See Challenge # 157.

It occurred to me I hadn't done one of the most obvious variants on spellbeast mechanics. This tutors up a spell, but at an unpredictable time.

Is "you could cast for" ok in reminder text? I was aiming for, something costing 3U or "less", but including color. So mana cost 3U, 2U, 1U, U, 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0. But not "no mana cost" and not 2UU. That seems to avoid some problems, and be more intuitive.

This is very flavorful, but it might be a bit too strong.
Maybe "that you could cast if you had to spend?" Or "you could cast with in your mana pool?" What a weird thing to try to word correctly.

This is very flavorful, but it might be a bit too strong.
Maybe "that you could cast if you had to spend?" Or "you could cast with in your mana pool?" What a weird thing to try to word correctly.

It's okay for reminder text. The rules can handle the correct wording and specifications - it would be similar to "If you reduce the mana cost by you are left with ".

The only problem is that this would not take into account additional costs that are not mana costs which are hard to integrate into the wording.

Also searching your whole library is an issue of another sort. And this is pure card advantage - making this quite possibly rare - and giving this mechanic the "free spell" problem that you are potentially making the card stronger by increasing its cost or making it more color-heavy.

The question to me is less "could this be made under the rules?" as much as "should this be?" Though the idea is enticing.

You could also specify the cost in the ability instead of using the mana cost if you needed more flexibility.

I don't know that this is inherently rare. Treasure Keeper did basically this. That was a top-tier uncommon for its set, but partly because it was colourless and could go into any deck.

Additional costs aren't a problem either, because casting the spell without paying its mana cost you still pay the additional costs. So either you can pay the additional costs, in which case you do, or you can't, in which case you fail to cast the spell and it gets shuffled away.

But this mechanic is definitely inherent card advantage, making it very hard to balance for common. Even a 1/1 for would be able to cast Brainstorm when it dies. That's possibly okay though - some mechanics, like imprint and aftermath, are still fun enough to print even though they don't work at common.

It should probably be a slightly less efficient creature, to piggy-back a spell on. You might not get to choose when you get the spell; but getting to choose which one it is is rather nice.

And, huh. It can get sorceries; but probably at a time when you can't cast sorceries? I guess end-of-combat isn't much better than main-2 for casting sorceries; so probably not a huge advantage, just an oddity.

It would be ok as a niche mechanic, but I'd still like to see a version which could work at lower rarities. Eg. if it searched but you still had to pay the mana cost. Or if it only searched the top N cards.

I also think in limited (which is where rarities matter) it may be hard to get the right spells to cast with these creatures. The creature is most likely to die in combat, which means you get less utility from a lot of spells, and you have specific color requirements. I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes, but I wanted that to be some of the trade-off, how much you were willing to stretch your deck to include instant/sorceries of the right cost.

Yes, I might expect this to say "Reveal from the top until you find a", except that once you're filtering down to "instant or sorcery that you can cast for 3U or less" that's probably not much faster.