Believe me, it is a great challenge to come up with titles every week! Since I somewhat spoiled it already, without further ado I will reveal the subject of this week, hinted at in my previous post: breaking away from the boundaries of the color pie.
In case you don’t already know, the idea behind of the color pie is that each color has access to a particular set of effects, specialties and even maybe monopolies, and then there are thing that some colors just don’t do. Straight up killing – non flying – creatures is not a green thing, drawing is very rare in red, and destroying a land hardly ever happens in blue.
Korr Flamedancer.
So what’s something else red hardly ever does? Gain life. I could only find one card only red doing so, and its purpose isn’t quite to gain life.
Our friend shaman here does just that though, so how is that in flavor? The life gain comes in when you have done direct damage to a player through spells, not creatures, like red mages like to do.
It is restricted enough so that it doesn’t get crazy, because most of the time you don’t want to focus all your fire to your opponent’s face.
I think this card demonstrate that some abilities just can’t be linked to some colors though, as the design still feels like it should be half white.
Autumn’s Melancholy.
Now we’re going to make opponents discard using a green enchantment. Again it is done through adding a spin on the ability, to make it feel greener.
Green is master of lands, isn’t it? With Autumn’s Melancholy, every time you play a land, you can discard another land to pick one off your opponent’s hand.
So if you have 4 manas and two lands, you can start preventing your opponent from dropping his. Hardly overpowered but you can make it work with green ramp! Does that feel like autumns to you?
This is a fun exercise. Try and come up with other combinations! Like reanimate in blue, fetching lands in black, haste in white… Tell me if you find great ones, I’ll gladly work on them. Have a great week!
Ominous Designs 