Magic The Gathering: What Is Improvise?
Artifacts drive everything on Magic The Gathering's more technologically advanced planes, like Kaladesh and Kamigawa. After all, who needs a magic spell when a 50-foot-tall mechanical automaton can do the work for you?
RELATED: Magic The Gathering: What Is Modified?
On these planes, you're likely to find tinkerers who like to fiddle and mess with technology to better understand how it works. Through their improvised modifications and the Improvise mechanic, smaller artifacts can easily become much, much bigger spells.
In a nutshell, a spell with Improvise allows you to use your untapped artifacts to pay their generic mana costs. Instead of needing to tap a land, mana rock, or other sources, each artifact you tap will count as having paid one generic mana towards the spell.
In a lot of ways, Improvise is similar to two other mechanics: Convoke, which uses creatures instead of artifacts; and Affinity for Artifacts, which reduces the cost of the spell by the number of artifacts you control. Unlike Affinity for Artifacts, though, Improvise requires you to tap each artifact you're using to pay for the spell, rather than just have them out on the battlefield.
Tapping an artifact to improve a spell is different from producing a mana source: you're not technically producing any mana when tapping the artifact, it's just paying off one generic mana in the spell's casting cost. That means you can't tap more artifacts than necessary to produce floating mana, and you also can't use artifacts to pay any additional or alternative casting costs. For example, if your spell gets Mana Tithe'd, you'll need to pay that additional cost in mana.
You also can't use Improvise to pay any coloured mana in the casting cost. If you want to cast an
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