Reasons why I don't like Kicker

I get to look at kicker from there angles: A custom magic set designer, a designer for a different card game, and someone who categorizes cards into very basic structures for superior use of numerous site tools.

Basically keywords serve various purposes:
- They direct and influence the lore of the card and how it relates to the set.
- They link cards together into one group despite having no other connection, be it a guild or world.
- They are shorthand for more complex abilities that players can't otherwise easily remember if seen in an abundance.
- They help the player intuitively figure out how to play the mechanic behind the keyword with less thought than normal (an example would be how the word mill is actually considered a bad name for the mechanic of milling).
- They make reading muliple cards more easier.

So keywords come in two primary different forms, keyword abilities and ability words. Ability words are more flexible and work well when you have few keywords in total, but require more reading and more lines of text, and generally more deckbuilding structure to center around them. As they are universal, they capture the feeling of the state of the environment the card is in lore wise. (Fateful hour, landfall etc). Keyword abilities are more complex but are static, meaning they can only convey one feeling and are generally made to convey a feeling on the card's lore itself (Surveil, battlecry, indestrucible, mentor, riot etc).

Kicker is just an ability word disguised as a keyword ability. It serves no intrinsic purpose of identifying a specific flavour or tone or theme among numerous cards to group them together, but instead attempts to invoke a much larger feel of the environment it is in. In almost all cases it is an environment portraying a sense of experience to overcome something.

And when we start comparing kicker to the purposes of a keyword, we realize that something would have been better suited in all situations because kicker lacks a fair few of these things.

Let's start from the top of the list: Kicker, as a word, has no real lore meaning behind it. They convey nothing like trample, scry, heroic, prowess, metalcraft, channel etc simply by itself. Sure if you tie it to a card you can describe what of the card it conveys, but you can do that with any mechanic you slap on a card. However if you try and build cards around kicker itself, the unifying theme or lore of kicker is quite muddled and weak and rarely intrinsic to the set itself.

Kicker doesn't really link cards together under one group, nor does it link a set together beyond "a set with kicker". You cannot have a unifying world theme under kicker like you could with landfall, or a guild theme like you could with extort.

Kicker's ability is not a shorthand really, as the kicker part is never the part to remember since everything that is needed to remember is what happens when you do. You are effectively creating more lines (and thus losing space) on your cards just by including kicker. The effect is just so simple and so easy that ... there's no real reason to keyword it. It doesn't need a shorthand to remember its effect. (The reverse can also be true, something can be so difficult and convoluted that it should never be a keyword but rather just on a single card).

Kicker as a keyword name never actually tells you how you should play the card, all it ever tells you is that you can play something in a different way than normal. The effect can cause confusion in many newer players as it doesn't direct them to an optimal play with the card leading to decision paralysis and frustration. Compare it with something like Spectacle which directly encourages swinging in just for a few points of damage to proc its effect.

Another aspect of wasted space of kicker is that it does nothing in regards to making a card easier to read, as the "pay an additional cost" is variable and so is its effect. You could use my Spectacle example earlier as a point against my argument, but the thing with spectacle is that it actually makes use of that space to describe a requirement to activate the alternate cost, which is a more rare effect that may not even be seen in numerous sets. Yes spectacle takes up more card space, but it is doing so to make it easier to remember the requirement that helps drive how the mechanic plays. Spectacle also doesn't always have the variable effect that results from paying its spectacle cost, which is an added benefit.

In a sense, kicker is not a mechanic that is made "how do we make this convey the best of our set" and more "we need something easy to utilize for our set". This is perhaps a fine thing. In Zendikar, landfall wanted to be the most important aspect of the set with nothing else really beating out its flavor. In Dominaria, Historic and Sagas took so much design and development power of the team that they didn't have as much time to work with the expansive universe that was/is Dominaria. But are those shortcuts really worth having every other keyword's impact on a set get lessened because it gets compared to kicker? I myself don't think so.