Tricks like that are just so satisfying. I remember in a video editing software I was working on, I was tasked to implement the Crop tool, and there was a requirement to temporarily blur everything outside of the cropped area during editing. I didn't want yet another expensive blur pass, so all I did was just change the mipmap bias so that a lower-res texture rendered, and texture filtering did all the work for free. I then compared my result to a similar "blur" effect in Powerpoint (when cropping, too), and it looked the same (even better - Powerpoint had a slight color banding, and my impl didn't).
Another similar trick - we didn't have full res antialiasing for some reason (performance?), and most of the canvas was just a bunch of 2D rectangles (representing video frames), however they could be rotated, and aliasing was visible along the edges. Instead of enabling full screen antialiasing I just extruded all quads a little bit, while proportionally shrinking UV coordinates - so that the visible "edge" was inside the actual 3D quad, and texture filtering, again, did all the work for free :)