Daily Card Redesign #20: Master & Apprentice Cycle Part 2

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being killed late during its own set's development, and I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color, is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

Last time, I designed two sets of replacement abilities for the 'Scape Master and 'Scape Apprentice cycles. Today, I'll finish with the remaining three pairs of abilities resulting in the rest of each of the cycles in their finished forms. The card you see above is 

So far, I've redesigned the blue and red abilities. They are shown on these cards:

Wobbles on Twitter pointed out something, though: the red ability on the Master overrides the ability on the Apprentice. There is absolute redundancy once you get the Master out while you have the Apprentice out. I think he's right in that this is a wrong thing. So, to fix this, while it's not as clean, I'm going to change the ability to:

"Up to three target creatures can't block this turn."

That way, there's still some potential useful-ness with the Apprentice's red ability. I realize that if the opponent has three or less creatures, the Apprentice would still be sitting on the sidelines with its red ability. But it's good that its red ability can still be applicable if there's a lot of creatures - better than only using the Master ability no matter what.

Next...

SCREECH. Hold up. I was going through each card, setting up the images and preliminary text and such when I noticed something a couple of things, one of which will undo the work I put into the blue and red abilities. First, the minor thing:

Thornscape Apprentice's two abilities are out of order. If you look at the images of the Apprentice cycle at the beginning of this blog post, you'll notice that they all start with a different color. Except, there's two whites and no reds. With the ordering scheme of the rest of the cycle, Thornscape Apprentice is the odd one out. Funny, this has also transferred over to the reprint of Thornscape Apprentice:

If you look at Thornscape Master, the order is correct:

Anyway, I'll make sure it's correct in my version. Next, the more-important discovery: Sunscape Master is the only one that depicts victims of its magic. And, in that art, the blue effect doesn't look like it's drawing you cards. Sunscape Master is freezing a creature. Which means we'll have to change the blue ability. 

And blue, nowadays, when "freezing" creatures, it means to tap the creature and have it not untap during the next untap step. So, I'm going to do that, even though the old white ability on the Apprentice cycle was tapping. This is better and O.K., and I'm not being un-creative! So, here are the new blue abilities:

"Tap target creature"

"Tap up to two target creatures. Those creatures don't untap during their controller's next untap step."

Because of this new blue ability, red is redundant with its "no blocking" ability. Back to the drawing board.

Oh, and I just discovered I accidentally duplicated Grixis Battlemage with my design of Nightscape Apprentice. Exactly the same abilities:

For the other guy in the art of Sunscape Master - well, he's happy. He's got tree stuff growing on him. This makes me think of +1/+1 counters. So, then, I think of the Apprentice granting temporary growth while the Master grants permanents boosts on two creatures. (It goes with the same scheme of "Do the same thing but more and better.") I realize that doing this would mean repeating the green ability of granting +1/+1.

RAN OUT OF TIME! Must post all cards: