CCDD 050718—Form of the Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/7/2018 - Now that red has a chokehold on black-bordered forms, let's try it on another iconic red creature.

CCDD 071015—Legendary Phoenixes

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/10/2015 - Today's WAC is coming, but first I wanted to share some phoenixes I designed too late for Remaking Magic's legendary phoenix design challenge.

CCDD 043015—Reborn Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/30/2015 - Modern sets are full of strange exceptions to the normal color pie which have been grandfathered in for mechanical balance or exceptional flavor.

Those are worthwhile tradeoffs, but in order to keep players from thinking everything is fair game we should make them feel as in-color as possible. Red's not very big on recursion, so how might one tackle the Phoenix?

CCDD 010715—Unquenchable Spark

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/7/2015 - I was reading Latest Developments and Sam was talking about giving red more resilient threats to help it support an archetype other than aggro-burn. The phoenix is an awesome creature and I hope they continue to make a couple every year, but it's a problem that red's two most iconic creatures both always have flying.

Is there anywhere else red could justify resilience/recursion?

CCDD 062113—Noble Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/21/2013 - I don't normally post a CCDD on the same day as the Weekend Art Challenge, but since Wednesday's Chromatic Phoenix was nearly a reprint, I'm sharing the Phoenix that led to it today as a bonus.

At least one of you will find this ability strikingly familiar…

CCDD 061913—Chromatic Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/19/2013 - While searching Deviant Art for another phoenix design, I found this colorful illustration. It's not as bad-ass as Magic's other phoenixes, but it was begging to have {W}{U}{B}{R}{G} somewhere on the card and I wanted to find out where.

I quickly settled on this being a mono-red card that you could resurrect with all five colors, but I kept feeling like it wanted to come back bigger when you did that. Sunburst later and we've got Chromatic Phoenix:

CCDD 030912—Ire Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/9/2012 - MTG Color Pie recently asked what color you would move the Phoenix to. His concern being—as I understand it—that red doesn't normally get creature recursion and thus that this creature type is out of color. He's quite right that red doesn't get creature recursion and I would agree that the existence of phoenixes doesn't justify more red cards that recur creatures, but I say you could never put a phoenix in another color and that they do red good.

The important distinction is that the source of the rebirth for the phoenix is fire. White can resurrect, black can animate corpses and green can survive what would kill less hearty creatures. Red can't do any of that. But it can, in this one instance, be reborn through flame.