Thursday, January 24, 2013

Daily Card Redesign #23: Attendant Cycle

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. Because there isn't a given reason for why the card is killed like in real life, I follow a self-imposed rule of designing something "different."



There's a lot of cycles in Magic: The Gathering.

Anyway, the Attendant cycle here is really just one single card design. There's nothing different among them besides the three colors of mana they produce. There's tight cycles and then there are super-tight cycles. I want to instill a little bit of variation with my replacement designs.

But maybe these dragon attendants don't really do much because they don't do much in the story except to serve their dragon master or whatever. They're 3/3, so their sturdiness is nothing to sneeze at. And if anybody dares tussle with them, they'll fight back. 'cause they gotta be functional to serve that dragon, right? ...This is just me imagining what they're for. I wonder if there are more information on them.

*researches*

...I learned a lot and ran out of time to write. Here's the cards that are shoddy at best. The idea here is that they can fetch for their respective Dragon master OR for their master's respective charm that appears in Planeshift, the next set.






2 comments:

  1. So, a comment about set context.

    One thing that the Attendants did in Invasion limited especially was fix man. They did it badly, but they let any color accelerate and fix their mana if they needed it enough.

    This is not carried out in your versions.

    To be very fair, Invasion was colossally bad at mana fixing by the standards of modern multicolored sets, so it is not outside the realm of possibility that they might not print uncommon artifact mana fixers in the block. And the Attendants were very terrible at that job, so they might not even be missed.

    However, if I were designing this cycle today, and knew it was a multicolored block, I might go with:

    Rith's Attendant
    4
    When Rith's Attendant enters the battlefield, you may search your library for a basic mountain, plains, or forest card and put it into your hand.
    2/2

    I briefly toyed with adding a "whenever you cast a legend with all the dragon's colors disentomb this" trigger, but that would be mostly worthless.

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    1. Hah, I actually had designed that exact version you provided but decided that it was too similar in function to what the the Attendants previously did and scrapped it for a different way in how they would serve their draconic overlords.

      However, you're right in that I didn't pay attention to how important the mana fixing was to Invasion Limited! If I had known this, I would have kept the versions that you suggested.

      Well, if the tightness of the cycle didn't bother me, that is. It's probably for the best I don't tack on keywords or other abilities, anyway.

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