Daily Card Redesign #158: Eldrazi Monument

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINAL:

REDESIGN:

O.K. I know. The text is pretty crazy. Let's break this design, and I'll get to a part where you might be going, "You can't do that; it's against the rules."

Name - since I haven't read the story, I wouldn't know whether Eldrazi Monument is something that exists in the storyline of great significance. It seems like it, and the art could have been created of this very significant part of the story in mind - thus, I'm not touching the name.

Mana cost - Since the original design was priced at 5 with a drawback and pumped its creatures with a +1/+1 along with other benefits, my design would be costed accordingly. One, I don't have any drawbacks. That should increase my cost by at least 1. A 6 converted mana cost should be enough, but to be on the safe side, I decided on 7. Turn 7 and beyond is pretty much the area where games might already have a winner decided.

Increasing numbers by 1 - Why did I decide this? Because if this is a monument to the Eldrazi, I wanted to make sure it could help all Eldrazi. But I couldn't just say "colorless creatures," because this card appears in Zendikar block! What did all the Eldrazi have in common? Annihilator. And all the annihilator abilities have a number. Thus, I had the direction. Then I shaped the effect into something that is applicable for any deck running creatures.

The templating - Overload on the Izzet cards mention "change its text by." So, I figured I needed to include that. Cards that change color words, for instance, also say "change the text of SOMETHING by replacing all instances blah blah blah."

Next, there was the problem of numbers. There are two different formats for numbers within the text of a Magic card: digit and word. "+3/+3" and "three" are examples of each, respectively. So, how was I supposed to prevent players from playing this card incorrectly when it comes to digits and words? I decided the answer was to be inclusive of both formats of printed numbers.

Now, I'm not exactly sure how much I broke something within Magic by doing this, but one good thing is that this only affects creature cards - well, yes, the most prominent card type. But here it is.

Daily Card Redesign #157: The Striders

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINALS:

REDESIGNS:

I would have liked to have changed the names but still kept the neat similar-sounding name thing going on, but I spent too much time trying to come up with a pair of names that did that but also kept these guys within their respective collector number slots.

The original designs are peculiar in that while the flavor of each card is aligned with one side of the war, for gameplay, each side would want to use the other side's card. If the Phyrexians win by infect, then they'd have no use for a card that causes life loss. Conversely, if the Mirrans are trying to win by dealing damage, they'd want the card that causes life loss. 

In a vacuum, the original design of Pierce Strider is more valuable than Peace Strider, because life loss is a bigger deal than life gain. However, I enjoy that the context of the set, with infect around, makes it so that this life loss might not actually be desirable due to a poison strategy.

For my redesign, I chose returning cards/discarding cards. I figure that letting the opponent choose what to discard rather than you being able to was the way to go, otherwise it'd be too strong. But I didn't want it to be too narrow, so creature or artifact made sense. 

Referring to creatures was important for the Mirran side since I wanted a card that said, "Hey, I'm here to possibly help you attain the number of artifacts you need to have metalcraft be active."

Daily Card Redesign #156: Mind Funeral

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINAL:

REDESIGN:

First, the name. This looked like a dump where minds/memories were being wasted. Therefore, Memory Dump. Also, "memory dump" is a term related to computers!

So, this card has been redesigned to still mill. Why? Because I took a look at Alara Reborn and saw that there are three milling cards, yet; two are rare and one is uncommon. Since I'm redesigning the uncommon, to support a Limited strategy, I determined that keeping this card a milling effect is very important.

Next, I always wondered why the heads in the art all look the same. That's when I thought: hey, what if they're all just about a single creature - a single creature's memories? And because these heads look like they're dead, I decided that the flavor is that when this one single creature dies, all of its memories get purged out - in the form of its controller getting milled, of course, but yeah.

Daily Card Redesign #155: Terror

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINAL:

REDESIGN:

Barring cards that deal damage to a creature, Terror is the only black spell card that straights up destroys a creature. Of course, with its own flavorful caveats.

So, I made sure to keep the destroy effect. There's not much else I can do to vary from the old Terror. Especially when the subject in the art is quite terrified. Playing off of that, I did away with "you can't terrify black creatures" and went with "black creatures can terrify."

I did away with the "nonartifact" clause to keep this card clean and free from clutter-y text. There are other spells in Magic that destroy that refer to flesh-only creatures, so I'm not bothered that this can hit artifact creatures, too.

While you have more freedom when hitting creatures, you also have the drawback of this spell not being useful later on due to a scarcity of cards in your hand, let alone black creature cards in your hand. Also, this is besides the drawback of revealing what your upcoming creature will be (but that's a minor drawback).

Daily Card Redesign #154: Skyhunter Skirmisher

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINAL:

REDESIGN:

Redesigning this skyhunter was a cinch! First, I knew it was going to have flying, as all hunters of the sky tend to have. Next, the art showing some super-fast action means I can dip into one of the three abilities that get the point across that this creature is fast: flash, haste, and first strike. 

Yes, I know double strike does first strike damage, and that could represent speed - the original design already shows how this creature skirmishes well by being able to strike twice in one go. But double strike, to me, doesn't do as well as first strike does when the reader is reading it to grok (understanding it because it resonates so well or instantly makes sense because it taps into this innate knowledge you have about whatever concept is being represented) that there is speed going on. I believe that double strike does better to represent concepts that involve hitting twice. Perhaps two fists, two laser eyes, or a double-edged sword, etc.

Anyway, double strike has already been done, so that left the other three. I couldn't do haste, because that's a red ability. That left first strike and flash. I wouldn't want to do first strike for two reasons: there's already a skyhunter card with first strike, and doing a powered-down version of the original design is lame for the sake of creating an interesting/compelling answer for this design exercise (In reality, it makes so much sense that you could just power down to first strike as a means of "scrapping" that slot of its double striker).

That leaves flash. No skyhunter currently has flash. The last thing to do was to check whether there was already a flash creature in Fifth Dawn, especially in white. *checks* Nope. Done.

Oh, and I dislike the name, but I couldn't come up with a satisfying one. You may have noticed that I tend to give my redesigned flash creatures the name "Striker."

Daily Card Redesign #153: Frenzied Tilling

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being scrapped late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color(s), is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

ORIGINAL:

REDESIGN:

It's a bad card, I know. But perhaps this bad card should exist. Not the name necessarily (but a name that still evokes that there's something going with a pair of creatures - I like that the word "pair" can warrant the otherwise-arbitrary number of "two"), but the rules text itself. There have to be bad cards in the game, and this could be one.

There's two creatures in the art, and we don't want to repeat destroying land. So, instead of focusing on destroying land, we focus on what the creatures themselves are like. They're in a frenzy. What would represent that? Haste and trample. Being green and red fit this perfectly.

There's scenarios where you could have made a couple tokens you want to attack with immediately. Perhaps a couple Elephants, Beasts, or Dragons. And it's always nice to give trample to that 7/7 without trample.

And, for common, giving two creatures two different abilities and nothing else like power/toughness boost or drawing a card seems pretty fitting.