A weird thing happened in this cube log. Halfway through, Gatherer gifted me a random zombie, forcing zombies late in the cube’s design.

That’s not weird. The weird part is that Popcorn Roulette will be hosting a movie night on May 25th in downtown Haverhill. We want it to be a regular thing, but for right now we’re focusing on putting together one good night. And what movie are we showing? Shaun of the Dead.

So yeah, that’s weird. I wasn’t planning on pushing my show in my quirky Magic the Gathering cube composed of 50% random cards from Gatherer, and 50% cards designed by me. But if the random generator forces me to flood the cube with zombies, and I’m hosting a zombie movie night, what else am I supposed to do?

Anyhow, the less we think about all this, the more you go check out my movie night. Why don’t we see what our first card today is:

Oof. Vedalken Shackles. I don’t like to veto this first card Gatherer ships me. But sometimes it’s necessary.

In my last log, Gatherer put Sword of Fire and Ice in the cube. I wasn’t happy to see it, but I accepted it. The thing that bugs me the most with Best Sword isn’t the power level of the card (it’s insane btw, considering Aven Envoy is in the same cube. Though oddly, the presence of Sword of Fire and Ice might make Aven Envoy a better pick?) What bugs me is that the Sword is an auto-draft for every archetype. You don’t need to commit to the Sword, assuming you play creatures. There are no interesting choices when drafting Sword. If you see it first pick, you take it. If you see it second pick, you presume there must have been a foil Sword in that pack, and you take it. If you see it third pick, you make a mental note to check the draft table and make sure no one’s sippy cup is knocked over, then you windmill slam that Sword. Congratulations. You’re about to wreck this preschool tournament and sweep all of Mrs. Severson’s gold star stickers.

Based solely on the way it impacts a draft, Vedalken Shackles is a more interesting card. Sure, any player can cast it. But it’s useless to you unless you control at least one Island. The more Islands in your deck, the better the Shackles become. The Shackles makes you reevaluate all of your picks, and forces you to question your commitment to Blue. How much of your Red/Green deck can you throw away to power up a single, powerful, Island hungry card?

The draft considerations are interesting and complex, but they don’t factor that the card is Bonkers D. Bobcat. Matches with Shackles end as soon as the card is online (often, by round four.) From then on, whenever your opponent attacks, they trade their second best creature with their best creature. You don’t even need to commit. Like a time travelling 800 pound gorilla, you can take whatever you want, whenever you want.

In a great many situations, Shackles and a small archipelago of Islands will force a game loss. Now consider the player piloting Shackles is allowed to play with other cards in their deck. In theory, Shackles falls to artifact removal, oddly timed Galvanic Key activations, or, uhh, Boil I guess. It’s not unstoppable. But half of all draft decks disseminate to it, and the other half lose to it only the vast majority of the time. I’m not interested in playing out foregone conclusions, unless it involves me sitting across from a half-gallon of Breyer’s Vanilla Caramel Gelato Indulgence®.

Let’s try again, shall we?

Well, it’s not as exciting as the Shackles, but it won’t ruin a draft either.

As I said in the last log, this set needs more removal. But I enjoy taking inspiration from the cards Gatherer presents me. White isn’t the only color that can grant flying. Red has been teaching creatures to fly since Alpha. But while his flight instruction academy has been around for twenty-five years, Captain Stone Giant tends to take your money, hammer the test plane into drive, and pops off for a quick nap while your vessel peels off into the sky. He couldn’t be bothered to teach new pilots how to properly land.

In case it isn’t obvious, the theme here is that you rocketed one of your opponents creatures in the air. That creature’s controller gets one last chance to attack with their stratospheric darling before it tumbles back, smashing into the ground for 10 damage.

The card breaks the color pie in favor of flavor. Blue grants flying. Red takes flying away. Red also isn’t supposed to deal this much damage to creatures because that blurs the line between Red and Black. I suppose I could cost this … but that somehow feels wrong.

The artwork by Leroy Olivier is great, but it’s not a perfect match for the card. But after fussing over artwork for beyond an hour, I need to move on. For the record, I could have used this instead…

This piece by Zebes does a great job capturing the mood of the spell… if you were enchanting your own creatures with the aura. But no matter how crazed this goblin is, it still feels like he made a choice to be there—not that the rocket was forced upon him. Hmpf.

I need to stop thinking about this before I spend yet another hour looking for pictures of falling things while avoiding images of fallen angels, and anime characters tumbling headlong while their loafers trail behind them. Some times you can’t force an image search to do what you want. Art searches that include the word “apex”, for example, only returns art from the science fiction magazine Apex. It does not return a chimpanzee mascot of the X-Men by the name of ‘Ape-X’ because that character does not exist. This is an outrage. Somebody get Charles Soule on the horn stat, and tell him that the world has a need that only the Astonishing X-Men can provide.

Next!

Whoo boy! Sometimes cheaper Wheel of Fortune! I need to keep pushing down the road of creature removal in my design. But I couldn’t help myself, and built an Underworld Dreams inspired two card combo.

Your opponents draw seven cards, lose seven life, then you wipe the board. This set could use a conditional global sweep, so win-win.

Let’s move forward. Hitting the random button, Gatherer gifts me…

We got a problem, folks. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with Binding Mummy. But I’m more than half way through a cube packed with themes and need to hunker down on them. Gatherer doesn’t know that, though. It doesn’t understand that we’re past the halfway point, and so far only two other zombies are in the cube. Gatherer continues to spitball ideas like it’s day one at a pitch meeting. I’m over here trying to wrap up the fifth season of critically acclaimed show Breaking Bad, and Gatherer is kibitzing over new wacky next door neighbors to explore.

How many zombies would I need to make Binding Mummy work? Let’s use Onslaught as our example. That set is 350 cards deep… not unlike a cube with 360 cards in it. Zombie tribal wasn’t hard to draft around in Onslaught. And Onslaught featured 21 zombies (it also included Illusions and spells that changed creature types, but let’s set that aside for now.) I figure, if we cut it tight, a card like Binding Mummy might need maybe… 15 cards in the pool to be reasonable?

Can we squeeze twelve zombies into our remaining 163 card slots? Keeping in mind, Gatherer is ‘choosing’ half of those cards. There are only 82 cards left for me to design. Grr…

Bah, screw it. Let’s go for it.

I need to combine abilities in earnest if I want to complete all my goals. So I made this:

That’s zombie number four (not counting the bonus zombies this wall makes.) Restless Barrows also brings our Wall count up to six, and is another card that triggers when you gain three or more life.

In the original design, the Barrows created a zombie instead of gaining life, similar to how Words of Wilding worked. I felt the conflict between two choices was interesting, and liked how cards like this could help the life gain theme make sense when combined with the suicide black theme. But that execution got old fast by my second editing pass. A token zombie is usually better than 3 life. But there are plenty of times when the life is more important. That would be fine if it felt like the card was giving you a choice… but when the two options are equally good, choosing to activate the ability feels like you’re spinning your own wheels. And when gaining 3 life is better, it feels like you got shafted with a useless ability. Words of Wilding is fine for what it does, or alternatively, a cost artifact that gave you the choice to convert 3 life into a 2/2 zombie would be fine. But a five cost creature needs a bigger effect, even if the core body is efficient. So I increased the activation to , and made the effect all upside.

Okay Gatherer, these zombies won’t design themselves. What mortal treat can we feed our unliving maws?

Vetoed. We got a strict rule against color hosing around here, so I don’t feel bad about this one. It’s nice that this card would’ve helped out Human tribal, but if that’s all we’re missing out on, then we aren’t missing much. Try again.

No. Color. Hosers. Damn it, Gatherer. Are you even paying attention? At least this string of automatic vetoes makes me feel better about choosing not to veto Binding Mummy.

Oh! Seismic Assault! I like what Mr. Assault is doing, even if there are no mechanics in the cube that put extra lands into a player’s hand. It turns out that “Every land in your deck is now a cost Shock” is strong enough.

To be honest, I got tied up for a couple weeks so I’m not sure what I was thinking when I designed this card. I guess it was “I need more zombies, and more cards that gain 3 life to interact with Restless Barrows.” Fair enough. If there’s another narrative reason, it’s lost on me.

I do remember vacillating over the cost of this card. It’s one of those cards that seems over-costed depending on what card you put it next to. I mean, I know we shouldn’t be comparing cards to Deathcurse Ogre or Goretusk Firebeast… but comparing this card to Kokusho, the Evening Star isn’t right either. I settled on moving the effect into Soul Syphon territory to help make up for the cost. Maybe playertesting will prove this card needs a power level bump.

Next card!

Pollen Lullaby. Sure, that’s fine. The clash ability feels stapled on, but a few cards in my cube look at the top card of the library (in white, even.) So this works fine.

That said, I find it weird that Lullaby is one of those cards which adds a keyword to a different card that doesn’t exist yet. Twenty-five years of Magic the Gathering, and there’s still a number of basic combinations waiting to become cards. So strange.

Okay, okay. Technically, Wizards already printed Tangle.

It’s not quite the same, since Tangle punishes attacking creatures, while Pollen Lullaby punishes an opponent’s creatures (that may not seem like an important detail, but if your opponent tossed a couple surprise Giant Growths into their block, and you were forced to cast Tangle to halt your attack, the inability to untap your creatures next turn wouldn’t feel so minor any more.) Be that as it may, ‘the point’ of Pollen Lullaby and Tangle are to mess with your opponent’s attack step, so the difference in wording is splitting hairs. What really separates Tangle from a Lullaby sans clash is the color pie. Fog still appears in Green, but is at least as likely to appear in White (a la Holy Day.) Temporarily locking down creatures? It’s not unpossible in Green, but that’s a solid White mechanic. But Wizards is yet to print a white Tangle. Heck, Wizards even reinforced the Green-Tangle connection in Dark Ascension with Clinging Mists.

But enough dwelling over neglected core set fodder. We need more zombies. When I decided to add fifteen brain munchers to the cube, I forgot about an important restriction in the equation. I have 82 card slots to design 15 zombies out of. Sounds like a lot. Unfortunately, I didn’t factor in the color pie.

Most tribes don’t require five colors to play. And while it’s possible to pool together a legitimate five-color zombie theme, slapping it on a cube with themes that are already stretched over multiple colors seems like a poor choice. Besides, if five color zombies was really my goal, then I’d need to include a lot more zombies than just fifteen. Players need options at their disposal if they’re going to form a playable five-color tribal deck.

That means two colors are automatically out, cutting our 82 potential zombie designs down to 50. Ideally, we shouldn’t touch a third color with this theme, but I’m leaving that door open. Otherwise, I need to design 15 zombies out of 33 card slots, and that’s not a lot of wiggle room.

We already started in White-Black, though, so let’s continue in White-Black. Wouldn’t you know, we still need a creature with an off-color activation in those two colors.

You got to be careful with cards that can return themselves. I once designed a set with a 3/2 common that cost , which you could return to the battlefield from the graveyard by discarding a card and paying . Sounds innocent enough. Turns out a flashing 3/2 from your graveyard for the cost of pitching lands and early game spells was too much for the metagame to handle. Who’da thunk it? It was too good in the control decks, but already looked too expensive. So I kicked it out and started over from scratch.

After that, I learned to be gun shy when it comes to creatures which can return themselves. Their potential for card advantage is extraordinary. Still, I don’t want to design cards that look terrible. Creatures need meat on their bones.

Oh, and I also don’t like it when a card with an off-color activated ability is unplayable without the off-color. I think Interminable Guardian hits the happy ground between those forces. 4/4 for is irregular in White. Creatures that enter the battlefield tapped even more so. But I’m taking advantage of this card’s association with black mana to put unique features to a mid-game White Giant.

Add black mana, and we have a relentless sentry of giant proportions. Hopefully, the two round delay combined with the caster ‘losing a draw step’ will leaving the occasional opening for opponents to scrabble their armies past this unceasing force. Maybe. I keep wondering if this should be a 4/3.

Let’s do one more, shall we?

It’s so nice to see a creature with only evergreen keywords show up. This is such a crazy cube, that cards like Sentinel Spider makes the drafting experience so much easier to consume. It doesn’t hurt that this spider is reasonable for its cost.

I’m taking a risk here by filling a black/white slot. But Gatherer hasn’t thrown much multicolored at us, so why not? I’m sure Gatherer will pitch nothing but black/white cards from here on out.

As far as I’m concerned, if I’m assembling a zombie with only keyword abilities (one that was likely to end up in a two color deck) then why not create an efficient two-color beater? Black grants menace. White grants first strike (black can get it, especially on knights. But it’s a rare event.) Both colors provide lifelink.

This card also non-combos with all the cards that trigger when you gain three or more life. That was intentional. If every life gain card triggers the ability, then the number three is meaningless. I expected Gatherer to float a few cards that only granted one or two life at a time, but we’re more than halfway through and that hasn’t happened. I guess I need to make my own. That said, it isn’t difficult to give this creature +1/+0. It still plays nicely with the mechanic, with a little work.

Bonus token time!

The only card in the cube that creates Eldrazi Spawn is Spawnsire of Ulamog. And if that’s on the table with a pile of mana up, it almost seems silly to reach for the spawn tokens. The game is effectively over. Still, it’s always nice to see custom art of Magic specific creatures, and there’s something about the vivaciousness of Taylor Fischer’s little spawn that makes you want to root for him. You go little spawn. Someday you can be a destroyer of worlds, I know you can.

~

Another 12 cards down, with 156 cards left to go. And our zombie count is up to seven out of fifteen. Part nineteen isn’t up yet; but as always, you can check out the According to Gatherer archives. And if you’re local, don’t forget to see Shaun of the Dead in Haverhill on the 25th! Byeee!

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