Cool Card Design of the Day5/8/2012 - I don't know why I designed a couple bear-person cards in August of last year, but I suspect I just found some neat art and was inspired to make some cards. First up is our bear warrior, Uru Hibernian.
While this isn't as strong as Garruk's Companion, the difference between 1C and CC is quite a bit more significant than between, say, 4C and 3CC thanks to land probabilities and the need to draw your cheap, aggressive cards early. At the same time, Uru Hibernian isn't impossibly better than Runeclaw Bear, perhaps making the jump a bit more palatable for new players. I know 'Hibernian' shares no lineage with 'hibernation', but the flavor of this guy is that he's just been rudely awakened from his long winter nap and "Hibernating Bear" just wasn't cutting it. It's this nature-based flavor that justifies the use of this otherwise out-of-color-pie drawback.If you thought a Bear-Man was odd, you're going to love this Zombie Bear-Man.
This drawback is completely irrelevant most of the time, but bear in mind that I made this before Walking Corpse was a thing and so it was pushing the envelope of how good a common black 2/2 could be. I love that they pushed Walking Corpse to be the best it could be in Innistrad, because it's mere existence helps demonstrate how dangerous zombies are on Innistrad. And all that from a vanilla creature? Well-played Wizards.Back to Uru Shambler. He's worse than the Corpse—which I think all foreseeable two-drop black commons should be—but very playable. We would never print this with just one other bear in the set because the text wouldn't be worth reading if it didn't come up reasonably often in Limited; there would need to be a few bears at common and a few more up the rarity ladder. I'm not 100% sold on the can't-be-blocked half, but in addition to promoting attacking, I quite like the flavor it suggests. The Uru are so appalled by their undead brethren that they refuse to interact with them at all.
Is Uru Shambler really worse than Walking Corpse? It has evasion.
ReplyDeleteThat's what I was going to say. It totally beats Bear-Go decks.
DeleteThose both look like nice cards to me.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little surprised to see "enters tapped" on a green creature: in my head, green usually gets efficient+upside creatures. But I see it gets cheap+downside creatures sometimes, so this is probably ok.
Uru Hibernian is awesome! It should totally be in M13, since it goes well in the RG deck following Kird Ape.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking about Walking Corpse, maybe the reason they named it in a non-planes specific way is so that they could reprint it as a core set vanilla in the future.
love them both, though with innistrad, the enters the battlefield ability doesn't feel as natural in green. does it have a flavor aspect that i'm missing?
ReplyDeletealso. though uru shambler is an awesome name, we simply cannot print a black 2/2 zombie bear and not call it 'gristly bears' :D