Daily Card Redesign #127: Grapeshot Catapult

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.

Redesign:

The first thing that was so wrong about this card initially was that this was an artifact creature. There was no indication of it being a magical, living catapult monster, so that had to change. However, I do recognize that there is more functionality from a card that is both a creature and something that taps to deal damage to fliers.

I wanted to have the catapult require tapping of your own creatures to load the next ammo into the catapult, but I decided to go simpler and just have it be implied. I know there's a Goblin in the art, but it's just holding up a dead flier instead of loading the catapult.

I also wanted to have the catapult be "loaded" while tapped and the act of going from tap to untap be the "firing" part. But that created the problem of making this card even more irrelevant if the flying creature has a toughness greater than 1. If it gets damaged during your untap step, then the player will just not block. And if there are multiple creatures, then the opponent will know which one to not block with.

I figured out that what I really wanted was the "untap symbol" found in Shadowmoor. But that couldn't happen in Antiquities. So, I came to the version you see here.