Blue Mana Battery

A quick recap for those who don't want to re-read Black Mana Battery: Coalition Relic is the fixed version of these cards, and I'm not gonna top that. Instead, we're melding the spellbomb line from Mirrodin (the first Mirrodin) and taking a page from the Urza's song enchantments.

With the Black Mana Battery, I chose to use fear as its nonmana ability -- Legends has a subtheme of unblockability, and fear is both a classic black ability and an aggressive one. (I realize that it's been replaced with the less-flavorful intimidate, but I'm going to stick with fear. I really, really dislike intimidate.) Moreover, while fear is a good ability, it doesn't scale very well (and it's entirely reliant on having a creature base). That's important -- I didn't want to punish players too much for pulling charge counters off the batteries. These dual-use cards work best when you can comfortably see a little use from both their sides; making one ability markedly better decreases the card's dual-ability role. There comes a point where it's just better to dedicate the card to whatever it's doing best.

With that in mind, there's a strong, new blue mechanic in Legends: Boomerang. It's tempting to make the Blue Mana Battery replicate the bounce mechanic, which has become an iconic blue ability; however, it's hard to balance it nicely. Bounce is a decent strategy for blue, but it -- unlike fear -- scales very, very well. One bounce in a game isn't very powerful, but a bounce every turn is absolutely backbreaking, particularly when it doesn't cost any cards.

I saw two clear avenues for the Blue Mana Battery: granting flying and tapping or untapping permanents. Flying's a shoo-in; it matches Legends' subtheme of unblockability, it's blue, and it plays on defense better than fear, making it different from the Black Mana Battery's ability (though just slightly so). That leaves untapping and tapping permanents. It's more distinct than flying, and that's a solid bonus, but there's problems with on-demand mass tapping (infinite fog being only the most obvious of such annoyances). I could add a sorcery-speed rider onto the card and allow it to tap or untap, but that's a) clumsy, b) inelegant and c) an unusual choice for a blue-aligned card. I'm left with either tapping nonland, noncreature permanents (fairly limited, in my opinion) or untapping nonland permanents. Those are all pretty unappealing choices, honestly. (Nonland's necessary on both tapping and untapping clauses -- in the former, it'll be used to lock players out of the game; in the latter, it'll be used to generate obscene amounts of mana. That's generally verboten for blue, because the color just can't be trusted with lots of easy mana.)

So flying it is!