The reason I was so enamored was that CIP effects gave echo cards a neat twist. Essentially they were spells that allowed you to pay the echo cost to keep the creature. In Urza's Saga , echo was used primarily as a way to get bigger creatures out with less land in play. Echo let you spread out the cost over two turns. With this as the major incentive, the player almost always paid the echo cost. But the CIP echo cards allowed the player to sometimes have reasons to not pay the echo cost.
An interesting side note: When we first started designing echo cards, we thought of echo as simply a drawback. But the more we played around with it the more we saw that having echo was sometimes a positive. This was particularly true for echo creatures with CIP effects because much of the value came from playing the creature.
With it in the graveyard, you could get it back and play it again. A good example of this phenomenon was Avalanche Riders. Here's the card he turned in: well, with modern keywording and templating. We didn't even change the name. And it turns out that Avalanche Riders having echo occasionally was quite handy. Then when it came time to do Urza's Destiny I was both the design lead and the rest of the team for that set , I messed around with echo creatures that had "go to graveyard from play" triggers.
The "go to graveyard" trigger was quite interesting because it also allowed you to trigger the effect by not paying the echo. I then mixed and matched "go to graveyard" with "comes into play. And then, the Urza's Saga block came to an end. Bye bye, echo.
Back then we tended to treat our mechanics more as a disposable resource. After I finished Urza's Destiny , I had no idea whether we'd see echo ever again. Obviously, we would. Flash forward a number of years.
Once the Time Spiral team realized that nostalgia was going to play a big role in the set, we started looking back at sets to see what mechanics we might want to reuse. Echo held a warm place in a few of the designers' hearts and so a few cards with echo started dribbling into the set.
As we concentrated different mechanics in different colors, it got stuck in one of its original colors, red Here was one of the cards:. Okay, at the time it was red, but other than that it was pretty much what we ended up with in Planar Chaos. The problem was that it broke a cardinal rule of Time Spiral. The set was about the past. The idea was to show mechanics as they were. Sure, we used some new effects, but the idea was that we would execute all the returning mechanics as they had been in their first incarnation.
Notes were made in multiverse that this card had to move to later in the block. The designer as it wasn't me it was either Brian Tinsman, Aaron Forsythe or Devin Low - the three other members of the Time Spiral design team argued that the set also had a "time as a resource" theme and that this card played nicely into that theme.
I agreed and said that luckily the entire block had the "time as a resource" theme. It should move. But no one knew where it was going to go, so it stayed in the file - that is, until Planar Chaos design got into full swing. The Planar Chaos design team Bill Rose was the lead, with myself, Paul Sottosanti, and Matt Place on the team liked the idea of taking old mechanics that we felt weren't executed perfectly and updating how they worked.
During one of our design meetings, it was pointed out that echo fell into this camp. What was the problem? A classic early design error.
We created the mechanic to specifically fit our need rather than make it adaptable to allow us innovation in the future. Why'd we do this? As I explained earlier, our mindset back then was to think of mechanics more as a disposable resource. Why make the mechanic more flexible if this set was never going to use that flexibility? The ironic thing is that we chose to use a number with cycling that did allow us to adapt. Why one mechanic and not the other?
I honestly don't know. Once we realized that the revamped echo fit into our Planar Chaos mold, we took it from Time Spiral. Any set can take a card from another set in design or development if it can properly justify why it makes more sense in that set, the idea being that cards should be put where they do the most good.
Sometimes this means moving a card to a set that has more synergy with it. Other times it means sending a mechanic to another set because it's problematic with the current set.
In the case of echo, it was an easy argument. Mechanics weren't supposed to evolve. This one did. Oh and by the way, it evolved in a way exactly like what Planar Chaos was looking for. All Urza's Block cards with echo have now been given errata to give them echo costs equal to their mana costs. However, the return of echo in a Standard set is unlikely as it's not a very popular mechanic. MTG Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Explore Wikis Community Central.
Register Don't have an account? Edit this Page. Edit source History Talk 0. Statistics 52 cards 5. When Echo came back in Time Spiral, Echo costs were no longer always the same as the mana costs of the permanent they were on.
The official Oracle text for all older Echo cards has been changed so there is an Echo cost that is the same as their converted mana cost. Skip to content Echo is a triggered ability that triggers at the beginning of your upkeep step if the permanent with Echo has come under your control since the beginning of your lats upkeep.
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