Hi. I played the match for the rogue, in my hand were the cards “preparation” and “pick pockets.” At first, I played the “pick pocket” card 2 times, then my mana ran out. But I wanted to play this card again, so I used “preparation”. To my surprise, the cost of the “pick pocket” card decreased instead of two mana per one.
There is a rule that Echo copies of cards cannot ever have their mana reduced below one to avoid infinite value issues (such as having two Sorcerer’s Apprentice on the field, thus playing Pickpocket any number of times until the rope ends (or you hand is full).
The patch notes when that changed happened:
https://playhearthstone.com/en-us/blog/23239986/hearthstone-update-december-5-descent-of-dragons?
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Strange rule. What prevented to make the cost of “pick pocket” zero for one turn after the “preparation”, and than two again. This does not contradict the mechanics of “preparation”, and no one can profit from it. But its ok, thank you.
The rule is not there to prevent Preparation to give a 1-shot discount, in that case it is just a side-effect of the infinite value protection. Programming single exceptions to edge cases would be too complicated.
Note that if you had played Preparation on the original Pick Pocket (not an echo copy) it would have been discounted to 0.
If you somehow got two sorcerer’s apprentices on board as rogue, without that echo rule you could just cast pickpocket infinite times. That’s not much of an issue, but there was an exploit where Warlocks could discount Snip-Snap to 0, and then magnetize it several dozen times to an existing mech to one-shot the opponent.