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.)