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Mechanic Monday: Out of Mana Returns, as Foretold

Hello and welcome back to Out of Mana, a limited run of Mechanic Mondays where I take a look at Magic: The Gathering abilities and postulate a way that mechanic could form the basis of its own game (or serve a larger role as a central mechanic anyhow) despite not having played Magic since high school.  There’s been a lot more, uh, armed insurrection since my last post, so, you know.  Not entirely sure this one’s going to be the well-reasoned erudite entry into the canon that I hoped for at the end of my last entry.  But at least it’s inspired by a more recent ability? And so hopefully it’s a more mature mechanical basis on which to build?

Circumventing Hand Size with Partially Purchased Actions

In GREEM, you have a default of one and a half actions per turn.  Cards half an action to prepare (play face-down from hand to tableau), half an action to complete (activate a face-down card from your tableau), or a full action to rush (activate a card directly from your hand).  You start with a maximum of three cards in your hand, but may have up to five cards in your tableau.

In case it wasn’t obvious, this is based off of Foretell, which I think is a TERRIFIC mechanic, I’m ALWAYS a fan of face-down cards waiting to be activated, and it feels like if Exile manipulation were formalized and simplified, because my primitive brain still thinks of exiled as “perma-killed”, instead of the liminal extradimensional space that it has become in the modern Magic meta.  Foretell is also uniquely under the player’s control, unlike Exile, and I love that it circumvents hand size, while also acting as an investment for a future action.  Breaking up hand and breaking up card cost; two incredible efficiency engines.  So I thought, hey, how about an engine builder that comes down to how much you want to space out or speed up your investments.  And maybe it could even have a deckbuilding element (like Magic) with stronger or weaker  cards contributing to penalties or benefits to your starting action pool (like the Chains handicaps from Keyforge).  Cool eh?

Well, til next week!

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