Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Daily Card Redesign #120: Whispersilk Cloak

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. 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.


The art makes it look like that the wearer can become death itself. There's two things that are preventing me from giving this redesigned card "deathtouch."
  • It's a common card. Being able to constantly have deathtouch in a large number of Limited games wouldn't be healthy for the Limited environment.
  • Deathtouch wasn't a keyword back then. It'd have to have the longform wording, which actually defeats the purpose of it being called "deathtouch." It's all in the name! You touch someone as Death, you have deathtouch!
With that said, here's the redesign:


It was tough trying to find a first word that fit alphabetically between Well of Lost Dreams and Wirefly Hive and still conveyed the concept I was trying to achieve.

For the flavor, I took a cue from how the cloak looks like it's being worn - except there's nobody being depicted in it. So, it makes the user invisible. But, the cloak isn't invisible. So, what's up with that? That's when I started thinking of extraplanar-ish stuff. Ghosts are like this. The ethereal plane. So, my final concept is that the creature is neither here nor there when it comes to dealing with other creatures. That's why it can't block either.

Yes, this text is just like Tormented Soul. This is intentional!

I love the descriptor "Wherenever."

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