What is kicker in magic the gathering

Kicker is a keyword ability that has been around for awhile and made several return trips to Magic expansions. It, like many other keyword abilities, allows your cards to be more flexible and do different things at different times depending on what you pay.

A kicker ability is basically an extra cost that you can pay when you cast a spell. The cost you pay is listed after the word kicker. There will also be lines of text stating what happens if the kicker cost is paid. 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. Multikicker [cost] You may pay an additional [cost] any number of times as you cast this spell.

From the glossary of the Comprehensive Rules September 24, — Innistrad: Midnight Hunt Kicker, Kicked Kicker is a keyword ability that represents an optional additional cost.

A spell has been kicked if its controller declared the intention to pay any or all of its kicker costs. See rule Kicker And thus, the first kicker cards were born—all creatures; little guys that you could turn into bigger guys in the mid to late game. Now all Bill needed was a set to put them in. One of the roles of the Head Designer is to put together design teams. Such was the task Bill had in the fall of Magic was going through a few rocky years. Urza's Saga block was crazily overpowered and Mercadian Masques was forced in the opposite direction to help balance the power level.

The next set needed to be strong without being overpowered. Understanding this, Bill pulled out all the stops. The team would be the three strongest designers working on Magic at the time Richard worked at Wizards at the time, by not actively on Magic —himself, Mike Elliott and myself. And we would be working on a theme that we all knew in our hearts was going to be popular with the players—multicolor.

On the very first day, Bill pitched the kicker mechanic. Bill was obviously very eager to use it, and Mike and I took to it immediately. I remember that I really liked how its mana requirements would allow us to make monocolored cards that functioned partially as multicolor cards. A lot of times I talk about all the deliberation that goes into picking mechanics. I talk about how at times we can spend months going back and forth over what should and should not be included.

Kicker was almost the exact opposite. Bill showed it to us and it was basically in the set the moment he finished talking about it unlike split cards, but go read my column Split Decisions for that story.

The interesting thing about that week was how much flexibility we found with the mechanic. What had started as a means to make small creatures into big creatures quickly expanded to fill all different card types.

It was during this time that we also started crystallizing another aspect for the kicker mechanic. Because kicker mana could be in or out of color, we decided that we should differentiate how they were used.

Here's how we did it. If a spell kicked with mana in color, then the kicked effect was merely a larger version of the effect. If it was a creature, it got bigger. If it was a spell, the effect got bigger.

If you paid an off-color kicker then the spell got an extra effect. The spell didn't get bigger in scope but rather bigger in the fact that it did more things. The extra effect almost always tied in with the original effect, often creating synergy. The funny thing about this design was how subtle it was. Whenever I would point it out I would always get responses from players about how the differentiation between on and off color completely passed over their heads. As there isn't a lot to say about the design of kicker as a mechanic, I thought I'd walk through a few interesting things that happened as we tried to use kicker on various spells.

So have you ever wondered why this rare cycle didn't have kicker? After all, each requires you to pay to get a bonus to the card aka turned it into an instant. They sure feel like they have kicker. And you know what, they did. Well, up until templating, that is. Then we ran into a little snag. Kicker costs aren't played until you play the spell.

This means that the spell has to already be played before the kicker can alter it. See the problem here? If these spells had kicker then you would have to play the spell before you could use the kicker. And as the kicker was the thing letting you play the card as an instant, the timing really didn't work out; there was no way to play them an instant speed. To all the rules gurus out there, yes, I know there's no such thing as "instant speed"; just work with me here. Everyone else knows what I mean.

These cards were created because we were trying to find other cool things we could do with kicker and in the end, to have their functionality they had to lose kicker. Ah, sweet, sweet irony. Verdeloth the Ancient. This card is the exact opposite of the cards above. Verdeloth was designed without kicker. The original version had you pay when Verdeloth came into play.

During some development meeting, someone said, "Hey, isn't this just kicker? This card caused a bunch of problems because it did something really weird.

You see, Skizzik is the only kicker card where paying the kicker loses you something. We tried wordings were the card gained something that kept it alive.

My favorite was the idea of having it deal damage to itself instead of causing a sacrifice and then making the kicker grant protection from red. In the end, we went with the wording that's on the card because it seemed to be the simplest and most understandable way to say it.