Weekly Mechanic #3 - Imbue
Introduction
This week on Weekly Mechanic #3, we're back to our scheduled programming, uninterrupted by Wizards of the Coast, who still might be listening in on the design conversations going on inside my own mind. Okay, first things first: I’ll likely end up renaming this project to Monthly Mechanic at this rate, as I can sometimes be a bit of a perfectionist and start to over-iterate when it comes to my designs. Maybe I should call it Bi-Weekly Mechanic? Neither really has the same ring, but I guess we’ll see.
That said, the extra time I’ve spent creating this month’s mechanic has led to a particularly interesting (and powerful) design space. The mechanic I’m presenting today is one inspired by Splice, as well as the cycle of Evoke elemental creatures from Modern Horizons 2. I’m calling it Imbue, and it appears only on instant and sorcery cards. Because of this, I see the mechanic as thematically relevant to Arcavios, the plane featured in Strixhaven (2021), and each card I’ll show here borrows loosely from that aesthetic.
The Imbue mechanic reads: “As you cast an instant or sorcery spell with mana value 4 or greater that shares a color with this card, you may exile this card from your hand. If you do, add this card’s effect to that spell.”
Design Context
Before getting into the meat of Imbue’s design, I want to talk about the design space that inspired it—namely, the MH2 Evoke Elementals and Splice. First up: the Modern Horizons 2 cycle. The five monocolored elementals are infamous for their power level and the game-breaking effect of being evoked for free—by exiling a card of the same color from your hand. Evoke, for the uninitiated, is a mechanic that lets you cast a creature for an alternate cost, but it sacrifices itself upon entering the battlefield. The main idea is that the enter-the-battlefield trigger goes on the stack before the sacrifice happens, so they end up functioning like spells.
The design piece I took from this cycle was the color restriction on their “free” cost. Like those creatures, Imbue cards are only “free” if they’re in a deck with spells that share their color. That detail came later in the process—I added it weeks after first drafting the mechanic—because it felt both flavorfully and mechanically wrong to see a black Imbue effect added to a mono-blue spell.
Another restriction I added for balance is the mana value condition: Imbue only works with spells that cost 4 or more. That limitation was baked into the idea from the beginning.
The second—and more obviously similar—inspiration is Splice, which first showed up in the Kamigawa block. Splice reads something like: “Splice onto [quality] [cost] (As you cast a [quality] spell, you may reveal this card from your hand and pay its splice cost. If you do, add this card’s effects to that spell).” Splice was a super parasitic mechanic because the only [quality] available at the time was Arcane. What’s Arcane? A subtype unique to that block. Even Mark Rosewater has said that they would’ve preferred Splice to just read “onto instant or sorcery” from the start. That mistake was later corrected in cards like Splicer’s Skill.
One obvious difference between Splice and Imbue however, is that a Spliced card doesn’t actually expend itself when its effect is added to another card. In other words, if you Splice a card’s effect onto another, the Splice card remains in your hand after its effects have been added. To me, this is honestly pretty weird and leads to some annoying gameplay loops where a single copy of a spell like Splicer’s Skill can be sandbagged in a player’s hand and its effects repeatedly added to other spells.
For both balance and flow of gameplay, I think the tradeoff of exiling the card from your hand to get the free effect with Imbue is a real downside, as you’re cheating on mana and not gaining direct card advantage.
Quick aside—this week (or month, depending), I’m changing how I showcase the designs. I’m doing mono-colored vertical cycles. While I think Imbue would mostly show up at rare or mythic in a real set, I wanted to show how the mechanic could appear across rarities. Each color’s vertical cycle includes at least one instant or sorcery with mana value 4 or greater to enable Imbue. I also loosely followed a rarity progression where the rare and mythic versions scale with the spell’s mana value, and the mythic can be “cheated” onto a 4-mana spell to get a discount.
Card Gallery:
Design Discussion
What interests me most about Imbue is its innate modality and the tension around optimizing it. Players will likely want to fill their decks with 4-mana instants and sorceries to hit the Imbue sweet spot. Why play a 5 or 6 mana spell if I can get my Imbue effect at 4 mana?
To address that, I made higher rarity Imbue cards scale based on the mana value of the spell they’re attached to. How? Well, because of how Imbue is worded—it tracks the mana value of the spell it’s added to, not its own. That’s similar to how Splice works. Also, because the Imbue card isn’t being cast, any extra costs (like life loss or sacrifices) don’t apply.
This also led me to avoid using targeting in Imbue effects. Splice tried targeting, and it created a rules mess. If a spell has a targeted Splice effect and the target becomes illegal, the whole spell fizzles. I considered that a design constraint and ended up restarting part of the project after realizing my initial designs were also compromised in this manner.
This mechanic is definitely the most complex I’ve worked on, and probably the hardest to balance due to its "free" effect. Even though it behaves a lot like Splice, it’s deceptively intricate.
And yeah—I know some of the cards I designed with Imbue are overtuned. Scholar’s Reward, for example, can basically make a 5-mana spell free when imbued. Cast Mystic Confluence, exile Scholar’s Reward, and boom—five Treasure tokens refund your mana. But when cast normally, it’s just a Strike it Rich variant.
Overwhelming Pain is a bit more balanced. It has an extra cost of 5 life, which you skip if you use Imbue. But it’s still gated behind color matching and mana value. And to be honest, I’m not designing these cards with perfect balance in mind—I’m exploring ideas in a vacuum.
You’ll notice I made an Imbue card for each color. I think the mechanic can work in all five colors—at least on Arcavios, where spells matter. On other planes, it probably makes more sense in blue, black, and red.
Cons:
Overly complicated
Narrow design space, as it only goes on instant and sorceries
Risky to actually print, as free spells are innately overpowered
The rules text is wordy and potentially ambiguous
Too similar to “Splice onto instant or sorcery”
Narrow design space rules wise, as targeting effects can’t be used
Pros:
Regardless of risk, it is very fun and powerful to enhance spells for free
Having a payoff for including mana value >4 instant and sorcery cards with matching color is fairly unique and encourages build-around
Logically fits in all 5 colours, at least on Arcavios
Creates new interesting decision points, as a card can function differently when imbued than cast normally
Is a mechanic that scales with game duration
Overall Grade: C+
If you’ve actually read all of this, please let me know what you think—and whether you'd want to play with this mechanic in a real set!
