Epic Cards - Failed Cards and Mechanics in MTG 

Or have it ramp, so it copies itself an additional time for each turn since you originally cast it.

Or here is another way: Make so that instead of not allowing to play any spells, it restrcts the player to playing a single card type (plus lands) An example of this can be a card like Endless Swarm with the restriction of only playing enchantments, where the goal would be to have a continous supply of little tokens and then the player uses enchantments to buff them

I agree, or giving it uncounterable would be nice. I like the design space ones like the enchantment tutor every turn give, but it's such a narrow design space. A cool concept though

Bit wordy though, could be hard to fit that on the card along with the actual spell effect. It's got technical problems too. It doesn't stop you from casting instants during the upkeep in addition to the epic spell. And the wording "other than the copied spell" sounds like you could cast multiple copies of the epic spell in one upkeep. Exiling it isn't needed either to make it work. I get what it's supposed to do, though. Also enables the option to play multiple epic spells, and decide during each upkeep which you want. How about this: "Epic (You can't play spells for the rest of the game. During each of your following upkeep, choose one: Be able to play spells as normal until your next upkeep. Or put a copy of this spell on the stack without its epic ability.)" I think that does what you meant. Still wordy though.

God I miss extended...

Expanded is Extended in Pokemon. The many channels are starting to get fused :p

@@Folfire dude also mispronounces words like he’s getting paid to, so there’s that.

@@OberynTheRedViper coming from MtGGoldfish SaffronOlive channel, mispronunciations seem to sell a lot tbh :)

It wouldn't be a hirumared video without three or four easily avoidable mistakes

Wasn't his name "Umezawa" and not "Umazawa"... yeah i can see the miracle part. I probably would mess up of the "Jitte"

lol.. as soon as I read "it's a miracle", I was immediately confused thinking you were referring to the mechanic from Avacyn Restored.

I loved the idea of the Arcane / Splice mechanic, but we all know that never took off.

@@Liliana_the_ghost_cat Jitte I was more confident on because I pronounced it wrong for so long the correct way sticks out. That 'a' was a 1 in 3 for me; 'i' being the other contender.

@@jessesutton7985 i see

Yeah if you can copy the epic cards and get mutiple casts per upkeep with some of these cards they would be really, really powerful like dominion. The black one could deck people out faster, but would still be eh. The red one could be really good at least at burning out people maybe. Green one just sucks though, 1/1's are easy to deal with.

@@dstreetz91 Once ran this ridiculous combo that involved Omniscience, Enter the Infinite, some copy spells, Leyline of Anticipation, and Neverending Torment, felt fantastic dumping all of my opponents deck in the most unexpected way that they did not see coming. You can do some thousand year storm combo with Undying Flame as well and basically ask whether your opponent wants to play guess the mana cost the game for like 5min. The Green one is only good pretty much when you can get it on top of another epic spell that is already winning you the game and you would like some things to shield you a little. However the most "fun" way is definitely playing hivemind on top of it, now they are locked in here with you. Which, you can build a specific deck meant to pull this off so your opponent benefits very little from the epic spell, or one where you will definitely benefit more. ...playing these too often will probably have your friend count decrease.

Wouldn't that make it hardly a downside for control decks, as they spend most of their mana and cards on their opponents turn? Though limiting you to no spells until your next upkeep would be perhaps too severe, as well.

@@Soumein Definitely too strong if it allows you to cast instants on your opponents turns. But I like the idea of it being a recurring choice to not cast other spells that can be stopped at any time. Something like this: Epic - Until your next upkeep, you can’t play spells. At the beginning of your next upkeep, you may copy this spell. That allows for them to be copied 2-3 times until you’ve drawn some other spell worth casting.

Or just make it so that you can only cast once spell per turn after you casted your Epic spell. It’s still a massive down side, but it fixes most of the problems that come with Epic spells. You don’t just sit there any do nothing while your opponent feels like playing vs AI.

You also can’t cast instants. 702.50a. Epic represents two spell abilities, one of which creates a delayed triggered ability. "Epic" means "For the rest of the game, you can't cast spells," and "At the beginning of each of your upkeeps for the rest of the game, copy this spell except for its epic ability. If the spell has any targets, you may choose new targets for the copy." See rule 707.10.

@@theemathas we're talking about changing that, not working within it. So it isn't a valid rule for this discussion.

I agree, even Eternal Dominion can be too weak at times. If it let you get two cards it might be good enough

Or here is another way: Make so that instead of not allowing to play any spells, it restrcts the player to playing a single card type (plus lands) An example of this can be a card like Endless Swarm with the restriction of only playing enchantments, where the goal would be to have a continous supply of little tokens and then the player uses enchantments to buff them

Then again it's 2 mana per copy so good luck with that.

Interesting. Could be a huge feelbad if you made someone's counterspell Epic though. That being said, I'd much rather have infinite mana payoffs do this than just burn everybody with Walking Ballista.

Yeah, Kamigawa had a Maro theme. That's what sweep and epic were supposed to be played with.

Whoa holy CRAP that IS an interesting idea lol. How does that end up working out though? Do you actually get to use all 5 every Upkeep? That part is confusing for me lol. Either way, I love that kind of rule-bending insanity in my Magic games.

Yeah making them instant speed so you can cast more in response to each other is one way to make them worthwhile. Other way is to use fork/twincast/other such cards on one really good epic spell to win that way.

The same set also introduced channel, which lets you pay a cost and discard the card to do a stated effect. In this original iteration of the mechanic, it was all creatures that had some tap ability, or you could channel them for a more powerful version of the tap ability. One had 3u and tap to counter a spell unless its controller paid 2, or channel for 3u to counter a spell unless its controller paid 4. Notably, since the channel ability isn't casting a spell, epic doesn't prevent you from activating it. However, like a lot of the parasitic mechanics in Kamigawa block, there just wasn't enough support to make it work, and even if there was it was still just too clunky to be worth it.

Yes, every card that isn't a land is a spell. So you're putting yourself at a huge risk by using these. Even if you have the mana to cast them, they're not always good depending on the situation. They're kind of like mass land destruction, they don't really affect the game state apart from "locking it in" for the forseeable future.

Back in like 2008 you could buy simplified chinese Kamigawa boxes on ebay for like $35-$40 dollars, it was so insanely cheap. Mostly because almost all the cards in the block were unplayable at the time or worth very little except for umezawa's jitte. It was pretty poor just because almost all the mechanics in the block were only good with cards from that block. Stuff like splice onto arcane when arcane didn't exist anywhere else.

I've played it with Yahenni's Expertise which gives all creatures -3/-3 until end of turn and lets you cast bitter ordeal for free. It's not as good as it seems. It CAN be bonkers but it's not consistent.

@@williamdrum9899 Bitter Ordeal is a nice payoff for going infinite with Sharuum in Commander but the mechanic is pretty silly in practice. Interesting sure, I'll give you that but cards like Brought Back or effects like Blood Artist do a pretty great job at covering what Gravestorm would hope to do without needing all the ridiculous tracking.

I always find spell copying effects to just cost too much mana to be of any real use, it just seems like there's never a good time to use them at all.

The problem is, they have to be win conditions, but not win too fast. (If I win on the turn I play an epic spell, it doesn't matter.) Making X X/X tokens where X is the number of cards in your hand might be something. Epic spells in general want to be abused the way you already abuse their non-epic counterparts (e.g., Endless Swarm would be like, I don't know, Spontaneous Generation, so like all other token makers, you're looking at sac outlets, entry triggers, death triggers, attack triggers, things that count how many creatures you have, and something like Kyren Negotiations, and of course anthems), but the difference is, you can't play them normally. You can't even play Collective Unconscious or March of Souls to exploit your superior numbers after playing Endless Swarm. Oh, did I mention that even with this downside, Endless Swarm costs twice as much as Spontaneous Generation? And that's probably the second-easiest (after Enduring Ideal) to exploit; after all, you can still use your mana to make more tokens, provided you have something like, well, at the time, it would be Nemata, Grove Guardian (which wasn't Standard-legal, but he's seriously all we had; today I would say Jade Mage or Ant Queen, possibly Mobilization...Heliod, God of the Sun if you want to exploit enchantments, or if you're just desperate).

Oh yeah I'm thinking impact tremors and fiery emancipation as a combo with it. That's 42 damage if you have 7 cards

You absolutely can play all of the Epic spells in response to each other if you can cast Sorceries at flash speed and have waaaay too much mana. (Or an Omniscience, I guess). Then, you get all 5 every upkeep. Very funny.

Arcane is probably never coming back. Some of the people at WotC have spoken on splice, and mentioned that despite their worries, the mechanic is actually kind of fine if it isn't parasitic. Which is why we saw a splice onto instant card in one of the Modern Horizons sets. So we may see splice return at some point, but unless they find some other interesting use for arcane, I doubt they'll bring it back.

@@fwg1994 Its a shame because they could literally put Arcane in most sets without much of an issue. There is actually really little support for Arcane so there is a lot things you can do. Example: a creature with whenever you cast an instant or sorcery Scry 1, if it was an Arcane draw a card. They could easily slot Arcane into an set with a heavy spell theme like Strixhaven. Arcane is something that has a lot of potential but they actually have to do something with it.

Green would get slightly better, black would clock faster, white might get better, red and blue would just shrug.

I like this idea. It would put a clock on your opponent much more effectively than it does now

Or only be able to cast one spell a turn. That way you could still counter things that threaten your board.