Saturday, March 17, 2018

Aetherial Phantasm

So, is this even playable? I mean, I know it is in certain environments, but think about the kind of set this weird-ass creature would belong in.


So the inspiration for this was partly from Ari Nieh's interesting Kaladesh-inspired Steamfist Enforcer for the Great Design Search entries, which cares about whether you used mana from an artifact source to cast it.

So I had the idea of an undercosted creature that forbid you from using mana from lands to summon it. I originally templated it in blue. Then as I was thinking about what such a creature would look like, I visualized it as a spectral creature that was alien and artificial because it had no direct ties to lands or life or leylines. So I started thinking of it in terms of blue-black. But it felt like it would be very, very difficult to make different iterations of this creature and be usable in a colored deck in a limited setting.

So I essentially came up with artifact ghosts. I suspect these are probably going to still be too difficult to play in multiples in most limited sets. It would need to be a set specifically designed with non-land mana in mind available to a significant decree. It could fit into Ixalan, actually, with the treasures, but the flavor just doesn't feel right.

It could maybe find space in constructed formats that allow for older cards, though I'm not sure if it complements artifact affinity decks or competes with them.

It's also not right for Overgrowth either, at least not in my current conceptualization.

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