Daily Card Redesign #56: Goblin King

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.

Redesign:

There aren't any red cards that grant haste in Alpha! So, here it is on the new Goblin King.

I noticed that there are two other "lords" in Alpha: Lord of Atlantis and Zombie Master. All grant landwalk of their respective colors' basic land types. However, there was an imbalance of effects - Lord of Atlantis and Goblin King both granted +1/+1 while Zombie Master didn't. I wonder whether this was for flavor reasons, like how Zombies couldn't get inspirited by a lord - so, instead, they just get reassembled and regenerated to continue doing their brain-eating spree.

We can still keep Zombie Master the way it is yet still fix this imbalance. So, since all grant landwalk, Goblin King had to keep the granting of mountainwalk. The other ability ended up being haste. While other Goblin lords have granted haste, there hasn't been one that has granted both mountainwalk and haste.

Something that I wanted to do instead of haste was key off of the art of Goblin King - sacrificing Goblins to make lands into Mountains until end of turn. The reason is because there are bones in the art. Dead creatures. Secondly, a Goblin can go and find a passageway for the rest of the Goblins to pass through for mountainwalk. A bit of a stretch for why the Goblin that is finding the passage is getting killed, though.

Lastly, the wording is weird because I tried to stay true to the templating. The clause of "while in play" was put at the beginning to make sure it's not confused that only half of the abilities work while Goblin King is in play. Modern wording would have said:

"Other Goblin creatures you control have haste and mountainwalk."