They should've made whatever the hell that skeleton cleric is a Black mythic card and commissioned Seb for that as well. I'd love another card with that character on it.
I think that's a statue meant to be an altar for offerings? Looks a bit like what's in Debt to the Deathless though.
That is a good read, I mean its gotta be cheap enough. But oh boy does that sound broken in Red Decks for Modern.
Smuttny's read is no good, there's no way spectacle is that easy to enable. Worse, it can't be so easily synergistic with Shock in the format. If it has anything to do with a player dealt damage or a creature dying, there must be a drawback or a difficult threshold to attain.
The two cards are playable until the end of the next turn, which means there's no reason for the conditions to be "cheap enough".
I also thought this prior to the mechanic reveal. But my guess is that Light Up the Stage is an unusually pushed example of the mechanic, since it is very, very easy to achieve.
I think the chain lightning concept going around in the thread is a little bit at odds with the connotation of a "spectacle." To have a spectacle you need spectators (the other players) and spectators do not participate in the spectacle; they just watch. That could be reading too much into the choice of words but it doesn't seem like a great fit.
Seems like Rakdos traditionally make a spectacle out of sacrificing creatures. "You may cast this spell for its spectacle cost if you sacrificed a creature this turn" would be pretty balanced but require sacrifice outlets. Alternatively, "you may cast this spell for its spectacle cost if a player discarded a card this turn" which is mostly weaker than madness but enabled by lots of common black and red effects and also jives with jump-start.
I don't think it has to do with sacrifice for this reason:
Selesyna and Boros (and pretty much any white guild) is pretty token heavy. Sacrifice a creature is best used in white based archetypes. I don't think it is a good idea to create a mechanic that is best used in other archetypes
I see where you're coming from with that point but, if I should defend my thesis, black and red are definitely colors that sacrifice creatures (especially in Rakdos) and getting a cost reduction for sacrificing a creature is pretty out of place in white's slice of the color pie but extremely fitting for both black and red. Token creation isn't really limited to just white and even if it were, you're making a case for the mechanic having inter-guild synergy with white token-based guilds (something it has been established is a design principle for the guild mechanics in this iteration). Black in particular makes tons of tokens and red tends to get tokens at efficient rates. Also, black and red do have some recursive creatures (admittedly just Phoenixes in red) that can diminish the drawbacks of sacrificing a creature. I would say the strength of the mechanic probably depends most strongly on the quality of the sacrifice outlets available and the actual cards printed with the mechanic or to support it.
Seems like Rakdos traditionally make a spectacle out of sacrificing creatures. "You may cast this spell for its spectacle cost if you sacrificed a creature this turn" would be pretty balanced but require sacrifice outlets. Alternatively, "you may cast this spell for its spectacle cost if a player discarded a card this turn" which is mostly weaker than madness but enabled by lots of common black and red effects and also jives with jump-start.
I think that's a statue meant to be an altar for offerings? Looks a bit like what's in Debt to the Deathless though.
I also thought this prior to the mechanic reveal. But my guess is that Light Up the Stage is an unusually pushed example of the mechanic, since it is very, very easy to achieve.
I see where you're coming from with that point but, if I should defend my thesis, black and red are definitely colors that sacrifice creatures (especially in Rakdos) and getting a cost reduction for sacrificing a creature is pretty out of place in white's slice of the color pie but extremely fitting for both black and red. Token creation isn't really limited to just white and even if it were, you're making a case for the mechanic having inter-guild synergy with white token-based guilds (something it has been established is a design principle for the guild mechanics in this iteration). Black in particular makes tons of tokens and red tends to get tokens at efficient rates. Also, black and red do have some recursive creatures (admittedly just Phoenixes in red) that can diminish the drawbacks of sacrificing a creature. I would say the strength of the mechanic probably depends most strongly on the quality of the sacrifice outlets available and the actual cards printed with the mechanic or to support it.