Daily Card Redesign #144: Sarpadian Empires, Vol. VII

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:

I admit I took a few risks here. First risk is changing Goblin to Orc. I did this because Goblin is already such a powerful creature type that I don't want to add to the laundry list of tools that Goblin decks can take advantage of. Well, not that this is a powerful card for it, but still. I made sure, though, that Orcs existed within the Fallen Empires set. They do!

Because this is a throwback card, it's important that each of these creature types exist on cards in both Fallen Empires and in Time Spiral. There's an Orc in Time Spiral, so that was good. But there were no Citizen creature cards. The same goes for Saprolings and Thrulls. But I solved that by having this design search for either a creature or another card that mentioned the type.

Let me tell you about Thrulls, though. They exist in abundance as creature cards in Fallen Empires. But they don't in Time Spiral. And that threw a monkey in the wrench of my original design where it had the player search for just creature cards. I was going to have the book let you search for; Soldier, Homarid, Orc, and Fungus. Those all exist as creature cards in Fallen Empires and Time Spiral. But, noooo. Despite the multitude of card versions of Thrulls in Fallen Empires, there isn't a single Thrull creature card in Time Spiral (yet this was true of the previous block, Ravnica block's Orzhov Thrulls).

The second risk I took was using the same words that cards like Magical Hack use and say "instance" and "text." ...Well, I'd say this is O.K. We did have overload, after all. And this IS a rare card. So... nevermind.

The third risk I took is a flavorful one. I'm only guessing that this is a reference to Fallen Empires and the nation/whatever of Sarpadia. And Goblins may have been crucial for this flavor. But I'm running out of time for this post, so I took a guess.