Alternative cost and cmc
Asked by Lurac 9 years ago
If a player casts Cyclonic Rift with overload, its converted mana cost is still 2, and it can be Spell Snared, right?
If I cast Terminus for its miracle cost, I assume its cmc will be 6.
While on the stack, the cmc of most x spells (e.g. Fireball) is considered to be what you paid for it.
What about Entreat the Angels? Let's say I miracle and cast it for 5 mana. What is the cmc? I see three options here. Either you count the mana I paid, which means the cmc is 5 (probably), or you use the printed cost, which makes the cmc 3 (probably not), OR, you use the printed cost, using the value I paid for X, which would give it a cmc of 9.
Epochalyptik says... #2
Note that CMC does not care about what you paid for 
.
When you cast a spell, you declare an X value during one of the first steps in the casting process. Payment, which is the last step, is based on the declared value and any cost-affecting things. CMC cares only about the declared value; cost-increasing or reducing effects will not change CMC.
April 21, 2015 9:01 a.m.
Gidgetimer says... #3
To clarify a bit more: with a spell with in the cost you use the declared value of when calculating CMC. In any zone besides the stack has no declared value and 
is used for the calculation.
The related point that Epoch is making is that CMC is not necessarily what you paid to cast the card since effects can change the cost of a spell making the cost different than the CMC. An easy example of this is Fireball since it has a cost increase printed right on it. You can pay 6 mana into a Fireball and it have a CMC of 6, 5, or 4.
With a Declared
of five and one target Fireball has CMC 6With a Declared
of four and two targets Fireball has CMC 5With a Declared
of three and three targets Fireball has CMC 4
(You can actually get even lower numbers down to 1 paying 6 mana into it but that is a whole different can of worms peculiar to Fireball.)
TheRedMage says... Accepted answer #1
Yeah, it would be 9. The converted mana cost of a spell with
in its cost is what you would get if you assumed X=0 unless the spell is on the stack, and what you get by plugging the actual X you paid while the spell is on the stack. Weird alternate costs like the ones on Entreat the Angels or Conflagrate don't change this.
April 21, 2015 1:41 a.m.