Daily Card Redesign #138: Lim-Dûl's High Guard

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:

Whenever there's a new threat, these guys are ready to do what they're supposed to do and guard you.

Daily Card Redesign #137: Suq'Ata Lancer

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 looked up all the flanking cards in Visions. They all depict creatures on horses. So, I thought it'd be best to keep this person with flanking. Because this is just a guy on a horse, I didn't see simply taking away haste and making it bigger as something that makes sense. Having 3 power or 3 toughness, especially when having flanking, was just out of the question. But I couldn't make it a 1/1, either. That also didn't feel right for a guy on a horse. 2/1 feels more red than 1/2. So, I either had to adjust this card to be a 2/1 or come up with an effect that replaces haste and be able to pursue 2/2 in addition to 2/1 for stats.

Before I continued, I wondered whether  1 toughness made sense for a person on a horse. So, I did a search on red Knights. Yep, Defender of Chaos is proof that this is something that can make sense.

This is a common card, so there's not much wiggle room with what kind of additional effects I can give this creature. First strike was my next choice, but combined with flanking, that's pretty powerful. Besides, there's already a red flanking creature that has an activated ability to give itself first strike. 

Then I looked at the flavor text. ..."never stop." AHA! The red drawback of "attacks each turn if able," was then added. Red can get a 2/1 for 1R at common, and flanking was a bonus, so the "attacks each turn if able" drawback balances out the upside.

Goblin Artisans Weekend Art Challenge: StormOwlArt

This weekend's Magic: The Gathering design challenge by Goblin Artisans can be found here.

Here's my submission:

The challenge asked for a card that's not black and helps curb a strong milling strategy (but doesn't completely eradicate it). And it also asks that this be something that players would sometimes want to put into their maindeck and not just be relegated to the sideboard.

The very first thing I worried about was the flavor of the card, not the gameplay. The challenge said the set that this card comes from was open for whatever, so I took that to heart. I looked at the card's art and tried to figure out what was going on:

The person looks sad and is wearing all-black, as if someone had died. Caring about dead creatures is green. They're also playing music. Is this in honor of the dead creature(s)? In that case, this could be a eulogy, but the music can be an elegy! I love alliteration, so I knew I had the name of my card. Playing music can be red, because of the emotion and passion put into it. But playing carefully-structured and methodically-arranged notes that forms into a musical piece can also be blue. With all of this, I took this as a cue to pretend this card is from an imaginary block/plane with "wedge" color combinations.

If the card's effect is going to care about dead creatures, it would care about creature cards in the graveyard. The card also has to combat milling, so I had the effect of the spell put those creature cards back into the deck. This is quite green (blue can shuffle cards back in the library, too - just not so much focused on creatures), so that color was taken care of, gameplay-wise.

Next, I had to figure out what red and blue was going to do. Both red and blue have the "looting" ability, so I used that. But the problem with looting is that you're "milling" yourself. So I figured that both blue and red together would have "slightly-'improved' looting." Instead of discarding the cards being looted away, the cards go on the bottom to keep up your increased number of cards in your library. As an added bonus, this avoid any awkward flavor clash by having the player discard creature cards. The spell's flavor wouldn't want to cause creatures to go into your graveyard after having just revered dead creatures!

Also, the combination of shuffling creature cards into the library and then drawing cards means there's chance involved in drawing them. This further adds to the redness of the spell.

Other card effects considered but discarded: gaining mana a la Seething Song, except mana of any color due to green being able to grant color of any mana; and gaining control of creatures with a fog effect.

Daily Card Redesign #136: Viridian Scout

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 I wanted this to be was a creature with flash and an enters-the-battlefield plummet effect. But that is uncommon territory. Scrap that. The main focus of this card is that this guy is catching a creature by surprise. So, I wanted to keep flash.

Next, I wanted to make a flash creature with stats that have never existed before. There's been a 2/2 for 1G with flash in the form of Ashcoat Bear. So we either gotta go bigger or smaller in terms of power and toughness. We can't go bigger because the art depicts one mere elf. So, the obvious thing was to go smaller.

After that, I remembered the 1/1 Kithkin with flash that can be cast for either a white or blue mana. Taking that into consideration, green can also have a 1/1 for one colored mana. But that already exists with this Kithkin! AND the flashing Kithkin is already more flexible with that hybrid mana for a cost. 

How do we differentiate this redesigned card from that Kithkin? Two things: green's good at creatures. Anything white and blue can do, green can do better. AND you have a not-as-flexible non-hybrid colored mana in the cost of the redesigned card. With those two factors, I deemed it O.K. for green to have a 1/2 for G that also flashes onto the battlefield. Never existed before! Ta-da.

Daily Card Redesign #135: Wave Elemental

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 love the flavor of a Wave Elemental, but I didn't like how the original had its effect happen only once which also can't happen during the first turn it is in play. It's a living embodiment of waves! How could it not be doing wave-y things the whole time it's alive?

I decided that waves should be associated with attacking, since standing still would be like calm waters. But to make sure it still did its thing the first turn it was in play, I had the trigger for its "wave" ability to trigger off of entering the battlefield OR attacking. Besides, the Wave Elemental could have crashed into play. Go, go crashing of waves.

I wanted the player to FEEL like they were sending a wave toward another creature by requiring the tap of an untapped Island. Usually, this will be the basic land Island being tapped, which is the desired experience.

Daily Card Redesign #134: Mortician Beetle

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:

There's a bunch of creatures in Rise of Eldrazi that level up. Here's a creature that can sap level counters from creatures to get stronger. As a bonus, it stands on its own outside of the set and can leech off of (typically) other +1/+1 counters. But it can also take away those -1/-1 counters on creatures of yours. Quite the interactive little bugger.

Daily Card Redesign #133: Tukatongue Thallid

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:

Three +1/+1 counters is a throwback to old Thallids and their spore counters. This card fulfills either role that you're trying to achieve: either you used up your tokens and just want a large dude, or you're working on building up your tokens and could use some help for devour.

Daily Card Redesign #132: Anathemancer

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 thought it'd be fun to do another -mancer for its new name. It also had to come alphabetically before Bituminous Blast. Anthropomancy is divination using human entrails. Gruesome. Very black. Which is why it triggers off of creatures dying. The red part, for the divination, is the looting mechanic. You have to discard first then draw a card because that's the order in which red loots while blue would be to draw a card first then discard a card. Now it's a black-red card!

I discovered that this card was the only unearth card at uncommon. So, I made sure to give it unearth. But then I needed it to have a relevant effect for when you unearth it for a turn. That's why I had it trigger off of not just creatures dying but from creatures being unearthed (with the poetic wording of "graveyard" to "in play" or "in play" to "graveyard"). I figured that the dead creatures coming back for a single turn from unearth could still be quite "entrail-y."

Hopefully this guy isn't too broken by not requiring a mana cost or a tap symbol.

Goblin Artisans Weekend Art Challenge: Joshk92

Illustration by Joshk92 on deviantART

This weekend's Weekend Art Challenge on Goblin Artisans uses the above illustration. The challenge asks you to imagine Ravnica never existed and to find the mechanical heart of a new city-plane.

Here's my submission:

There were two things that come to mind that is the essence of a city: population and buildings. When I think of a city, I think of how there's a lot more people in it than non-city places. Additionally, all those buildings are present to accommodate the denizens of a city. Apartment buildings versus houses. Commercial buildings that house several businesses versus small stores/shops.

So, I had to accommodate both of these into a single card. Thankfully, before realizing this, I had thought of the fact that larger cities tend to have tourist attractions. In fact, the larger the city, the more presence tourism has. And the reason why I thought of "tourist attraction" was because of how there's a peculiar spotlight on two folks within the art. These folks could actually be tour guides or part of a tour's presentation.

For Buildings, I came to the conclusion that it should be a land type. I don't need to define further what Buildings would do for this card, since this is just a glimpse card I'm designing. However, as this card shows, one implementation is for them to just function like Gates, where other cards would reference Buildings. Of course, they would have more mechanical relevance than Gates as they are one of the two core attributes of a city.

And what kind of people live in a city? Citizens! If there's going to be a high number of people defining this city-plane, it should be Citizens. I was tempted to use Humans, but this city is going to be full of non-humans that live there, too. So, it wouldn't make sense to have Goblins and Elves be not considered part of the city. I also decided that every color should be able to have access to producing Citizens, so I made them colorless, flying in the fact of past cards that produced white Citizen creature tokens.

My first iteration of designing a Tourist Attraction card was to copy Khalni Garden, except the land would produce colorless mana. And, in exchange for that drawback, it would generate a 1/1 instead of a 0/1 Plant. I believed this was fine because I compared this to having a Memnite and a basic land in play on the first turn. With the Memnite 1/1 and untapped basic land, you have the drawback of two cards down and an artifact type for susceptibility to artifact destruction spells. With this card, you lose that one mana for the turn. In exchange, you have a 1/1 that's not an artifact.

But then it didn't feel like a Tourist Attraction if there was just one 1/1. And that's when I remembered how the larger the city, the more tourists are drawn to it. So, I keyed into having you tap your Buildings. The more Buildings you have (the larger "your city" is), the more "tourists" you can draw in.

When it comes to a set where there's a focus on a large number of creature tokens like the Eldrazi Spawn in Rise of the Eldrazi, it's important that, if they're 0/1, that they are functionally different, gameplay-wise, from Eldrazi Spawn. We don't want to rehash the same gameplay from before, even if it uses different rules text achieving basically the same thing.

One thing I thought of for 0/1 Citizens is something like, "T: Govern." Whatever "govern" does, I don't know. Replace it with a better word, and it would contribute to some kind of mechanical relevance in the set. However, the problem is that there needs to be reminder text for new keywords at lower rarities. And if colorless Citizens are going to permeate the set, we can't have that much text devoted to a new keyword and its reminder text. So, the Citizens have to do something else that requires few characters in the text, like "T: Gain 1 life."

In the end, I couldn't think of any inherent ability that a Citizen should have, so I decided that the fact that Citizen is an important type was going to be in this theoretical city set. There would be a mechanic in the set that would leverage Citizens. And if Citizens would have no abilities, we can't leave them as 0/1s, otherwise, they'll just be worse than Eldrazi Spawn. 1/1 it is, then! Don't worry - sets are flexible in the kind of card designs they include, which can accommodate for an environment that has a bunch of these tokens running around. Just look at Rise of the Eldrazi.

Daily Card Redesign #131: Cobra Trap

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:

It's a flexible fog effect! And the condition to cast it cheaper is keyed off of the art depicting just one guy there. You can get more Snakes this way, but they are forced to block right away, as a drawback. For balance.