Daily Card Redesign #145: Coalition Victory

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:

Tsabo Tavoc kills legendary creatures. Here's a counterpart to that. If Tsabo is Loki, then the Weatherlight Crew are the Avengers. And here they are, as a collective, responding to something. I just HAD to do this name as a riff on the "Avengers, Assemble!" thing.

NOTE: I know only just a little about the Weatherlight story. So, I may be wrong to call Tsabo Loki in this analogy.

I had to keep this card at five colors. Here's why: every single color combination is already balanced equally in number of cards in the set Invasion. If I chose anything besides 0 or 5 colors, there'd be an imbalance. So, I was stuck doing a colorless card or a five-color card. And, of course, a colorless card would mean an artifact. Five colors it is.

And there's ACTION going on in the art. And those legendary folks. I couldn't do a creature or something like an enchantment, unless it was a magical effect that kept causing explosions or something and people running around over and over. So, instant or sorcery it should be.

I figure that if you're paying FIVE colors for this spell, you deserve being able to cast this and get a bunch of legendary creatures. After all, you do still have to cast them, too.

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.

Daily Card Redesign #143: Necropotence

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.

Ah, Necropotence. The enabler of that famed Black Summer that was before my time.

Redesign:

I never figured out who or what is depicted within the art of Necropotence. Is that supposed to be what a planeswalker looks like when they're powerful in the ways of death magic? Or is that Death itself with its hand granting you its services?

I decided I liked the fact that the subject represents Death. And the hand raised with swirly magical effect is your soul being taken by Death. I wanted to go for a flavor that had you making a deal or contract with Death to help you out of dying. In exchange, your soul.

I wanted to capture the flavor of what it meant to be a planeswalker without a soul. But, in the end, I decided on this simple effect above. You get to take just one more turn of yours before losing. In exchange, you're protected until then.

I have no idea what the appropriate mana cost should be. So I made it the same cost as a Time Warp. It's essentially granting you an extra turn - since you were supposed to lose before you got the chance to have that additional turn.

By the way, wondering about a planeswalker losing its soul made me wonder what it'd be like to sacrifice or otherwise lose your spark. Do you die? Or do you become an ordinary creature?

Daily Card Redesign #142: Aerial Caravan

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:

So, Albatrossus. The name is a portmanteau of "albatross" and "colossus!" You know, if it wasn't clear. 'cause that is a giant bird thing.

I decided to change this card to be focused on the bird instead of the people riding it because, well, for one, that bird steals the show in the art! You can barely see the people riding it. Secondly, that flying monstrosity is too unusual in comparison to the plain humans riding it for it to NOT be the creature type that this creature is.

But there's still a focus on people riding this albatross. So, I decided that the mechanical implementation of this giant Bird was to have your creatures be able to ride it.

And here we are.

I like how it can make itself leave the battlefield instead of needing to rely upon dying (hard to do if it keeps getting stronger) or a bounce spell or something if you ever want to get your exiled creatures back when you want to.

Daily Card Redesign #141: Bloodshot Trainee

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 couldn't name this something that started with "Boulder" because Boldwyr Intimidator came after this card slot alphabetically.

Because this card has a future-shifted frame, this card needed to do something that is unusual but could possibly be something that's normal from whatever set in the future. In this case, putting +1/+1 counters on Mountains is pretty weird - but it's completely fine to do. They just don't do anything for those lands unless they become creatures.

The +1/+1 counters on the Mountains represent boulders that this Goblin lifts. He travels from Mountain to Mountain, training in the art of boulders to become stronger. Goblins dignify even the most rudimentary of behaviors, such as lifting large rocks, making it kinda funny that his apprenticeship specializes in heaving chunks of stone.

This kinda feels more appropriate in green. But because the requirement involves Mountains, it can still be kept in red by virtue of the colors required.

Daily Card Redesign #140: Sun Clasp

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 found it weird that the art featured something ominous-looking, especially for a white card. But then I remembered how death can be something pretty scary and white deals with death. The focus is on this gold medallion-looking thing, so I figured that this was something that protected its wearer from death once. The figure in the art actually died (which is why is in the lying-down position), and the shadow shows the subject gasping as it draws breath once again.

Mechanically, this plays into the same space as Breath of Life/Resurrection but with a Second Sunrise/Faith's Reward condition. And the effect it applies to save the creature is the blinking mechanic. Also, this is similar to Angelic Renewal.

I know that Auras are put into a graveyard when the creature being enchanted leaves the battlefield, so I could get away with just blinking the creature. However, players not in the know of how this works might think the creature returns with the Aura still attached to it. Thus, an "invincible" creature. So, I decided to just state that the Aura needed to be sacrificed as part of its effect.

I don't know why one white mana feels too dangerous to have as a cost. It seems to check out. Angelic Renewal is applied to any creature you choose, and it costs 1W. And it's definitely worse than Breath of Life because it prevents you from bringing back a creature card you never fairly cast in the first place.

Daily Card Redesign #139: Acidic Slime

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 found out some things about modern core sets, which may also apply to the expert-level expansion sets. Green always has at least one deathtouch card per common and uncommon. It also has at least one  Naturalize effect at common and uncommon. Additionally, land destruction has been at a minimum of two throughout the existence of Acidic Slime, which has been every modern core set.

There's so much utility that Acidic Slime is taking care of itself that it's hard to deviate away from the design that already exists. It's so good at doing what it does that it keeps coming back, doing what it does. If we were to have it my way, I'd want to shelve Acidic Slime for a set and come up with other cards that handle the effects of deathtouch and destruction of noncreature artifacts.

There wasn't a lot of wiggle room for what other effects we could put on this card besides the one that already exists. But Bramblecrush exists and still takes care of artifacts, lands, and enchantments - with the added bonus of destroying planeswalkers.

I wanted to keep pushing to further differentiate this from the original design, so I made the effect depend upon the creature having its activated ability activated. Upside: instant-speed removal. Downside, sacrificing the creature. I think this shakes out.