Weekend Art Challenge Review 052215—kelsm

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card with this art addressing the sea creature trope. Don't use islandhome. Bonus points if your mechanic can be reused across blocks and at common. Does it warrant a keyword?

We've got some bold choices here. Abyssal Serpent finds its watery connection in the oceanic keyword, and neither the card nor the mechanic require islands or blue mana. It doesn't come up often, but there is a long-standing debate whether all sea creatures are inherently blue. Ipaulsen appears to believe not and I tend to agree: The theoretical water world set is one argument, aided by the color pie philosophies that distinguish land creatures from each other and air creatures from each other.

Oceanic is curious mix of defender + unblockable. {1} isn't a lot to ask, but can be all the difference when mana's tight or you've simply forgotten there were oceanic creatures in play. I would honestly love to try this mechanic out. If it's fun enough, I could certainly see it used sparingly across blocks for years and/or heavily in water world.

Abyssal Serpent also has a mono-black saboteur ability to reinforce that the card is black, not blue; something we'd have to do the first year or so as players adjust to the idea of sea creatures in all colors. Neat!

Benthic Leviathan allows you to throw cold water on a fight, slowing everybody down with a few hundred gallons of brine. Or maybe the leviathan is diving and bringing its combatants with it, though I'd think that more lethal. This ability is notably stronger when your creature is more powerful, or double-blocked (which tends to happen to more powerful creatures). But it's also useful on small creatures, provided you've got the mana to spare. Despite its simplicity, 'sloshing' is a bit mathy and will reward a clever player; so it's very blue. Maybe after a year or so of using it at uncommon and rare, players will be familiar enough to have a single common with it.

I totally buy that a submerged sea creature won't have as much impact on land, but it's mighty odd that Darkwater Chaser is weaker in its home environment. Mechanically, this works for a set with -1/-1 counters, but I see it getting completely different flavor, like undercover in a spy world, or something.

Bonus points for potentially explaining Segovian Leviathan.

Deep-Sea Leviathan is a bit like Meandering Towershell, but impressively simpler. I'm not sure whether he's swimming under me or leaping over me, but attacking unblockable every other turn sounds interesting. It's not as big a drawback as for the turtle, since I can still block with my leviathan the turn before I attack. I don't think it's too strong this way, but I do think the flavor would be better otherwise.

Deepwater Recluse is shy and only comes out to play for one friend at a time. I like that ability on a creature with 'recluse' in the name, and I think this eel is close to printable, but I'm not reading anything fishy about the ability and don't expect to use it more than once or twice. Might like the flavor even more if it only blocked when there was one attacking creature too, but that's probably too hard to use.

Fathom Swallower is a 7cc unblockable 5/5 as long as you control other attackers your opponent is worried about. That doesn't seem common, but in practice if you've got a seven-mana creature in addition to an already dangerous force, you're probably winning anyhow. I have no idea what the flavor behind tapping all your permanents is, but apart from the amount of text here, I think this could be a common along the lines of Boulderfall, in the right set.

Gulping Trencher doesn't have a taste for planeswalker, but it does have a taste for creatures. It excitedly charges into combat as a... 6/4, making it a red/blue Craw Wurm. (That math was not easy enough.) Not sure what's sea-creature-y about that, but Trencher could be fun to play with and does seem like a good red-blue hybrid.

Highwater Serpent continues the tradition of islandwalk for sea creatures, but offers a more landfall-y version of islandhome. (Like Shoal Serpent) At least it doesn't die if you lose your islands somehow.

Using twobrid guarantees we won't see deepsea in more than one block (unless we return to the original plane later). It's keyworded, so we must see it on 10+ cards. Hookjaw Prowler demonstrates those cards needn't be blue, so I guess the set it belongs to features blue sort of how Torment featured black. Probably water world.

Deepsea is symmetrical, limiting everyone's ability to target it (as shroud did before hexproof) as well interacting with it in combat. Except it's not symmetrical, because it's free to attack with and your opponent has to pay to block it, whereas they pay nothing when you defend while you pay to block, so effectively it's a limited combination of unblockable and "can't block." Very interesting to compare to oceanic.

Flavorwise, it's cool that players pay to interact with it (and that blue mages can do so more efficiently). I did eventually figure out why the second half of the ability works the way it does (someone's got to use magic to bring this deepsea creature up to your land creatures or vice-versa), but it's not exactly self-evident.

Hookjaw Prowler itself can attack anything, provided you pay the standard {2U} breathing spell. Very cool.

Fascinating to see the "any color can have sea creatures" design aesthetic on the same card as "blue is better at water" aesthetic. I would expect one or the other, but not both.

Lurking Mosahk is shy like Deepwater Recluse, but is more concerned that the defender has tired creatures rather than having too many ready creatures. I'm not sure I know what this ability is meant to represent. Vengeance for having attacked and survived? If it were attacking the tapped creature, I could see an opportunistic thing. Mosahk is a strong defender. Not only is it very efficient while blocking, but your opponent can avoid being hit by a 6/5 if he doesn't attack you at all.

Monster of Profound Depths counts your hand-size and your opponent's and rewards the player sitting on the most cards. Kamigawa taught us that rewarding players for not casting spells isn't very fun. That said, 'unfathomable' is a clever name for this mechanic (and I enjoy the idea that denizens of the deep are also intellectually deep—creepy and cthulhu-y).

Riptide Hunter proposes a flavor for shadow: marine. I have to say, that does make a lot of sense. Magic has stayed away from shadow for a long while because it's not as interactive as flying (and it's a bit redundant with it too) and that's still true. A 4/1 for four that's usually unblockable seems far too dangerous for common too. But if shadow were to return, and in a new form despite that resetting the parasitic mechanic count, marine would be a great fit thematically.

Scourge of the Traders looks like a completely reasonable uncommon: 3/3 unblockable for {3}{U}{U}? Totally. I'm not sure the last ability is worthwhile, though, since it's impossible to trigger without spending removal. It doesn't help sell the sea creature vibe, either, though I do love the poetry of stealing whatever made the serpent unblockable from its corpse.

Sea Monsters have strong morals you see, and it makes them sick to the stomach to think of hurting others, which is why they do it half-assed.

Or, more likely, jumping out of the water to smack land dwellers leaves them weak and vulnerable. Except not jumping out of the water to smack sea dwellers also does. And they can block whomever. Gotta be the morals.

I love the simplicity here, and this is imminently reusable across blocks and rarities, I just wish it nailed some kind of relevant flavor.

Diving is hexproof only while attacking. The opposite of Tromokratis. All that matters with sometimes-hexproof is that it's not always-hexproof, so either way is fine. Themed as diving, this makes a lot of sense. It also means the defender can't Murder it in response to your Giant Growth (and that if they intend to Murder it at all, they need to do so before you declare attackers). Mechanically, it seems like it should dive while blocking too, but that flavor's weak and this promotes attacking, which is never bad. I definitely don't see Submerged Serpent as a common with these numbers. The downside to naming this nifty hexproof variant diving is that it's harder to use outside of blue (unless we give more colors sea creatures, but even then we can't put it on a sphinx).

Vortex Angler eats everyone's blue mana when it attacks, forcing blue defenders to cast their spells in response to the trigger, as well as forcing its controller to use her blue mana before combat. That's weird, but it's a relief to see something serve a similar purpose to islandwalk without being islandwalk, and weird isn't unreasonable for a single uncommon. I might make this bigger and rarer, though.

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There's definitely a trend in this challenge where unblockable equates on some level to "sea creature." If I were looking for the most expected execution—and that's a pretty good design metric—I would definitely go with straight up unblockable. I personally enjoyed some of the more creative solutions, even if that doesn't make them the best answer in the long-run. Not many of the cards showed mechanics I'd repeat once, much less many times, but almost all the cards were awesome sea creatures, or close to it. Nice work, artisans.

Thanks to Pasteur for rendering the cards.