Unicorn Design

A couple weeks ago, over at Gathering Magic, MJ Scott pointed Magic's egregious lack of unicorns. To give some added context, unicorns show up slightly more often than the classic fantasy Lobster People, but far less often than the beloved fairy tale fungi. However, I'm not convinced the shortage is necessarily about gender bias in design. I'm all for designing cards to attract more female players, but I suspect unicorns never found a place in Magic because they never found a unique mechanical trope to represent them. In game design terms, tropes are the conceptual, game-play mechanics that are used as a metaphor for describing creatures, characters, or environments within the game's story. For example, gnomes are expendable artifact creatures, angels fly, demons demonize, and so forth. Without an established identity, it becomes hard to describe where an entity fits in the overall scheme of things; hence the lack of unicorns.


I was watching my friend play her Oros, the Avenger EDH deck when it occurred to me that there aren't a lot of ways to reuse enchantments from the graveyard. This is a major bummer, because no one ever lets cards like Furnace of Rath or Gratuitous Violence hang out on the battlefield. It's already hard enough to get the most out of your enchantments (especially in competitive, single player formats), and it's pretty lame that there aren't more ways to recycle them. For reference, there are fewer than 20 cards for recurring enchantments (some recur artifacts as well), and with the exception of Replenish and Open the Vaults (artifacts again!), all the cards are pretty bad. By contrast, there are dozens of cards to recur artifacts and hundreds of cards for springing creatures out of the graveyard, and a lot of those cards are top-tier.

Thinking about these two problems led to a cheese-meet-macaroni moment. Why not design unicorns that love enchantments? These are a few of the designs I came up with...

(And as always, all designs have been added to my Wizards community wiki here.)

Ideal Unicorn (U)
WW
Creature - Unicorn
2/3
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may return target enchantment from your graveyard to your hand.

Regal Unicorn and Monk Idealist make a baby. I tried this card as a 2/3 at 2W, but it feels weak by current design standards. I realize Auramancer has been unofficially spoiled, but I believe it is a bad card, and I'm unhappy to see it (aside from the stats, I dislike bleeding wizards into white, where they compete with clerics for design space). With Armored Warhorse officially spoiled as a 2/3 at WW, I think these should be the new equine standard stats going forward.

Tragic Unicorn (U)
3W
Creature - Unicorn
3/3
When CARDNAME dies, you may return target enchantment from your graveyard to the battlefield.

I think this is actually a bad card for a couple reasons, and they both have to do with auras.

First, for the death trigger clause, let's imagine this scenario: I have Tragic Unicorn on the battlefield, and cast Holy Strength, targeting the unicorn. In response to my casting a Holy Strength, my opponent cast Doom Blade on the unicorn. Can I return my Holy Strength to my hand? Here's another case: I have a Tragic Unicorn with a Holy Strength attached on the battlefield. The unicorn is my only creature. My opponent topdecks a Gatekeeper of Malakir, and casts it with the kicker. Can I get back the Holy Strength? (For anyone who knows the answers here, how sure are you? Are you certain enough to play it correctly without having to call a judge or consult the unholy complete rules tome?)

For the Zombify-an-enchantment part, there's a similar problem. How exactly does it work when you put auras directly onto the battlefield? Do they still target the thing they attach to? What happens when the target leaves play before the aura gets attached? (Again, I realize there are players that can answer these immediately — but they're in the minority. For most players, these are the kinds of questions that start arguments.)

One way to dodge both these problems is by using the Chancellor of the Spires template instead of the Rise from the Grave template, in which you actually cast the spell instead of the more nebulous "putting it on to the battlefield." This gets you more or less the same effect without tripping up new players. It also gives you an extra way to impact one of MtG's classic enchantment tropes, the tradition of having Enchantresses that trigger when you cast an enchantment spell. So you end up with something like this...

Rampant Alicorn (uncommon)
3WW
Creature - Unicorn
3/3
Flying
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, you may cast an enchantment from your graveyard without paying its mana cost.

Speaking of enchantresses,  there's lots of open space to play with enchantment-triggered effects without having to resort to card drawing, so I made some friends for Rampant Alicorn to play with.

Argothian Healer (C)
GW
Creature - Human Druid
2/2
Whenever you cast an enchantment spell, you gain 2 life.

Ethunian War Enchanter (U)
RG
Creature - Human Druid
2/2
Whenever you cast an enchantment spell, CARDNAME deals 1 damage to target creature or player.

Dark Unicorn (U)
1B
Creature - Unicorn
2/2
Pay 2 life, sacrifice CARDNAME: Destroy target enchantment.

With white mechanics, I always try to envision what the evil doppleganger would look like in black. I strongly dislike the idea that there are mechanics strictly off limits to black, and this is an ideal space to demonstrate that black is willing to pay a price to get what it wants.

Battletide Unicorn (R)
2WW
Creature - Unicorn
3/3
First Strike
If a source would deal damage to you or a creature you control, you may prevent X of that damage, where X is the number of enchantments you control.

There are a couple other areas you could connect with unicorns. I like the idea of unicorns with first strike (since they can reach out and stab you with their horn) and it seems like a better way of scaling up unicorns than simply adding P/T. (Magical beasts and assorted animals tend to cap at about 3/3 — anything larger than that seems more monstrous). Also, unicorns and pegasi feel natural with lifegain and damage prevention, and borrowing Battletide Alchemist seems like an easy way for a flying unicorn to tie in with an enchantment theme.

Unicorn's Grace (U)
2WW
Sorcery
Cast target enchantment spell from your graveyard without paying its mana cost.

The other way to establish tropes for a creature type is to design other cards to refer back to it, like this one. If you wanted to bump Unicorn's Grace up to rare, you could add in a "shuffle into your library" rider to give it a nice Beacon feel to it.

Ideally, the new unicorn concept would get its own set (or perhaps block), where it could be part of a enchantments-matter subtheme. As far as I know, the only block to commit to an overarching enchantments-matters theme was Urza's, and that's been quite a while (Ravnica and Rise of the Eldrazi both had significant enchantment themes, but they were buried pretty deep, and I don't know how much notice they attracted from players). But a new set design is a topic for another day.

Note: I didn't anticipate that Dark Unicorn would get so much reader feedback. I really like it as it is, and if you guys were my development team, I would try to argue you into liking it too. But it occurred to me that it could also get tweaked to have a white activation cost (sort of like Quagmire Druid), which might be more acceptable.

Revised Dark Unicorn (U)
1B
Creature - Unicorn
2/2
W, sacrifice CARDNAME: Destroy target enchantment.