Rethinking Reave

Over at Goblin Artisans we're all invited to do our own entries for the Great Designer Challenge 3. For the challenge to create a new mechanic, I brought in Reave, but I changed the way it worked. For that challenge, rather than being a graveyard version of Revolt, it was a passive ability on the card that triggered when it left the graveyard.

An example:

If anything, I made Reave even more parasitic, and I knew that. I made this variation with the idea that it would be part of a set with a graveyard manipulation theme. In this case, I conceived the mechanic as part of a return to Amonkhet.

But Overgrowth is not a set with a theme of graveyard manipulation, and so the mechanic needs to be much more accessible. I was still feeling that the version that I've been fiddling with here is still too parasitic to function, especially in a limited setting. So instead of it just being something to check, it's something you can trigger when casting. My current version of Reave for this set looks like this:

What about this instead?

Essentially Reave becomes a variant of Kicker, giving you the opportunity to pay the cost as part of the spell.

Note how I've worded the damage boost so that it doesn't say "If you've paid the Reave cost." That's deliberate. So you can pay the Reave cost on one spell during your turn and then all spells you cast that turn that check for the graveyard-exit condition will get the bonus. This means recursion to your hand or battlefield will also work. It also means that you can create combo dynamics--other spells and abilities that remove cards from your graveyard that aren't specifically Reave costs will trigger the second ability.

So my dragon for the set currently looks like this:

But it could instead just be this:

Fundamentally, it operates the exact same way. I'm just taking the ability word away because it's no longer necessary. Reave is now a type of additional cost action, not an ability word. I think this is both a more elegant presentation and also a way to manifest it at common more easily.

I have two templates here, though, one that allows for land cards to trigger it, and one that excludes them. I'm not really sure which one I want to use. I'd have to playtest. My natural inclination is to exclude lands, because that tends to be the habit in card design (lands aren't spells and they have no casting costs and it can be a gameplay problem to exile/destroy/discard them). But I'm not sure it's relevant in this context.