Crash Test Magic — Vedalken Fever
It's an image of an influenza virus, if you're curious.
For this edition of Crash Test Magic, I’ve put together a card inspired by an article in Discover Magazine that would probably require five pages of Oracle text and drive even Level 3 judges to drink.
I was reading this Discover article about glial cells, which are cells in your brain that do a bunch of different jobs and transform into different things throughout their lifespan, depending on what’s needed in your brain at the time. This, of course, made me immediately think of Figure of Destiny, and I wondered if I could take the concept a step (or five) further. Making the card into a virus made more thematic sense than some kind of brain cell, so I went in that direction.
The idea is that you get some powerful effects for relatively cheap, but you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get there. It all ends up with what is perhaps the ultimate Magic ability possible: a reusable Black Lotus. I’m not sure if it’s too powerful – without some way to skip a step, I think it would take at least until turn five to get to the final step, and you’ll have to play at least four colors to get there. But something this complex seems ripe for some unexpected card interactions.
The thematic concept is this: when first cast, it is just some 2/2 mope creature unknowingly infected with Vedalken Fever. When you play the first ability, the virus jumps to a new host and the symptoms take hold, enraging the poor victim but making it a bit weaker as well. The second ability represents the host dying (perhaps there should be a “sac enchanted creature” in the cost), but the corpse continues to spread the contagion to other dead bodies. The side effect is that they become reanimated as they are filled with magical spores. In the final step, the spores are released from all those walking corpses, where they spread across the land and take root as the virus’ final form — a powerful magic fungus that generates huge amounts of mana.
My guess is that this is one of those cards you get in a pack and think, “Wow, this is crazy, I’m sure there’s some way to abuse this and make it super powerful,” but you never quite figure out how to make it useful. The wisdom of the Vikings has proven me wrong before, though!
By the way, we’re still working on the Sigil Captain/Flurry of Wings deck over at the Robot Viking forums. It’s evolved a lot in two weeks thanks to some great testing by the Vikings.
Related posts:
August 31st, 2009 7:03 PM
First off, where in the forums is that post? I couldn’t find it again.
secondly, and much more on topic NEUROK TRANSMUTER! http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=49839
That’ll get you to superland status rather quick. I think that one of the more powerful effects is the zombify, but I can’t see a way to cheat it to Enchantment status. there are so many ways to make some an artifact that the superland is the easiest one to break. Heck, Ashnod could do it.
August 31st, 2009 7:40 PM
The link in this article goes directly to the specific forum thread. It’s in the Magic: the gathering sub-forum under the title “Sigil Captain/token creatures.”
Nice call on the Transmuter, wow.
September 1st, 2009 3:18 AM
Whoa. The licids from tempest block were headache inducing enough with just going from creature to enchantment and back again…
Anyhow, the most obvious way to break this (that I can see) would be to simply skip to the last transformation step, artifact->lotus vale, would be with something like a Thran Forge or a Mycosynth Lattice to simply make it an artifact right off the bat.