Power at a Price: The Lore Behind Magic's Costly Bargains

Folk tales everywhere carry the same warning. A stranger at the crossroads offers you exactly what you want, and the bill arrives later, larger than you agreed to. Magic writes that warning on the card itself.

A great many cards hand you power with a condition attached: pay life, sacrifice something you love, discard your options, or owe a debt that comes due next turn. Those prices are not just balancing tools. They are the oldest plot in fantasy, the costly bargain, translated into rules.

This guide is part of Behind the Cards, a series on the ideas beneath Magic's mechanics, written for people who design their own cards. It covers why a price makes a story, the forms a price can take, which colors strike bargains, and how to design a card whose bill feels earned in PipGlyph.

Why a Price Makes a Story

A card that simply gives you something is a vending machine. A card that asks you to give something up is a decision, and decisions reveal character, in the card and in the player.

Watch a table when someone casts a spell that costs half their life. Everyone leans in. The player who paid has said something about how badly they want to win, and the opponent now has a target: a lower life total, a thinner hand, an emptier board. The price creates the drama that the effect alone could not.

Three questions sit beneath every good bargain:

• What is being sold? The effect has to be worth wanting, usually more than its mana cost alone would buy.
• What is the price? Life, a permanent, a card, a future turn: something the player can feel.
• When is it paid? Now, later, or a little every turn. The timing is where much of the story lives.

The Forms a Price Takes

Published Magic has charged for power in almost every currency the game has. Five forms cover most of them.

Life

Your life total is the one resource that is also the score. Paying it is the most direct way to say "I want this badly enough to risk losing". Black pays life more than any other color, which is why the color pie guide describes black as the color that will do anything, but pays the price.

New Phyrexia (2011) pushed the idea into the mana cost itself. Phyrexian mana is a symbol you can pay with one mana of its color or with 2 life, which lets any deck cast the card, at a cost to its health.¹ It is a striking bargain, and an easily underpriced one: "free" is a price players love, so cost Phyrexian designs conservatively. The mana symbols guide covers how the symbol reads.

Sacrifice

Giving up a permanent you already paid for is a sharper price than mana, because the thing you lose is on the table for everyone to see. Wilds of Eldraine (2023) even named a keyword after the idea: bargain lets you sacrifice an artifact, enchantment or token as you cast a spell, to make the spell stronger.

Sacrifice comes with a warning, though. A deck built to sacrifice things for value treats "sacrifice a creature" as a gift, not a cost. Ask which deck wants the price before you call it a drawback; designing balanced custom cards covers that test.

Delayed Payment

The most tempting bargain is the one paid later. Future Sight (2007) printed a cycle of Pacts: spells that cost nothing to cast, with their real mana cost due at the beginning of your next upkeep, and the game itself as the penalty for missing the payment.² Nothing in Magic captures the deal at the crossroads more cleanly.

The lesson for designers is that a delayed cost only bites if it can't be dodged. A softer penalty invites players to skip the bill whenever they can, and the bargain quietly becomes a free spell.

Rent

Some prices recur. Ice Age's cumulative upkeep asked you to pay more every turn to keep a permanent; Urza's Saga's echo asked you to pay a permanent's cost a second time at the start of your next turn, or sacrifice it. The story is a lease: the power is yours only while you keep paying, and one day you will stop.

Rent is a hard price to make fun. A permanent that grows more expensive each turn tends to sit unplayed, and the bookkeeping adds up. When you use it, keep the payment small and the decision to stop paying a real one.

The Other Player's Choice

A last kind of bargain hands the choice to the opponent: "deal 5 damage to that player unless they let you draw two cards". These are sometimes called punisher effects, and they read as menacing. In play they are usually weak, because the opponent will always pick whichever option hurts them least. If your card offers the opponent a choice, cost it for the worse of the two outcomes for you.

Which Colors Strike Bargains

Every color pays prices, but each pays in its own coin.

Black is the color of bargains in its bones. Red bargains impulsively, white sacrificially, and green and blue only rarely. A bargain in the wrong color is a pie bend at best; read the guilds and color pairs guide if your bargain belongs to two colors at once, as so many black-red cards do.

Making the Price Real

A bargain fails in one of two ways: the price is so low the card is simply strong, or so high nobody plays it. These principles keep it in between.

• Charge the deck that plays it. A price that a dedicated deck turns into an advantage is no price at all. Picture the deck that wants your card, then make sure the cost still stings there.
• Let the payer choose how to pay. "Sacrifice a creature or discard a card" lets the player pick their pain, which feels like a decision rather than a punishment.
• Keep the bill visible. A delayed or recurring cost should be written where both players can see it, with a clear trigger such as "at the beginning of your next upkeep". A price nobody remembers is a price nobody pays.
• Scale the reward to the risk. A real price earns a real discount. A spell that costs life or a creature can do more than its mana cost alone suggests; that is the whole point of the bargain.
• Never make the price someone else's fun. Costs that strip the opponent of their turn, or force them to track your debts for you, tax the table rather than the player who made the deal.

Five Original Bargain Cards

Here is one example design for each kind of price. The names, costs and rules text are original; take them as starting points.

Price of the Pyre

· Sorcery

As an additional cost to cast this spell, sacrifice a creature or discard a card.

This spell deals 4 damage to any target.

Sacrifice, with a choice. Four damage for two mana is above the usual rate, and the additional cost pays the difference. Letting the caster choose between a creature and a card keeps the price painful in any deck without making it unplayable in one.

Debtor's Lantern

· Artifact

, : Draw a card. Activate only as a sorcery.

Life as mana. A colorless artifact with a Phyrexian pip in its ability can be used by any deck, but only a blue deck uses it without bleeding. The sorcery-speed limit keeps the life payment from becoming a free card every turn at instant speed.

Borrowed Hour

· Instant

Creatures you control get +2/+0 and gain trample until end of turn.

At the beginning of your next upkeep, you lose 6 life unless you pay .

The delayed payment. A free combat trick on the turn you need it, with the bill due tomorrow. Unlike a Pact, this one lets you refuse to pay and take the loss in life instead, which keeps the decision alive into the next turn.

Hireling of the Toll Bridge

· Creature — Human Soldier · 3/3

First strike

At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this creature unless you pay .

Rent. A soldier well above the curve, paid by the day. Each turn the player decides whether the bridge is still worth guarding, and the small fee makes stopping a real choice instead of a certainty.

Lien-Bound Ravager

· Creature — Horror · 2/2

Debt 3 (As this creature enters, you may put up to three debt counters on it. It gets +1/+1 for each debt counter on it. At the beginning of your upkeep, if it has a debt counter on it, remove one and you lose 1 life.)

An invented keyword. "Debt" is our own mechanic, not a published one. You borrow strength when the creature arrives and repay it a point of life at a time, while the creature shrinks back to its true size. The player chooses how deep to go into debt, so the bargain is theirs, and the opponent can see exactly what is owed. When you invent a keyword like this, keep the reminder text and template it as the templating cookbook describes.

Design a Bargain in PipGlyph

Start with the deal, not the numbers. Decide what the card sells, what it costs, and when the bill arrives. Then build it in the PipGlyph card creator:

1. Write the price first. An additional cost opens the rules text: "As an additional cost to cast this spell, …". A delayed one closes it with a clear trigger.
2. Use the right symbols. Phyrexian pips, hybrid pips and every other symbol are in the cost picker and the rules editor's symbol toolbar; the mana pip editor page lists them all, and the glossary defines Phyrexian mana in a line.
3. Let the flavor name the deal. A single line of flavor text that shows who made the bargain, and who will collect, does more than a paragraph of rules.
4. Playtest the payment. Save the card, add it to a deck from the "Add to a deck" box under the preview, and see whether players pay the price or dodge it. If they always dodge it, raise the penalty; if they never cast the card, lower the price. Browse decks for lists to test it against.

The MTG lore shelf has more on the stories behind Magic's mechanics, and the rest of this series includes the other half of black's bargain: what happens after death.

Costly Bargains FAQ

What Is an Additional Cost in MTG?

An additional cost is something you must pay on top of a spell's mana cost to cast it, such as paying life, sacrificing a permanent or discarding a card. It is written as "As an additional cost to cast this spell" at the start of the rules text, and it is paid as you cast the spell, so it is not refunded if the spell is countered.

Why Does Black Pay Life for Power in Magic?

Black's philosophy is power at any cost: it will do almost anything to win, but it pays a price to do it. Paying life, sacrificing creatures and discarding cards are how the color pie turns that philosophy into rules, so a black card that does black things for free breaks the color's central promise.

How Does Phyrexian Mana Work?

A Phyrexian mana symbol can be paid with one mana of its color or with 2 life. It still counts toward the card's mana value and still makes the card that color. It was introduced in New Phyrexia in 2011.

How Do I Make a Card With a Drawback Feel Fair?

Make sure the price hurts the deck that will actually play the card, keep the cost visible on the card, and let the player who pays choose how to pay. A drawback that a dedicated deck turns into an advantage is not a price at all, and a card that hands the choice to the opponent will usually be weaker than it looks.