Ertai Planeswalker wrote: ↑1 year ago
Thanks for allthe suggestions. But afaik, there's no reliable way for a decent mana cost or not involving multiple cards.
Something I'll call out is that as a general rule, recursion effects are costed more conservatively than other forms of card advantage, at least in blue. Compare
Divination vs
Call to Mind, or
Think Twice vs
Mystic Retrieval, or
Fblthp, the Lost vs
Archaeomancer. From a design perspective, there are two reasons for this. FIrstly, recurring the right spell is significantly more powerful than drawing a random card. This is, admittedly, dependent on graveyard status, but it's certainly true in the lategame. However, the other reason is that lots of recursion tends to lead to poor gameplay. Imagine a player looping
Counterspell or
Cyclonic Rift over and over - or even worse,
Time Warp. As a result, spell recursion tends to not be very aggressively costed, or it has safeguards in place (such as exiling itself or the recurred spell) to prevent looping.
Another thing I'll call out is that recursion engines are much easier to assemble than other multi-card value engines, since one card can explicitly recur the other. It's easy to use a
Ghostly Flicker for incremental value in the early game, and grab it back with
Archaeomancer in the lategame.
That said, whether or not these things are worth pursuing is definitely dependent on your meta - the faster it is, the more important it is to have cards that are immediately impactful, which recursive spells generally aren't. I will call out that
Snapcaster Mage and
Torrential Gearhulk have both seen extensive competitive play in other formats though, and
Mnemonic Wall +
Ghostly Flicker has seen Pauper play, so recursive strategies definitely have potential at various points on the power curve.
RxPhantom wrote: ↑1 year ago
I went from dead in the water to winning the game last week thanks to The Mirari Conjecture.
Ha, indeed. The Mirari Conjecture ranks very highly on my 'opponents should really kill this thing more often than they actually do' list.