Like any long-lived game, Magic has an explicit and extensive rule set that governs what you can and can't do. You can only play spells you've got the mana to pay for. You can't look at your opponent's deck. You only draw one card in your draw step. These rules make the game what it is. Unfortunately, not everyone's content to play by the rules—the desire to win is so overpowering for some people that they try to surreptitiously gain an unfair advantage over the competition. Some of them draw extra cards at the start of turn, or draw four off a Brainstorm, or shuffle your deck on a suspiciously exposed angle, or "forget" to write down when you gain life, or a million other little things that are barely noticeable. This behavior is unacceptable, and when people are found running cheats, they can be slapped with disqualifications and other punishments by the DCI. Wizards of the Coast does not condone breaking the rules.

Hang on a minute. Wizards encourages us to break the rules all the time! Let's look at some of the basic rules that every player understands and recognizes.

You may draw one card per turn.

Untap, upkeep, draw. Once per turn, you may draw a card. This rule limits your options each turn, placing emphasis on intelligent use of the resources available and thoughtful deck-building—if you had any number of cards in your hand each turn, you wouldn't need versatile cards, as you could just play the most efficient pinpoint answers and be assured of having access to the correct tool. This is one of the most frequently broken rules, especially by that most rule-breaking of colors, Blue. Check out some of the culprits of this particular cheat that you're probably familiar with:

People draw extra cards constantly! Card advantage is one of the fundamentals of Magic strategy, as the player with more cards in hand has more options than the player with fewer cards. Card-drawing ranges from the innocuous to the utterly broken, banned-in-Legacy-restricted-in-Vintage Yawgmoth's Bargain, Ancestral Recall, and similar early cards.

You may play one land per turn.

Each turn, you may play one land. This rule gives the game its progression—on the early turns, you have few mana available, so you can't play your expensive cards, while later, when you've played many lands, you can pay for your bomby Titans and Planeswalkers. Green loves to break this rule, and does so all the time:

Ramp decks are a common feature in Standard and Extended, and they give up board position in the early game in order to play their Titans earlier than they should be allowed to—rather than play a 6-mana Inferno Titan on turn six, they can get them out turn four or even earlier. Once again, this rule-breaking can be inoffensive, like Rampant Growth, or banned-in-Legacy-restricted-in-Vintage offensive, like Fastbond.

You have to pay the mana cost to play your spells.

Mana is the most obvious resource in the game—you want to play a 1-mana spell, you tap your one land and put it on the board. You want to play a 6-mana spell, you tap six lands. Getting extra lands is one thing, but you still need to tap them to play your spells. Except when you don't:

New players sometimes get quite taken with Ornithopter—it doesn't cost anything to play! I should just play tons of those, right? Well, once they learn that a card itself has value, they find that an army of Ornithopters that didn't cost any mana isn't quite as good as an army of Grizzly Bears that did. Not all free spells are so innocent, either—once again, for an example of a stupidly broken free spell, we only need to turn to the Vintage restricted list. See: Mind's Desire and Channel.

You might notice a common theme running through many of these obnoxious, Vintage-restricted cards: They let you trade a plentiful resource—life—for scarce resources, like cards in hand, land drops, and mana. The reason this is a recipe for disaster is because you start the game with 20 life points but only seven cards, no lands, and no mana, and there are restrictions placed by the rules on how quickly you can normally increase these last three resources. The other obvious issue is that a card, a land drop and a mana are all generally worth more than a single life point.

Free spells are usually a recipe for broken formats filled with un-fun combination decks, something Wizards has learned the hard way. Just look at probably the most reviled deck in history, Mirrodin-block Affinity. The Affinity mechanic combined with artifact lands was such that after about turn two, you never had to pay any mana for your cards, aside from the individually absurd and broken cards like Cranial Plating, Arcbound Ravager, and Disciple of the Vault. Now they are taking us down the road of discounted spells again, in the sequel to Mirrodin block, a little older and wiser this time—we hope. New Phyrexia, the final set of Scars block, will introduce Phyrexian Mana.

Phyrexian Mana

If you haven't been following the recent spoilers for New Phyrexia over on our spoiler page, let me answer your questions. Phyrexian mana looks like this:

That's the White Phyrexian mana symbol; there is presumably a similar symbol for the other colors. Early forum chatter is typing those symbols out as (P/W), in a similar fashion to hybrid mana symbols. To pay Phyrexian mana costs, you can either pay 1 of the color as normal, or you can pay 2 life. That's basically it—as to what you can do with Phyrexian mana, that remains to be seen, though we do have some examples to go from:

Spawning Shell

Artifact (rare)

( may be paid for with either or 2 life.)

, , Sacrifice a creature: Search your library for a creature with converted mana cost equal to the sacrificed creature's converted mana cost plus 1 and put it onto the battlefield. Then shuffle your library. Activate this ability only any time you could cast a sorcery.

While this card is very interesting for its creature-upgrading ability, it appears to be one of the less offensive uses of Phyrexian mana—both the casting cost and activation cost include a mana component, meaning you won't be able to play or use this card without having mana available. Another interesting point about Phyrexian mana, at least on the cards spoiled so far, is that they can be played in any color deck, just like artifacts, as you can just pay the life cost and colorless mana—so a Red deck could play this card and sacrifice their Ball Lightning to get a Cyclops Gladiator, as long as they were happy to pay 4 life for the privilege.

Norn's Annex

Artifact (rare)

( may be paid for with either or 2 life.)

Creatures can't attack you or Planeswalkers you control unless their controller pays for each attacking creature.

Here, we're getting a significant discount off the mana cost, potentially paying Tumble Magnet mana instead of Gideon Jura mana. It puts a Phyrexian mana Propaganda effect on our opponent, and intriguingly, it's colored—while a White-playing opponent gets the choice of paying mana or life, a Red or Black opponent, for instance, will have to pay the life if they want to attack. This makes me think that life-total management is going to be very significant with Phyrexian mana in the picture. A Red deck playing this card could put their opponent in a very difficult position; at 10 life, do I attack Koth and risk getting burned out, or do I conserve my life total and let Koth go ultimate? It's a bit like Manabarbs for attacks.

Screamwhip

Artifact – Equipment (rare)

Living Weapon

Equip

Equipped creature gets +1/+1 for each Swamp you control.

Spellsplitter

Artifact Creature – Horror (rare)

: Target spell or ability that targets only a single creature targets Spellsplitter instead.

0/4

Now we're getting to the potential brokenness. Both of these cards have activated abilities with a potentially mana-less Phyrexian cost. While neither card seems particularly obnoxious, being able to target a creature for free with Screamwhip's equip cost has been used in combos previously—see Nomads en-Kor plus Daru Spiritualist. Spellsplitter also seems an extremely handy guy to have around, letting you redirect removal spells on your key creatures, or burn spells on your face, to this friendly little artifact dude. While Blue decks will be able to take best advantage of him, any color can make use.

Speculation Time!

I am really impressed with this mechanic—it places an interesting tension on your life total, as you risk getting taken down by an aggro opponent in order to cheat on your mana costs. Having Phyrexian mana in the same environment as Infect is also intriguing, as against an Infect deck, you can essentially forget about your life total—whether it's 19 or 9, a devoted Infect deck won't be able to impact it, instead piling on poison counters. We will have to reevaluate every decent piece of life-gain we have as well, as gaining 8 life from a Rest for the Weary can be like a mana ritual given a suitable Phyrexian spell we want to cast. So what sort of things are people guessing at?

Phorce of Will

Instant

Counter target spell.

Pact of Negation. Daze. Force of Will. Free counterspells have a long and fruitful history in Magic, letting Legacy, Vintage, and even occasionally Extended and Standard players interact with broken one-turn combo decks, and protect their own broken one-turn combos. Interfering with your opponent's key Ad Nauseam or Seething Song can throw their whole deck off, and these free counters mean they can't just wait for you to tap out. Some people have speculated at a counterspell that could be played entirely with Phyrexian mana, generally pegging it at the Cancel gold standard of 3 mana. I think this is more powerful than Wizards deems acceptable to see print in Standard without some other additional cost—there are a lot of spells your opponent could cast while you're tapped out that are worth a lot more than 6 life. It would also be a defining staple in older formats as a colorless Force of Will. At some mana cost, I'm sure this is reasonable—4, maybe? At 3, I think this is too strong a counterspell for modern Magic.

The potential colorlessness of Phyrexian spells is an important limitation that R&D will have had to consider, as a Red or White deck could play our theoretical Phorce of Will and have a mana-less hard counter. The Mercadian Masques free spells and the Future Sight pacts both let you play them for no mana, but they enforced color restrictions in other ways, by requiring you control a particular basic land or demanding an eventual payment of colored mana. It really depends how far Wizards are willing to stretch the color pie in this artifact-centric block. One card I think is a shoo-in for a slot, though, is the following hypothetical Mythic:

Phyrexian Nexus

Enchantment (mythic rare)

You may pay life equal to twice the converted mana cost of spells instead of paying their mana cost.

The wording would probably make the templating team weep softly, and the mana cost is not based on anything solid, but this card would certainly be slapped with a hefty price. Lending the set mechanic to other cards is a common enough occurrence, and while lending Phyrexian mana to any other card in Magic is potentially a combo nightmare, at a suitably high initial cost, I doubt it would break anything in competitive environments.

Phyrexian Mana looks like the most exciting mechanic coming out of the early spoilers, being an odd mix of colored artifacts, hybrid mana, and Vintage brokenness. We will have to wait and see how far Wizards have pushed it, but as always, the first sighting of new cards has gotten me excited about a new set I previously was a bit down on. If the Phyrexians winning means we get more mechanics like Proliferate and Phyrexian mana and less of Metalcraft and Battle Cry, they can infect me right now.

Let me know in the comments or on twitter (@rtassicker) if you think Wizards have broken the format, or if you think Phyrexian mana will have been nerfed into irrelevance by development. Here's a couple of questions to think about, as well—what are the best life-gain cards in Standard? What card would you most like to pay life instead of mana for? Sound off in the comments!