Rewards for Bottoming

There's nothing salacious about this post headline. Nothing at all.

Anyway, I washed out of the GDS3 competition in the multiple choice test, as expected. For fun, over at Goblin Artisans, I attempted the card design phase of the competition, which required you to make 10 cards for each color pairing, demanding various rarities and card types.

I ended up with blue and red at common, which screamed "instant" to me. It screamed that because there are soooo many blue/red instants and sorceries already. I wondered about doing something different with scry and came up with this.

While technically, scry could be in red, I decided that the mechanic of something happening if you put a card on the bottom of your deck felt very blue. I wonder how much design space there is there. I'd love to playtest this to see how much a player thinks about whether to put a card on the bottom so that he or she could deal damage.

And I was thinking about how the concept could fit in the Overgrowth set. I've been struggling with coming up with a solid blue legend (partly because I've been struggling with blue and white's identities in this set as a whole).

I genuinely cannot tell from looking at this whether she's overpowered or underpowered or just fine.

Edit: Days later I realize I put "deck" in the text of both spells instead of "library" like an idiot. Oy.

U/R Ability Word: Runic

I suspect I'm not the first wannabe designer to develop this ability word enter-the-battlefield concept.

Runic: When this spell is cast, if you've cast a sorcery or instant this turn already, there's some sort of a bonus.

Right now I have it concepted as blue/red for the obvious reason of them being the two colors who care most about sorceries and instants. And while it could appear in any type of spell, right now I have thematically typed as appearing on creatures only (and maybe artifacts). The idea is that, much like prowess, these creatures have a specific connection to magical energy and therefore benefit when spells are being flung around.

Very simple here. Very easy to understand. It is a very familiar template for enter-the-battlefield triggers. You could probably take every raid-triggered mechanic on blue/red creatures from Ixalan and retemplate them with this.

But I did hit an interesting snag with the templating on this blue creature:

The wording on this one is really awkward. I deliberately wanted this person to recover only the sorcery or instant cast this turn (essentially retaining the spell that triggered runic in the first place). But technically you don't need the "if you cast a sorcery or instant this turn" text, because it is written so that you can only recover something you've cast this turn. But if I leave that text out, it's a break from the templating. 

Maybe this isn't even a "runic" creature at all? It's just a creature that lets you recover a spell you cast that turn. The ability word doesn't actually do anything here.

I don't think this mechanic would work well in the Overgrowth set. I feel like it competes with conceptual space with the mutate mechanic, which causes creatures to grow due to exposure to magic.