So it is now three/four days since V42 has dropped, and I was thinking about the card system today. In MtG design, there's a concept of a resource called "design space", where the designers try not to consume all possible design space as fast as possible. So variations on tried and true mechanics come with a little bit of exploration, finding the design space of the mechanic, and generally being cautious.

This is a good thing, and its kept Magic alive for 25 years.

Paragon has the same concerns, and so I wanted to take a look at what space has been explored by the current cards (ignoring the five broken ones in each affinity that are getting reworked...) and where Paragon could go in the future.

So cards have costs, and there's some design space to explore there.

Non-obvious costs that Paragon uses already: * Cultivate - With this mechanic, the cost you pay is choice and flexibility. You can save 4500 gold, and get Growth Totem as your first card. Or you can spend 4000 gold on four attributes points, and 500 on Growth Totem, rewarding you for something you're already doing. * Cursed - Here, you pay for useful, strong cards early with late game opportunity and flexibility as the drawback. So you get power at the cost of a card slot in your "hand". This can be worth paying, depending on the team, role, and hero. * Combustible - This mechanic takes up a slot until you die, leading to a strange and interesting tension, where sometimes you want to die to get the slot back. And this also increases the punishment if you die before getting full advantage from the card. Tension is a good thing. It forces players to make decisions, often based on imperfect information. * There isn't a name for this mechanic, but its found on Order and Knowledge cards, where you get a bonus for purchasing an attribute while it's equipped. Again, rewards you for doing something you were already doing, and you can multiply this effect by creating a deck around that attribute (Intellect in the case of Mana-Flow Acolyte * Elevate - this cost is in card slots, and can provide powerful effects if your hero kit and gems can provide most of what you need. * Affinities - to use a card, your deck needs to use that affinity. * Time - The earlier you equip Growth Totem, the more useful it becomes. So you pay for this card in time equipped.

So several of these costs can be explored with variations in the future, such as: * Cultivate - Specific affinities, or specific objectives to reach before you can buy them, such as damage, time, kills, deaths, towers. * Cursed - There may come cards you can use to remove cursed cards, mitigating some of the cost of these cards, or having specific conditions that must be met to remove them. * Combustible - these could have different conditions when they will be removed, such as number of deaths, a certain number of kills. * Affinities - Epic could create cards that can only be used by specific combinations of affinities, or by more than one affinity (Such as a Chaos/Death card that can be used by either Chaos-X decks or Death-X decks)

And then there are potential costs that haven't been explored, such as losing one of your hero abilities, objective conditions, contents of your deck, and so on.

I think there's a lot of potential design space for Paragon cards in the costs alone. They don't even need to be new abilities or some new rule-breaking power.

But when you combine new costs and new variations on costs already in use, with new effects?

I foresee a long future of Paragon cards, without power creep (if the designers are careful and manage the design space with caution).