I have this idea for a cantrip-based casting class that focuses on casting damage and debuffing cantrips on alternating rounds. On ebbing rounds, they'd get a malus to their damaging cantrips and on flow rounds, they'd debuff their own save DC. You'd want to give them a decent selection of cantrips on each side, maybe 6 for each, and let them start with 2 and 2.
They could have other effects that let them do things like ebb, ebb, flow to keep them somewhat flexible and could have a focus spell that swaps between a heal and a self-buff based on their current state.
It's a very rough idea that I think might have some merrit.
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Alternate way to achieve the same basic thing - you have positive and negative spells (or whatever dichotomy you want). You start each fight with no charge. Casting a negative spell gives you positive charge, and vice versa. When you cast a positive spell while having positive charge, the spell gets buffed in some meaningful way, and the charge is expended (and you get a negative charge, as normal). Unused charge fades after about a minute, and there might be some cap on the amount of charge you could accumulate.
Then you can fiddle around with it in various ways - spells without charge that just don't interact with the system, spells that give you more than one point of charge, feats that mess with your charge numbers, spells that straight-up require charge to cast (or focus spells that can be cast with either charge points or focus points) and so forth.
If you want to really lean into the "I build up for a major smash" effect, then you could have the cantrips build up charge to power up the slot-cost or focus spells.
Additionally/alternately, might be interesting to have a sort of marking mechanic - have your little spells add marks to the targets they hit, and your big spells consume those marks. That might encourage poor tactics a bit too much, though, unless your cantrips have significant multitargeting ability. Taking three rounds to plaster cantrips on three different targets, with the expectation that when you fire off your spell on the fourth round your first target will still be there? It's a somewhat awkward bet, and not necessarily ideal even if you pull it off.