My favorite alternate resource systems in TCGs are Star Wars CCG and Lord of the Rings TCG, but they're both very different games than Magic and neither of their systems would really work for a Magic-like game.

In Star Wars, you play location cards that give 0-3 Force for each player. Each side can give a different number, and 1 or 2 were the most common. Each player plays one location at the start of the game, and each turn you activate Force by adding up all the Force icons for your side on both players' locations, and counting that many cards +1 off the top of your deck into a separate face-down Force Pile. You paid for things by spending Force, counting them off one at a time into a third Used Pile. At the end of your turn you could draw as much as you want out one by one out of your Force Pile, or leave as much as you want to save up for later turns. Once your turn was done, you recirculated your Used Pile under your deck.

In Lord of the Rings, each player's deck was half good guy cards that they played on their turn, and half bad guy cards that they played on other players' turns. When it's your turn you basically have unlimited resources. Play anything you want, adding counters to the Shadow pool to pay for it, there's no limit. Then you move to the next location and also add 1 for each character you have plus whatever number is on the location you move to (which is the opponents choice, generally speaking). Then the other players get to spend all those counters you added to pay for their bad guy stuff that you have to deal with. So you can spend all you want, but the more you spend the more your opponent gets to spend against you. At the end of every turn, both players can optionally discard 1 card and then draw up to their maximum hand size, which I believe was 8.

One big downside to both of these systems is that all resources are colorless, so there's nothing really keeping you from playing a deck of all the best stuff for the most part. Star Wars handled this by splitting the game into Light Side vs Dark Side, with 2 different card backs, so every card could only be used by one side although there were cards that got 2 versions, one for each side. A later spiritual successor game tried to solve this by adding a secondary resource called "support icons" to a certain locations, and each card required you to have 1-3 support icons for that card's faction in play to be able to play it.

In LotR this was really only a problem for the good guy side of each deck; your bad guy characters all got discarded at the end of the turn you played them so for consistency's sake most people only played a single faction of bad guys anyway. They handled it in later sets by making a lot of cards that only worked with characters from a certain faction, or that required you to have 1 or more characters from that faction in play. Given that you were limited to 9 characters total between in play and ones that had been killed (and most decks ran far fewer than that) requiring one or more to be of a certain faction was a big limiting factor, though a bit clunky as well. Certainly not as elegant as the basic resource mechanic.

Magic the Gathering: Adventures in the Forgotten Realms

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