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I've seen things like this before where it involves "playing without paying its mana cost" and "put into play".

When you "play a card without paying its mana cost", you are effectively playing a spell with a converted mana cost of :mana0:.

When you "put a card into play", you are putting into play without casting cost.

Take a look at Dragon Arch. You take a multi-colored creature from your hand and put it into play. You are not casting the spell, you are just putting it into play as if it were just played, like Natural Order. Same thing as Elvish Piper.

Now let's take a look at the abilities "cascade" and "ripple".

Cascade says "When you play this spell[the spell that has cascade], remove cards from the top of you library from the game until you remove a nonland card that costs less. You may play it without paying it's mana cost. Put the removed cards on the bottom in a random order." Here, you would be playing a card w/o paying it's mana cost, but you are still playing it, and therefore, casting it. I'm assuming that is why you can still counter a card that comes off of cascade. Cards like Bituminous Blast along with Bloodbraid Elf can be used to somewhat abused cascade, especially if they get a three casting cost card with cascade.

Ripple has nearly the same effect as cascade, but the card has to have the same name and it's only the top x amount of cards (like ripple 4 is the top 4). Here is what ripple says(coming off of Thrumming Stone so it may read different on cards that actually have ripple, although i know of none): "Whenever you play a spell, you may reveal the top four cards of your library. You may play any revealed cards with the same name without paying their mana costs. Put the rest of the bottom of your library." As you can see, this is almost exactly cascade, but with a little twist. Thrumming Stone is often use din Relentless Rat decks due to the fact that you can have any amount of Rats in the decks, so this continue until you run out of rats(at which point one wrath of god kills you ;)).

Hope i helped you here! :D

hmm... i think i got it.
"put into play" = not casting
"play without paying for mana cost" = casting.
now, just to satisfy my own curiosity, what about alternate costs?

the first example that comes to mind is Hand of Emrakul, if i sac four spawns instead of paying for the mana cost, am i casting the spell? or does it just come into play?

Effectively you're sacrificing four Eldrazi Spawn instead of paying it's mana cost, so you are still playing the card.

k thx, i think i'm all good now

-V

[QUOTE=Danokozmo]I've seen things like this before where it involves "playing without paying its mana cost" and "put into play".

When you "play a card without paying its mana cost", you are effectively playing a spell with a converted mana cost of :mana0:.

When you "put a card into play", you are putting into play without casting cost.
[/QUOTE]

Dan the vocabulary is important here, because the way this reads right now to me it seems like it has several factual errors regarding the difference between "Casting" and "Putting Into Play", which are two very different things but according to what you've said are identical (a CMC of 0 vs without casting cost... those two sentences are logically identical...)