Cycle of gold creatures.

Look at this reminder text spanning eight lines! o.o

6 or 7 lines in my font. But... yeah, this is not very suitable for common, is it?

It would be a little bit better without the extra ability (the death trigger). Once people have played with archaeology a bit, they can shortcut it.

­:/ damn, I really don't want to change the mechanic, but since many people have already said Archaeology is too wordy I might have to anyway.

I honestly don't think it is a complicated mechanic, it's just that you need to spell out every step, even if they are totally basic.

Reminder text doesn't have to be the full rules text. So you can trim some lines - but yeah, this just doesn't feel like a common mechanic (and thus, doesn't feel like a major set mechanic)

If you do want to try it out as a mechanic at common, then you definitely need to keep as few other words as possible on the cards with it. This thing's death trigger is two lines (plus the unnecessary extra blank line you've put between the two abilities), and that's completely unusable at common. If the only thing on the card is Archaeology, that would look a bit better.

However it's got another strike against it as well which is that it enables repetitive game states. In a decent draft deck, for example, this card can probably turn any dead draw into a kill spell. (Say I've got kill spells at 2, 3 and 4 CMC. It's very likely 3 cards from the top of my deck will include one of those CMCs.) That's not the level of recursion you want to allow at common, or probably at all.

I wouldn't want it to be a solo mechanic on every card, that would quite defeat the purpose of a "basic" mechanic in a set :/

How about a Dredge variant though?

Archaeology 2 (Put the top 2 cards of your library into your graveyard, then return a card with converted mana cost 1 or less from your graveyard to your hand)

I know this can probably be abused in some Legacy or Vintage deck, but that's no real concern of mine. It's rather important that it can't be abused in Limited or a "regular" Standard environment.

There's really no way kto know until you've played with it to be sure how well it plays.

It's weird that the parameter does double duty here. Wouldn't it be enough to bury one card with each archaeology action? Or alternatively change the cmc restriction to something else?

I remember suggesting for some other set "Dig for (Treasure)s (Put the top card of your library into your graveyard. Then you may return a (Treasure) card from your graveyard to your hand.)"

Would that work here? Dig for creatures? Dig for artifacts etc.?

Is it really that weird? I thought it quite simple, because that way it makes it easier to price the ability since it doesn't depend on where it's added too.

Dig is pretty cool I must say, but possibly too strong? You can manipulate it quite easily depending on what type of card you get back, which should make it very hard to implement.

Right now I might even substitute it with Delve, which is also fitting for the flabour, even though I do not like it that much.

Both have "Things get repeatable and boring" problems. But try it, see how it works out.

I think Delve is even more boring as a mechanic as it's so bland to me. Like in KTK, Delve and therefore Sultai had the weakest identity in my opinion. Delve cards can be incorporated in basically every deck regardless of its plan since everybody gets stuff into their graveyard. The same is not true with archaeology though, I don't find it that splashable.

Regarding the discussion regarding "repeatable state" mechanics: If we compare this to some existing mechanics in M:tG that recur cards, there is a notable difference between this mechanic and those. Mechanics like Dredge and Retrace, for example, go on cards that can recur themselves, and therefore the cards that use these mechanics can be balanced around. (To a certain extent, at least, we can see how well that went with Dredge...) However, cards that use this mechanic recur other cards, which would be more difficult to balance around. [edited]