Krunanan, Skyprodder

I had an idea in mind that deep within the "Untended Cradle" is a creature that had evolved itself enough over a long period of time to become secretly extremely powerful U/G creature that manipulates in subtle, psychic ways, some of the high-speed evolution taking place there.

This eventually made me think of a highly intelligent dragon that the humanoid races of Guthreham are completely unaware exists.

And then as I was thinking about my U/G theme of self-directed evolution I hit on the idea of creatures learning to control triggered abilities. Multitriggering abilities has become an interesting, janky component of blue's identity. Tying it to a creature's abilities seems green. So I end up with Krunanan, here:

This card just seems like it's going to break stuff, but unfortunately I'm not really good at mentally recalling/thinking about what has been published in the past. I've attached it to an attack trigger and then set it target a single other creature to gatekeep it just a little bit.

Within the set itself, you can use it to trigger pretty much all the special abilities in this set. Mutate and Fecund are both triggered abilities. Reave itself is a casting cost, so it doesn't trigger reave, but if there's a creature with an ability that triggers when you pay a reave cost, you can trigger that.

I also had a story idea in my head that Krunanan becomes evolved enough to "spark" and becomes a planeswalker with a build-around focus on creature abilities. I'm still brainstorming what that might look like.

If You Reave, I Won't Cry

Given the parasitic nature of reave and things triggered when cards are reaved (riven? whatevs), I'm a little concerned about its playability in limited. So I decided there should be a cycle of common sorcery/instant spells that would typically be used as useful if not terribly exciting tools for sealed/draft 40-card decks. The twist is that there's a bonus if they get exiled from anywhere. So you're essentially double-dipping with reave. The reave card itself gives you some sort of bonus if you exile a card from the graveyard. These cards also do something when they're exiled.

The bonus on this one is not terribly exciting. But it could be useful if you're playing W/B and need to be reaving out cards to make zombies in order to survive.

Keep in mind how this also triggers if you exile a card off the top of your library but are still able to cast it. Which you can do with Plundered Sanctum. And don't forget about effects that let you play a spell from your graveyard and then exile it.

The familiar land tutor. Note how this significantly boosts R/G if you reave it out and have creatures with the mutate ability. Each one you untap gets a +1/+1 counter.

Ashen Illumination as the typical discard/draw red card also has the bonus of putting another card in your graveyard for potential reaving. I haven't designed it yet, but I'm sure there will be a red spell of some sort that will let you exile, then cast the top card of your library in some fashion. Which means that if Ashen Illumination is the top card of your library it will cost only 1 colorless to cast (plus the discard).

This one might be too powerful for common, given that black has primary access to reave and other reave effects that create zombie tokens.

It actually taps for colorless mana, but I think the Magic Set Editor is old and doesn't have that symbol. I think I'm going to take the "non-land" restriction off of reave kickers. I don't think it's necessary.

More Artifact Concepting

While Gutherham (and the Overgrowth set) is not an artifact-heavy plane, there are artifacts present due to its long history. It's Janell's anti-artifice mentality that's been purging them for the past several decades. So there are artifacts--and some of them are going to be quite impactful. Really they're going to kind of exist on the edges--either they're low in powerful and beneath Janell's notice, or they're very powerful but are hidden deep in places where Janell does not know they exist.

Some common artifact creatures:

As you can see, flavorwise the mages used to use artifact birds to pass along messages. They still have some in the Runetide Flotilla, but make sure the Arbor doesn't know about them.

An updated version of this early creation. These creatures are underground so Janell doesn't even know they exist. Note the spider creature type. This is compatible then, with black/green's vermin identity. Should I give it reach? Hmmm.

Since the cephalids are deep under the ocean, they obviously are not affected by Janell's efforts. That could have made it possible for a B/U artifact-heavy theme, but I've noticed that sets that try to sell an artifact theme in a color pairing kind of struggle unless there's a good as-fan of artifacts.

So even if Janell at the Arbor is very down on artifacts, I did want there to be some defensive artifacts accessible to white, given the emphasis on playing defensively in this set. In this case I flavored/balanced it as something very limited that only serves to protect.

I flavored the typical card-draw tome to go with the red hermits. Obviously anybody can play this artifact. It's going to be particularly good late game in red/black if you also have a reave card that cares how many cards left the graveyard.

Here are a couple of cards that tell a story about whatever secrets are hiding deep within Guthreham:

And the new version of Womb of Guthreham:

There's some stuff going down deep inside this plane. What does it mean? It's a secret. (Which means I haven't actually really figured it out yet.)