CCDD 022611 — Master's Simulacrum and Master of Being

Cool Card Design of the Day
Every day, I design a new card and discuss it briefly. Sometimes I will examine new possibilities for colors or mechanics, sometimes I'll re-examine existing executions and sometimes I'll just design something I think is neat.

2/26/2011 - People love creature-type lords. People love obscure tribes. There are heaping scads of tribes with no lords. This is what we call a design opportunity. How do we satisfy the need to supply a lord for the poor Beebles, Bringers and Brushwaggs who have no representation? Why, a shapeshifter, of course!

Master's Simulacrum can act as the lord of literally any creature type. Making him colorless wasn't an option, it was a requirement. I originally costed him at 4, to be safe, but most lords have converted mana cost three to cast and give their respective type an additional ability particularly appropriate to their race, so this should really be fine.

I considered briefly making him gain that creature type rather than overwrite his original and to give the +1/+1 bonus to any creature that "shares a type with" him, so that he could simultaneously be an X-lord and a shapeshifter lord, but that seemed unnecessarily wordy for a very rare (if awesome) benefit. Particularly considering most of the shapeshifters in your Metathran/Shapeshifter deck will probably have already earned themselves the Metathran creature type on their own.

As Johnny as it is, I couldn't help but notice there was even more Johnny potential:

Why not a Conspiracy on a stick? With a Glorious Anthem on top? You'll note that is blue-white instead of black-white. Yeah, there's nothing black about uniting all your creatures under one banner and there's something very blue about altering their fundamental nature. Color-shifted!