It is not a completely new mechanic, in fact it's the fusion of 2 cards mechanics together and I sure that there is already a game out there that already did it. Anyways, I tought about it yesterday and it is giving me good ideas for some of my games which were stalling.
There are some kind of card games where you must combine a certain number of element to perform an action and each card is one of these element. I'll give you an example which is not a board game but still illustrate the situation.
In Saga Frontier 2, you have 6 elements : Fire, tree, stone, water, tone, beast. Then there are spells, some spell require some combiation of these. For example Tree-Stone, or Fire-Fire-Tone, etc. Now as a card game, we could make card for each elements and when the player has the proper combination of elements he play the cards and the effect occurs.
With this kind of mechanic, you need to write somewhere in a rule book or on a character sheet what are the required elements and what is the spell effect. I wanted to find a way to remove this extra material and keep just the cards.
So what I tought is to write the spell effect on the element cards instead. So that each card could either be used as a ressource to cast a spell or as a rule text for a spell. Here is an example :
Card 1 : Fire : Effect A ( requires Fire-Fire-Stone )
Card 2 : Fire : Effect B ( requires Fire-Stone )
Card 3 : Stone : Effect C ( requires Stone-Tree )
Now with the 3 cards above, I could play all the 3 cards together to perform spell effect A. Or I could use cards 2 and 3 to perform spell effect B. But I can also use cards 1 and 3 to perform effect B. Which mean that I would show card 2 to the players for the rules and place card 2 back in my hands. But there is no ways that Ic ould cast effect C.
To complexify things, you can make sure that the element of the cards is not required by the spell effect on the cards, forcing you to use other cards. You could even add number beside the elements of the cards which could be use to compute damage and stuff like this.
Of course, since each spell would require to play between 1 and 4 cards, you need to have a good card flow to fill up your hand.
In generalm the goal of this mechanic is to give more than 1 usage to each card in order to improve the strategy level. It's like in duel masters where you can use either a card as mana or as a spell.
