HotC Design Challenges, Week 3

Zach Barash at Hipsters of the Coast is hosting some design challenges there to sharpen the minds of anybody participating in the WotC design competition. I've been participating and figured I'd share my card creations that he requests for each challenge after the submission deadline has come and gone.

Here are the card design orders and my submissions for week three's challenge.

Card 1: Design a card that contains two existing keywords that have not yet been on a card together.

Bant-ish, deliberately kept simple for common. There was a blue exalted creature with shroud (for a cost) but hexproof and exalted have not appeared together.

Card 2: Design a card that contains an existing keyword action and an existing keyword.

(No, it's not a pic of a birdman, but I was using a creative commons search engine and my options were kind of limited)

Flying is the keyword and scry is the keyword action. This guy is intended for Amonkhet. The flavor is that even the cleric types attempt the trials.

Card 3: Suppose Dragons of Tarkir’s story went a little bit differently. Design a mythic rare enemy-colored Dragonlord.

I ended up in all Simic colors for this challenge. Wasn't intentional. Just sort of happened organically.

The concept for Karatson is that he was part of Atarka's brood, secretly plotted against her, and overthrew her in ambush attack with some allies and took over. I think that plays out well in how the card's mechanics operate. Creating a token clone may not seem like a mythic thing, but combined with flash and the fact that "Dragons of Tarkir" is a set full of some pretty large creatures, this can be quite the ambush in limited. 

Card 4: Design an uncommon creature that references or interacts with an existing planeswalker to appear in an upcoming Core Set.

Since it's meant for a Core Set, I kept the interactions fairly simple to understand but powerful enough for uncommon. Upon review, I think two counters is too much. Assuming you have a Nissa and use her as this card intends, the elemental will actually be 7/8 at the point it is able to attack. (Play it, then use Nissa's ability. Then your next turn, use Nissa's ability, then attack). Probably way too much. I should have just put one +1/+1 counter each activation.

Card 5: Design an uncommon guildmage for a new Ravnica set.

Since I was already in Simic, I figured why not? Also gave me a chance to kind of research the guilds because I was not playing Magic at all when the Ravinca sets came around. I deliberately decided to change the way the guildmage's abilities work specifically because this is a new set. Since the coordinator is blue/green, she can be tapped to help activate either ability. And her abilities can be triggered repeatedly even when she's tapped.