Kumano (Don't) Bless Us, Everyone!

Okay, so I have a confession. I have a stack of like 40 copies of today's card sitting around in a box somewhere. They're from the prerelease for the set that I attended. They're in that box along with several foam shuriken that were given out as promotional material. Yeah, we're going to Betrayers of Kamigawa today.



Before anyone asks, no I didn't actually pull 40 copies of this out of my sealed deck packs and tournament pack (which, by the way, I was sad to see go). I actively wandered around "begging" for copies from people. I say "begging" because others were more than happy to toss their trash onto someone else. You would too.

Feast your eyes on Kumano's Blessing!

This is about as useful a card as a certain other reviewed item in that it literally does nothing 90% of the time.

This effect is appended onto other cards all the time, most notably burn spells. Except it usually feels like an afterthought, and not a very powerful effect. Magma Spray is so marginally better than Shock that you wouldn't even know the difference (provided you're only tossing it at a creature, of course). There are notable exceptions, but I doubt I'd care if my spell had this clause in basically every game I ever play.

So, for an effect that's tacked onto spells as a marginal-benefit rider effect, what would you think that would cost? 1 mana? 1/2 a mana?

Oh man, you must be getting excited now!

...


Well, what about 2R?

Well, I guess you're right, that's no good. Hey, maybe we could put it on an aura! Yeah! Then you can put it on whatever creature you want!

Yeah, that's no good, either. That'd be horrible card disadvantage for a not-very-useful effect. I mean, Soulshift was a mechanic during that block, and I guess there had to be some way to deal with it, and especially in limited... oh, right. I'm just going to go forget this card exists, okay?