Cascade - New keyword ability

[Matt]

So I had this idea based off [card]Forbidden Ritual[/card] and Twincast and trying to balance the Storm mechanic. For now the working name is "doubleup" but that obviously is just a placeholder. It's about the depth of Affinity I would say: it could never be a big deep one like kicker, but it's also not Amplify or Scry.


"Doubleup [cost]" is an activated ability meaning "[cost]: put a copy of this spell on the stack. Play this ability only while this card is on the stack."

So for example check this out:

Doubleup Discard

Sorcery
Target player discards a card.
Doubleup

which is pretty basic. But, there's another layer of complexity:

Doubleup Wrath

Sorcery
Destroy all creatures.
Doubleup

So here's an example that plays up the uncounterability aspect without having a cumulative effect (i.e. it's not inflatable like discrad or burn would be). You can hit them with this, and if they counter it you can respond by hitting them with it again. Like Storm, it's a way to make spells pseudo-uncounterable without making the mechanic strictly an anti-blue hoser, which is the big problem with similar mechanics we've seen proposed here in the past. However, unlike Storm, it won't power up combo decks because you still have to pay for each copy.

You can even imagine a doubleup counterspell:

Stackmaster3000

Instant
Counter target spell.
Doubleup

It's kind of like kicker, except you kick the same spell. We could do variations like have the base spell be cheap with expensive doubleup, or vice versa, or balance them like my example above. We can also do nonmana costs, which opens it up to some nifty possibilities:

Doubleup Life Shunt

Instant
Target player gains 2 life.
Doubleup -- pay 3 life

which looks useless until you play a politicking multiplayer game.

It also satisfies one of the important things a keyword mechanic needs to do, which is prevent mana screw in limited formats. Every block needs to have some way of fixing mana screw - onslaugh had cycling, which can help you dig for land when your cards aren't castable. In Odyssey you can run extra lands because you'll have lots of things to do with excess cards later on, like feed a Wild Mongrel or gain threshold. In Mirrodin any extra artifacts could count for affinity, plus they had spellbombs and such that can "cycle". With doubleup, you are rewarded for having extra land in play, because you can get so much more out of your spells.

Obviously this is only usable on instants and sorceries, but that didn't stop flashback from being good and popular.


Current wording:

"Cascade [cost]" is an activated ability meaning "[cost]: put a copy of this spell on the stack. Play this ability only while this card is on the stack. You may choose new targets for the copy."

[Jacob Orlove]

I like this mechanic a lot. I'm already trying to figure out how to cost the obligatory "draw a card" one (1U/2 instant? U/1U sorcery? hmm). We can take a page from flashback and have some green ones that make tokens, too.

[Matt]

Do you think we should give these cards a subtype like Arcane was for splice?

As far as the draw spell goes, I think / works fine as an instant. It's better than Stroke of Genius at drawing 1 or 2 cards but worse thereafter, and Stroke wasn't too powerful.

[Jacob Orlove]

At that cost, it's strictly better than Inspiration, but personally I don't mind.

What use would the subtype serve?

[Matt]

Mostly it would tie them together, like how Sweep was supposed to do.

I'm not sure what it would do mechanically but I'm sure we could think of something.

[Jacob Orlove]

Isn't the keyword enough to tie them all together?

[Matt]

It could very well be.

[rvs]

It's probably enough. Kicker or Flashback cards didn't have a different subtype either, and this is a similar mechanic.

I like the mechanic a lot. Well done, Matt.

[Limbo]

Nice idea indeed. Keep up the good work private

[Ephraim]

You can pay the doubleup cost more than once, right? If that is the case, then the name may need to change to reflect that. "Boost" would probably work well.

[Machinus]

Under the current wording, as long as you have priority and the spell is on the stack, you can copy it as many times as you want.

[Matt]

Yes, I intended that it be activated as many times as you want and have mana to pay for it. The name DEFINITELY needs to change. "Inflate" is a possible choice.

[Jacob Orlove]

We could give it a les concrete name like "memory" or something--play off the fact that you already know how to cast the spell.

[Godder]

Fork?

Magnify? Extend? I quite like Boost, personally, but those are some options.

[jcb193]

Perservere?

Expertise?

Redux.....

[Machinus]

Xerox?

[Ephraim]

Magnify might be okay, but I think it sounds a little bit too much like "Amplify."

[Norm4eva]

Flood.  It's reminiscient of Storm and fills the stack up, like a flood of spells. Cascade sounds good too.

[Godder]

Cascade would work, plus, I like the word ... I got magnify from a thesaurus entry for boost. Said thesaurus also proposed amplify .

[Slay]

Is doubleup really all that bad of a mechanic name? It's short and to the point, a lot like Kicker.

Other than that, my vote goes to Cascade if we scrap doubleup.
-Slay

[Ephraim]

It isn't to the point though. You don't just double these spells. Sometimes you triple or quadruple them and so on. Better to give in a name that doesn't suggest that you can only use the ability once.

[Jacob Orlove]

I really like Cascade.

[Godder]

I also really like Cascade (as mentioned). Might I suggest that this thread be stickied, and that it be used as a place to develop the mechanic further with some basic concepts? Alternatively, this could be given a separate sub-forum, depending on how much we intend to develop it further.

Some additional ideas:

Gold cards
Cards that trigger off the mechanic (e.g. Astral Slide)
Cards that affect D'Up costs (e.g. Fluctuator)
Option of different costs (e.g. Crystal Shard)
Different colour payments (e.g. Ray of Revelation)

Nonmana costs, such as:

Sacrifice a permanent of an appropriate type
Tap an untapped permanent of the appropriate type
Discard a card (either any card, or an appropriate card type)
Opponent draws a card
Opponent gains life
Opponent returns card(s) from graveyard to hand
Opponent untaps a permanent of their choice
Opponent puts a token creature into play
Skip a particular step/phase or even the next turn
Pay life
Remove cards in the graveyard from the game

Various combinations of the above .

[Jacob Orlove]

One important aspect of this keyword is that we don't want to mine out all of the possibilites immediately. It's much more interesting to take a good look at the basics of the mechanic, and then bring it back in future sets, instead of having a whole bunch of different approaches with less coherence and depth. Also, saving design space for the future makes sense if we want to keep making cards indefinitely (and we do). There's no reason to rush.

That doesn't mean that people can't create cards with those various approaches, just that they probably won't make it into our sets for a little while.

[Rabbit Scribe]

Yes, I intended that it be activated as many times as you want and have mana to pay for it. The name DEFINITELY needs to change. "Inflate" is a possible choice.

"Cascade" is the best name so far for the mechanic, but somebody should use "concatenation" in a card name.

[Matt]

So far cascade is the winner by a wide margin, and I'll sticky this as suggested.

[Machinus]

Hey, I used cascade in my DU card and I hadn't even read this thread. Good choice

[Godder]

Was it intended that new targets could be chosen for the copies?

[Jacob Orlove]

Was it intended that new targets could be chosen for the copies?

I think it's pretty obvious that it was. Otherwise, a lot of his example cards become fairly pointless (like the counterspell).

[Godder]

I thought as much, but in that case, something to that effect should be mentioned in the 'rulebook' entry at the top of the thread.