Cost This Effect: Scry Variant

[Sporegorger_Dragon]

I dislike the flavor of Scry, since it implies divination/fortune-telling, peering into the future, etc, which I feel is a poor description of fiddling around with the thoughts in your own brain. Surveil is a bit better, but still the flavor's wonky (conducting surveillance on your own mind?), so I tried coming up with my own variant:

SPOILER

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Overthink

Instant
Scan 2, then draw a card (Look at the top two cards of your library, then put any number of them into your graveyard and the rest on top or the bottom of your library in any order.)

Based on Deliberate. Scan is just a placeholder name (I wanted to use Sift as the name, but it's already used for a card; other options were Mull and Cogitate). Open to suggestions for naming.

Basically just mashing up scry and surveil.

I realize this would make scan a strictly better scry/surveil, so how much would the above card cost? Open to any other kind of feedback as well.

New version version, now with less options:

Scan 2 (Look at the top two cards of your library, then exile any number of them and put the rest on top of your library in any order.)

Still filters, but now is worse than both scry and surveil. I guess it might work with a lot of parasitic cards that care about exile.

[user_938036]

There is too much choice here which leads to too much cost. Overthink would probably need to cost 3 as an instant or UU as a sorcery. On both points I belive it fails to be an exciting card.

Giving players too many choices is as bad or worse as giving them too few. You have taken the herculean challange of taking one of the best designed mechanics in magic's history and are trying to improve on it. Scry is minor enough that it scry 1 can be added to most effects without needing to increase the cost and it gets significantly stronger each time it increases by 1. There is a limited number of things you can do with the top of your deck and most of them are covered by Scry and Surveil.

[Sporegorger_Dragon]

You are absolutely right, scry is elegant and almost perfect.

It was not my intent to "improve" scry, but design an alternative to scry and surveil.

It seems my only choice is to make a worse scry.

Scan 2 (Look at the top two cards of your library, then exile any number of them and put the rest on top of your library in any order.)

Still filters, but now is worse than both scry and surveil. I guess it might work with a lot of parasitic cards that care about exile.

[spacemonaut]

Note that players undero decision paralysis just with a normal scry; I agree merging Scry and Surveil into some kind of Scryveil gives them so much choice it will make for a problem.

It seems my only choice is to make a worse scry.

The idea is to make a fun Scry-like effect. Surveil isn't a worse Scry (in fact in many ways it's an upgrade), and there will be other remixes like this available too. It's also fine to make a strictly better version of an existing mechanic—but be aware that it will be strictly better and thus cost more.

Scan 2 (Look at the top two cards of your library, then exile any number of them and put the rest on top of your library in any order.)

Still filters, but now is worse than both scry and surveil. I guess it might work with a lot of parasitic cards that care about exile.

Scry into exile sounds fine. It sounds like something that could easily belong in red, even. It has an advantage of deck thinning over time. I could see there being cards that say something like "whenever you scan, you may cast the cards you exiled until end of turn" or "whenever you scan, put a +1/+1 counter on CARDNAME for each card you exiled."