not surprising if it means easier to program AI opponents.

every game needs reactive effects. whether that entails a whole type is arguable. but magic would not be as deep and interesting if they didn't recognize fast spells as its own category.

as for rules issues, everything has rules issues. name one type or mechanic that has no issues. should we dumb down just because of that? creatures probably cause the most issues. the power/toughness layers is a huge issue. do we remove P/T, too? color has issues, mana has issues, land has issues, i could go on and on and nitpick. but at the end of the day, having instant spells are a greater boon than not. those games without instant effects almost always seem so uninteractive and less strategic overall.

the errata is what causes the most confusion, mainly because the text on physical still exists in the old form. regardless, there is not much benefit to replace instant with sorcery with flash. on the contrary, it would be worse. wasting valuable rules text, massive errata. and not just one or two cards per set, it's 15% of all cards every set. that space would better used for the main effect or reminder text of new keywords.

"Hearthstone is nowhere as deep as Magic."

Certainly true. Alpha is nowhere as deep as Magic currently is, too.

"Magic would not be as deep and interesting if they didn't recognize fast spells..."

I doubt that. If we assume an equal amount of spells, with an equal amount of variance, then we can assume the game would be just as 'deep'. Adding instant speed adds a certain type of complexity, but there's a limit to the amount of complexity the game can have before players are turned off. We'd just trade all the complexity in instant speed for a different complexity that the game doesn't currently indulge in. A tech tree, for example.

Just to be clear, I like Instants, and I like what they add to the game. I just don't think they're all that sacred. The vast majority of games do no involve interrupting people on the opponent's turn, and many of those games are very interactive. For many new players, instants are a turn off, since they stop the action (and all this casting at end of turn stuff just looks weird.) To us, it's no big deal, since we've been playing the game so long. It's a problem when learning to play the game, though, since the stack isn't intuitive. When I talk about rules complications, I'm talking about things like "When can I respond to what you did, and what happens when you want to respond back." That's hard to nail down for new players. "What does being a blue creature mean?" isn't hard.

"How does combat work?" certainly is hard, though. That and how instants work are the two big boogeymen of the game. They're also what makes Magic, Magic. I wouldn't remove either of them, since that would cut out the identity of the game. If I was to make Magic from scratch, though? I don't know. Maybe I'd keep it, and maybe I wouldn't. I'd probably be playing with a lot of different designs, so it's kind of hard to say that I wouldn't find something else I liked better. It is a very 1990s design. A lot of 21st century games don't do that.

As for your last point, I agree. I think it would be more annoying than useful. That said, I don't like "Enchantment - Aura" preferring the type "Enchant Creature". Wotc seems to disagree with us on this point, at least on some level.

Open a thesaurus for synonyms of sorcery:

• incantation
• jinx
• invocation

If starting over from zero I would use 'sorcery' for the fast spells and 'ritual' for the slow type since it sounds more like it needs preparation.