Weekend Art Challenge Review 032913—Maze Champion

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Emmara can't be killed in normal combat. So she can block your opponent's biggest attacker and negate the damage from her second biggest attacker by gaining life from the first. That she can do that while swinging for two makes this a very appealing card for a GW player looking to race or to hold off a ground assault. Does she feel Selesnyan?

Emmara doesn't interact with her guild's mechanic or focus at all, but she is very zen and Evan explains that she is a healer in the fiction, so that's what she's doing here. I'm not sure why she doesn't heal your other creatures, but it's hard to argue that she's not doing an amazing job keeping you well.

Jules originally had the only Melek design, but no one was messing with Lavinia at the time, so he designed this. She is very Azorius. You can tell, because it's not terribly clear what the final result of executing all this procedure will be. Basically, every creature your opponent doesn't attack with (or tap for some effect) is tapped down for the next turn. They'll untap the turn after though.

What concerns me most is that we're penalizing our opponent for not attacking us. Both in terms of flavor and in-game strategy for Azorius, it's odd that we're making peace illegal and violence against us lawful. I'm also not sure how relevant that'll be, since the opponent will be attacking us with the creatures they want to attack us with and won't mind not having the creatures that aren't good to enough attack unable to attack. Where this does make perfect sense for Azorius, though, is that then your opponent has no blockers which lines up with the WU tempo plan detain enables on its own.

It's also noteworthy that despite this ability acting like detain, it's not detain. And that lets it combo with detain. If you use an Azorius Arrester to subdue one of your opponent's creatures, he won't be able to attack with it on his turn, which means it'll be untapped on your turn, letting Lavinia tap it down for an extra round.

For any other guild, I'd say this is entirely too sideways but for Azorius, it might just be perfect. I'd love to hear what you all think.

Remember, you can click these images to see them at full-size. Devin's Melek gives you an alternate Izzet Charm for each sorcery or instant you cast. The modes of that spell are Act of Treason, About Face and Meddle all for . If you can't get value out of that, you just aren't trying.

You may have noticed this is a lot of text. Very tiny text. We would definitely need to cut something from this to make it printable. Flash seems like an easy candidate, eating an entire line by itself and only offering the benefit of a draw-go play style (and blocking a titan out of nowhere, for some reason). Next, I would consider removing the counters and making the player use his free charm as soon as he casts the spell that earns it.

Is it Izzet? Let's see, tricky, versatile and tricky? I'd say that passes.

I was aiming for three main goals with Exava: That she interacts positively with unleash, that she calls back to Lyzolda, the Blood Witch, and that she feel dangerously sadistic. Flinging a creature every turn without option fits the latter two goals, and getting bigger when you sacrifice unleashed creatures satisfies the first, especially since making her bigger also makes her Fling better.

It's a little odd in terms of flavor that she actually combos better with Golgari's and Simic's keywords, but I can't imagine throwing away a card that feels and helps Rakdos as much as this does just because it's not insular

Zefferal's Dimir champion gives you free Mind Knives whenever you use cast a spell without using your hands. Flashback was last block, you say? True, but cipher also casts cards from outside your hand, so Mirko upgrades all your cipher spells with a better-than-Mental Vapors.

Next up, for each card you successfully rob from your opponent this way, you can draw a card and pump Mirko whenever you like. You may (should) have been wondering why the first effect exiled the card instead of just discarding it. Now you know why. This Dimir champion had a nefarious plan all along.

Mirko Vosk has too much text. What would I get rid of? Removing flash doesn't buy us anything since we have to have flying, but I still don't feel like it's holding its weight. Maybe we keep it just to parallel Ruric-Thar. The +2/+2 bonus can help Mirko connect (by making it beat or scare away smaller fliers in combat) and thus makes him a good cipher target (unless you'd rather not put so many eggs in one basket), but it still feels a little out of place in blue-black. If we nix that, then there's no point using discarded cards as counters and we can consolidate his text so much that we've got room for a tiny splash of multiplayer love:

Flying
Whenever you cast a spell from anywhere other than your hand, each opponent discards a card at random. Draw a card for each card discarded this way.

Wobbles take on the Mind Drinker rewards you for milling your opponent as well as attacking their hand. That's both black-blue and very Dimir. Whether you're comfortable with +1/+1 counters being the prize or not, I have to say trample is a mighty odd choice. It's true that every color has access to trample for creatures of grand enough scale, and it's also true that Mirvos Vosk is just one Mind Sculpt away from being bigger than Lord of the Pit (And how awesome is that? [Very]), and yet the word trample on this 1UB 2/2 just feels so wrong. Is it so terrible to have a 9/9 flyer attacking on turn four without trample? I hate to say it, but hexproof almost seems like a better fit.

Regardless, I love the flavor and huge potential of this Mind Drinker.

Lobster's Teysa gives you Spirits whenever you cast a spell like extort, but free. She also gains power from your Spirit hordes and can race with the best of them. This is definitely an exciting card (as any update to Teysa, Orzhov Scion would have to be) and very black-white in nature. Personally, I wish you had to pay to get your Spirits increasing the parity with extort.

Bam! R Stech comes in swinging with this bad-ass 3/3 for two. It doesn't have Battalion, but good luck blocking (or racing against) Tajic before turn four. Did you know Razorgrass Screen is the only card that naturally has to block each turn if able? A few of us amateurs might have tooled with Vigilance and the last two abilities before, but I'm ecstatic to see it here. Yes, both the final abilities are drawbacks, but they're fun drawbacks and ones Boros is happy to work with given the sheer efficiency here. Follow with a Frontline Medic and you're cooking with some serious gas.

Varolz was the most popular champion and has three entries for your consideration. First up, George's Fungus Beast. He grows whenever a card dies or is discarded or is milled. While it's not terrible that the Golgari champion combos with Dimir's methods, I feel like if one of Varolz and Mirko is going to key off any cards from all zones, it would be Mirko. Varolz could key just off of hand and battlefield. Of course, this Varolz and that Mirko would never be printed next to each other, so that argument is academic.

Next up, you can turn +1/+1 counters on any of your creatures into removal. Awesome. How do you get extra value out of your scavenge creatures even after their exiled? Turn extra boosts into steaming lazer death beams! It's a bit odd you can activate that with green mana, but I guess it worked for extort.

Death to Life and vice-versa? Check, Golgari.

Ben goes for the Fungusaur call-back, which I can't not respect. It also better explains his nom de guerre. His second ability gives all your dead creatures scavenge and for super cheap. It's not hard to imagine Varolz outclassing Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (in terms of size) pretty quickly. All that balanced by the lack of trample or other evasion. As such, Varolz is aimed squarely at Timmy.

Is it Golgari? Death to Life and then again. Ehhh, close enough.

Finally, we've got Bradley's Varolz with a very familiar first trigger, though this one is direct: We care about creatures dying and that's that. Clean and Golgari. His second ability gives you some protection for your huge soon-to-be huge creature. I might suggest an activation cost for the regeneration, but since this Varolz also doesn't have any evasion, it's probably fine that he's almost unkillable.

My main concern is that there a few ways players could get confused trying to figure out if they can regenerate Varolz when a bunch of creatures die but he didn't already have counters on him. How Golgari is this version? Death to Life is still present, with some Life to Life (or however you want to classify trading size for not dying) added in. Works for me.

This is a pretty sweet design from Antny223. The first ability rewards you for making your other creatures evolve (perhaps in the same action of putting Vorel into play). I love it. The second ability doubly rewards you for having a bunch of evolved creatures. In this case, it makes your team almost completely unblockable and that might make Vorel a green-blue take on Teleportal, by which I mean it's a finishing move like Overrun. And for a six-mana rare, that might be fine.

I'm less a fan of haymakers personally because the end the joy that it playing the game. I would have gone with something like this, but that's just me:

Spells that target creatures you control cost more to cast for each +1/+1 counter among them.

This Vorel is drastically different, but also pretty sweet. Chah's version is a bit more cerebral which I think is appropriate for Simic. You pick a creature back up (hopefully one with an ETB effect or a very efficient body), embiggen the rest of your team and then, presumably, recast your creature unless you've got something better to do this turn. Starting at three mana, I can imagine this doing a lot of work in Limited or Casual formats.

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Lots of interesting designs here. If you figure what Wizards will deliver is going to be at least this awesome, then Dragon's Maze promises to be an exciting set indeed.

I talked inline about general design quality, flavor and guild-appropriateness, but I didn't address how much cards look like they were designed to be part of the same cycle. I wanted to do that in one place, and we need the context of the one champion card we have seen to get started.

If we choose to believe that the champions will be a tight cycle (that is a cycle with as many direct parallels as possible), then each other champion might be a 6/6 for 4CD with two keywords from one color, and two abilities from another, with one drawback thrown in. Mirko Vosk, Teysa, and Taldric come the closest to that. My first stab at Exava also came close, but…

A bunch of us quickly found that model too limiting. It could be done, but it often came at the expense of innovation and/or elegance. I would have jammed haste and "can't block" onto the final version of Exava if I could, but that took her beyond 7 lines and made her text tiny. It just wasn't worth it.

As such, we've got a few champions with no keywords and one or two abilities. Turns out, getting really nitty-gritty classifying which of these could be part of a tight cycle or not isn't really fun or illuminating (though if any of you really wants to, the comments section awaits you). What's perhaps more interesting is the definition of a loose cycle which I would argue all of these cards qualify for. Even though these don't all have the same size, mana cost, number of keywords, or triggered and static abilities, nor even a common identifier like name, they are bound together by being rare legendary creatures with the same role in the story, though I would argue players would intuit their cycle-ness without ever reading Wizards.com or any of the supporting fiction simply because there won't be any other rare two-color legends in the set.