Spotlight Challenge 3 Initial Review—Devin E. Green

Here's the challenge Devin E. Green is taking lead on:

Design six cards that inject a clear flavor-identity into a returning mechanic—either by adding flavor where there is none (ala cycling), or by re-branding a returning mechanic (ala chroma and devotion). Include at least two commons, one uncommon, and one rare or mythic. Include at least two colors.

Devin was split on two directions, so he's submitted two (smaller) mechanics. Let's see how this goes.

Remember champion (see Mistbind Clique and friends)? That you couldn't play a champion without another creature in play caused the mechanic to suffer from one of auras' two biggest problems. Champion was worse, actually, because even if you had a creature in play, you wouldn't always want to replace it with your champion, and most of the champions could only replace creatures of a particular tribe.

Synthesis does away with the unnecessary tribal element, and is entirely optional. You can play Ambush Plasm without any other creatures in play, and if you do have some, you can still choose not to exile one. So why would you? A 3/3 is more valuable against a zombie horde than a pair of 2/2s, so that counter might be worthwhile. You could also block a Frost Ogre, trade your Plasm for it, but get your Runeclaw Bear back afterword.

You can also use synthesis (just as you could champion) to flicker your Duplicant or Palinchron, but unlike champion, you don't risk permanently losing your target if an opponent Murders your Plasm in response, thanks to the updated Banisher Priest template.

Ambush Plasm's flash allows you to 'save' a creature that was about to die, either from combat damage or removal (including Damnation). That's more of a white thing nowadays, but if synthesis is in blue—and this submission suggests it's primary in blue—Plasm seems quite reasonable.

Cephaloweft is much wordier despite being common, but that'll happen sometimes. This squid gives you a free Unsummon, whether you synthesize or not. For +{1}, Aether Adept gains flying and the option to be -1/-0 or +0/+1 depending on our ability and inclination to exile another of our own creatures. That's a bit better, but still reasonable power-wise, I think. Given the lack of set context that shows we need flying, though, I might leave that off to simplify this common.

Zameck Vitagor is green-blue Hill Giant that really wants you to synthesize, and cares what you synthesize. My dream scenario is to eat a Coiling Oracle, getting a 4/4 flying vigilance fungus that will net more card advantage when it dies. This is probably fine power-level.

On one hand, the conditional abilities have pretty good flavor and seem fairly natural for synthesis. On the other, they make the option of not synthesizing (or of synthesizing the wrong thing) unappealing to the point where you'll likely feel bad when you can't, which defeats a little of the advantage synthesis has over champion.

Add a green requirement to Clone's cost, and you get synthesis 4 as a bonus. Zonotic Mimic shows that we will see synthesis higher than 1 and I'd love to see a french vanilla example too, as those tend to illustrate a mechanics worth best of all. How good is synthesis 4? Probably pretty good. It's not exactly Magical Christmas Land to imagine exiling a creature smaller than 4/4 to net positive power. On a Clone, it's even better, because cloning your opponent's best creature often creates a stalemate, but Mimic can trump that creature and swing the game heavily in your favor. It could do that almost as often with synthesis 1, so I have to wonder if we should save synthesis 4 for a card where that's not true (or how fair Mimic is), but it's not necessarily a problem.

I like the choice to make synthesis appear in green and blue. The flavor's weird, but perfectly Simic. It's a very good sign for the mechanic that I have half a dozen ideas how to use it already.

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Unearth returns unchanged from Grixis, except in application. Instead of appearing exclusively on creatures like Shambling Remains, it appears exclusively on artifacts here.

In a vacuum, Glittering Totem is a terrible example of this, since it's a card that will almost never leave the battlefield once it's there. Until you start thinking about older formats where it's a colorless Lotus Petal if you can just mill yourself. You probably run 4 of them, increasing your chances of getting one early in the process, or even getting multiple of them at once. But you also need a profitable way to discard, since you're obviously not casting a 3cc mana rock in that format.

So you need a particular kind of eternal deck to benefit from Glittering Totem? Thank goodness; we wouldn't want something like this to become ubiquitous. To get something like that out of a common is pretty impressive.

Runic Mortar is a really bad mill card, unless you've got a ton of artifacts to sacrifice, which clearly you do, if you're running it. A single copy of it allows you to sack itself for fuel and still use it for a big turn once more, though it doesn't help you get back the rest of the fuel. I don't know if this gets there, but I sure don't know that it can't. Hard to evaluate a terrible-looking combo piece without really trying to Jenny the hell out of it.

Timewarp Spellbomb is a two-color, three-ability spellbomb… with unearth. It's critical that it requires both colors to unearth, because that ability actually pushes this from charm-seal territory into card advantage. Where the other spellbombs were common, this is uncommon, which is sufficiently justified.

Academy Curator grants unearth to an artifact of your choice, which lets the player think of endless fun things to cheat into play. Awesome. Could be blue or even red, but white works too. I think you can simply say "gains unearth 3 until EOT."

Unearthing artifacts seems like a very flavorful thing to do in a world with archaeology. It's not a total flavor transformation of the keyword, but it is concrete, distinct, and a bit stronger than the original.

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I'm delighted to see how many artisans contributed to this exercise.

In the abstract, I'm more excited to explore synthesis, but unearth is unambiguously an answer to the challenge, where synthesis is a stretch, given how significantly different it is from champion.

Devin, if you think you can prove that a set can make your unearth meaningful in Limited, that will be your strongest submission, but I'm skeptical you can, whereas I'm confident you can submit some exciting synthesis cards.

Whatever you choose, I'd like you to write a paragraph or so about your mechanic and its place in the set, and if you'd like to call out the artisans who were most helpful to you, that would be nice to read.