What the heck was September all about? I mean yeah, sure, it was obvious, but was there more to it than just… that?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
There’s an obvious ‘what is this thing doing?’ kind of theme to September’s card. The most obvious one is ‘it’s Kamigawa stuff.’ And that’s right, it is early, Champions-and-Saviors era Kamigawa cards. That’s not quite all it is, though.
The idea was what would a commander precon for Kamigawa Spirits look like?
There’s a set of alternate commander options to serve alongside Kyodai, Soul of Kamigawa. The idea would be that one of the commanders would be the box commander, and then there were more specific commanders to push in the other directions for the other themes.
- I was happy to use other keyword actions
- I tried to spread across all the colours without pushing the colour pie strangely
- I tried to make ‘Soulshift 1’ interesting
- I tried to make things that looked interesting and that wanted to look at other, existing Kamigawa cards. So a lot more value engines, reasonably priced cards and just generally making things cheaper than they were in the modest era of 2004
Some trivia about the names and cards:
- ‘Read the Air’ and ‘A Thousand Years Early’ are both trying to invoke common Japanese idioms
- The cost reductions on ‘Rupture the Blood’ and ‘A Thousand Years Early’ are both meant to be ways to make the total spells you splice cheaper
- ‘Tanuki’ is its own creature type because it should be. It’s not a dog, it’s not a badger, it’s a Tanuki.