CCDD 081811—Lake Hellion

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/18/2011 - Lake Hellion came directly from the art. That's clearly a Hellion, with its tell-tale mouthy tendrils. But it's also in water, which isn't the standard hellion lair (see Crater Hellion and Volcano Hellion). In theory, everything fire needn't always be red and everything water needn't always be blue. In practice, however, there are almost no exceptions. So... a blue hellion. Sure. What would that look like?


For one thing, a hellion in water isn't that different from a Sea Serpent, so we're going to draw direct inspiration from blue long lineage of those guys. Yet it still needs to be distinctly a hellion. Most hellions have haste (historically, habitually, what have you). So that's how I got to "haste versus islands." Not as island-punishing as Islandwalk, but still fairly relevant.

Flameborn Hellion has a must-attack clause that we can also make care about Islands. Maybe "~ must attack a player who controls an Island each turn if able" is better because its simpler, but we're also above the curve on common blue fatties right now. Serpents usually have a defender-unless clause so we need to get that in here too. Basically you can attack players with Islands freely (ala Islandhome) or you can attack other players but it'll take your hellion an extra turn to crawl back into its lake.

The end result is just too wordy and too different for a common card. It's also too red to be mono-blue, I think. Maybe it becomes RU, but then we can adjust the cost to reflect the card's new goldness. Ultimately, the creature itself seems unprintable, but some of the tech that went into conditional haste could be useful elsewhere. (The conditional untap being predated by Spectral Force).