CCDD 021319 - Some More Interesting Slivers (Part 1)

Last week I gave myself the challenge of making a cycle of slivers that incorporated the five clan mechanics from Khans of Tarkir into their designs. I had fairly strict design parameters for myself - the mechanics had to be the Khans ones, not the Fate Reforged or Dragons of Tarkir ones. I wanted to get the execution as clean as I could, and not gunk up the individual slivers with additional rules beyond the core of the clan mechanic. Unfortunately, as Nich Grayson rightfully pointed out, this resulted in some relatively unexciting Sliver designs.




Well, in the comments I made a Sliver Queen for the set that would work for the trans-clan morph theme going on which I was pretty happy with.

I was considering other things we could do with Slivers if we were producing them at the same scale that Time Spiral block did, and came up with some really fun things.

This time around, my goal was to create fifteen slivers, one per rarity per color. I wanted them to create interesting draft archetypes, within their inidividual color and with their ally color. I ended up giving each color's sliver's its own mechanical hook to hone in on for the design, and then trying to allude to some interesting mechanics the game has used since Time Spiral.

For white, the major Sliver theme is ETB and creating sliver tokens.

With Blue, I decided to get a little weird. The theme in blue is turning all your slivers into artifacts, and then giving tap mechanics to your artifact creatures overall. This type of strategy can reduce a lot of the parasitism inherent to Slivers. The WU slivers can take advantage of the numerous robot drones that will inevitably result.

With Black, I decided the internal theme would be saboteur abilities. I stole the Slith ability from Innistrad's red vampires and brought back Ninjutsu. The blue uncommon sliver can help you sneak some of your slivers in past a defense, and the Graverobber Sliver lets you bring back used slivers to either recast or Ninja in.

I'll show off the Red and Green guys tomorrow, but while I was doing the black ones, I came up with this little weirdo:

Enjoy!