Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Daily Card Redesign #22: Giant Tortoise

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.


YES. Giant Tortoise!

I don't know the nuanced differences between a turtle and a tortoise, so this guy is never going to be renamed a Turtle. Wanna get this right! (Though, tortoises are consolidated into the creature type Turtle in modern design.)

...But then I looked up the difference. Tortoises are land-dwellers with large dome shells and live about two to four times as long than your average turtle. Turtles are water dudes with flatter shells.

Fascinating!

What makes this tortoise giant, from the art? The perspective, as if you are craning your neck up to look at a Giant Tortoise looming over you. After all, the skies are all you see in the background, so you gotta be looking up. Normally, you look down on these creatures. So, we'll avoid making this tortoise small, if anything, just like how this tortoise won't be a turtle.

I get what's happening with the original ability - the shell doesn't mean anything for a tortoise as long as it is exposed. While it's tapped, it is peeking its legs and head out. Bash in a tortoise's head, and it's as good as dead! ...But just like with so multiple other Magic: The Gathering Turtles, we can assume that this tortoise is quick enough to withdraw into its shell, thus being able to have permanent high toughness.

This is a common card, so I can't make this card too complex. Gotta be elegant about its design. I looked to other Turtles in Magic: The Gathering. There's shroud and high toughness. Hexproof should happen some time with a future Turtle with modern Magic design.

Power and toughness switching happened with Calcite Snapper, which is interesting. Of course, I wouldn't do that for an Arabian Nights common. You'd need a way of triggering the swapping, too! Too much complexity.

What interested me most is Giant Turtle:


Its ability plays into the slowness of Turtles. That is so flavorful! I would like to represent the slowness of Turtles, too! Two things came to mind:

"Whenever CARDNAME blocks or becomes blocked by a creature, that creature gains first strike until end of turn."

The above ability is a bit weird. It works well with high-toughness creatures, though! Actually, this is an ability that I've longed wanted to give to a Slowpoke, if it were a Magic: The Gathering card:


The other effect that came to mind was the ability that appears on a few Zombies and some other creatures:

"CARDNAME enters the battlefield tapped."

I think is the best. It seems like there should be a Turtle that exists that does this. And replacing the current design there is now is great because it's not tied down to any other constraints and shroud and hexproof haven't existed as keywords, yet, to take advantage of those.

Holy moly - did you know that there are only five common blue cards in the Arabian Nights expansion? Three of those are creatures: 1 one-costed creature and 2 two-costed creatures. I think we should increase the mana cost of this guy to three or four. And because Dandan has two blue mana in its mana cost, I want to make sure there's only a single blue mana in the mana cost of this new Giant Tortoise.

Oh, and I think Giant Tortoise is a great name already. Especially since it has no other constraints to the world it's via flavor or mechanics. This way, it can be reprinted easily later.

A Giant Tortoise at three mana, compared to Horned Turtle, should normally be a 1/4. But because it enters the battlefield tapped, the stats should change if we want to keep this creature at three mana. Either a 2/4 or a 1/5 would do it. I don't like a huge disparity between the power and toughness, so I would go with 2/4. If this were a creature that cost four, I would need to make it about a 3/4 or a 2/5, given that drawback of entering the battlefield tapped. Eh, I'd rather the Giant Tortoise be a 2/4. Let's not get too crazy now.

Summon Tortoise:



I used the wording on the old card Polar Kraken, for reference. I like how both Giant Turtle and Giant Tortoise exist and that they both play up the "Turtle creatures are slow" theme.

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