Avatar; just the word alone gives off a sense of power, of might, of grandeur.

But what is an Avatar? Is it the power of a god given form? The chosen warrior, given the weapon of his deity? The embodiment of an unseen force or emotion? The truth is an avatar can be any of these things, a representation of someone or something.

So as you can imagine, avatars are common place in magic right? Well, not really; in fact there are only twenty six avatars (twenty seven if you include the mistform, which I don’t) in the entire volume of cards Wizards have produced over the years and two cards that ‘create’ an avatar. But they do cover a wide range of attributes among such a small number. From big creatures that could be cheap such as Avatar of Might, to creatures with variable power and toughness such as Soulless One. So what could we do that would be new and exciting? What hasn’t been touched by the greedy hands of R&D?

STEP 1: MAIN PREMISE

Because it been quite a while since I’ve posted an article (March this year if I’m correct), I will include my personal power scale so you might understand what I’m aiming for here.

The ‘what were they on!?’ Card – This is the category for those cards you wouldn’t pay someone to take from you. Take One With Nothing; What was R&D on that day, coz I recon the world would be a strange place if we all took some.

 

The ‘Comse, Comsa’ Card – Those cards that are nothing special, but could have their uses. Aven Envoy is a prime example in my mind because we all know there is a better version out there in the form of the Ornithopter, but because of colour, type and creature type, the envoy could be better for certain decks.

The ‘Solid Choice’ Card – These are those cards that make for good deck additions, such as Serra Angel and Grizzly Bear. A large number of cards fall into this category.

 

 

The ‘Powerful’ Card – These are cards that are ones most people would build a deck around, like the Bringers. This is the field that my vampire will slide into. 

 

 

The ‘Oh-So Broken’ Card – These are those cards you would chop of your left arm to own. These are things like Black Lotus or the Moxes. 

Please bare in mind, this is how I, personally value cards. Everyone has a different view and a different value system, so take this into consideration when reading this article. The number of ‘That system is screwy’ comments I got last time was depressing, if you disagree I’d like to know but please be constructive!

Well, now we need a theme for the avatar and a power band it will belong to. Well, I believe we can all agree that Avatars are beings of great power, a good finisher but will never hold the game on their own so lets aim for a ‘Solid Choice’ power band. But what to do about our card theme? Well, the image that Wizards try to associate with the game is that you are this grand and powerful wizard with many minions and spells at your disposal; similar to a god don’t you think. And because an Avatar is an aspect of a god, we could create an Avatar based upon the user!

STEP 2: RESEARCH

Now I know what you’re all yelling, ‘They did that in Unhinged!’ Your right, they have done an un-card based upon the user. But I’m after a serious card based upon the user’s power. But what is an indicator of a player’s power that can be used for a card.

To answer this question, we must consider how a player wins or loses:

• Reduced to Zero life – So we could use a player’s life total as an indicator of his power and this is always variable.
• Deck out – Now this presents three options; Hand size, cards in graveyard and cards in library. All can be considered measures of strength (or weakness) in a player.
• Poison Counters – This isn’t really that helpful, as not ever deck features a poison counter creature.
• Forced Lose – Again, this option doesn’t really help as there is no guarantee that your opponent will play something like Door to Nothingness.

So the main aspects that represent a player’s power are his life total, his hand size, his library and as a measure of weakness, his graveyard.

Now as we know, none of these abilities are unique or new. All have been used in one form or another but never by an Avatar. But what do we use? What about a fusion of two, somewhere between the folds? Being primarily a blue player (The shock, the horror) I’m drawn to the hand size and library options but how do we fuse these two things to create a new ability? What if we could ‘trade’ cards from our library to our hand in exchange for something in return?

Tutoring is a powerful ability and isn’t restricted to blue, though different forms of tutoring are associated to the different colours. We all agree that land search is associated with Green and that pain search is in the domain of Black, but what kind of tutoring are we after and what colour does it fall under?

What about the ultimate in tutoring, the ability to search for any type of card. It’s obvious that this is a powerful ability so to bring it down in power; the cost must be extremely high. What is not obvious is where tutoring for any type of card falls. To figure this out, we need to take a look at other tutoring cards.

Here are two prime examples of search cards, and as you will immediately notice, they are both Black. In fact, to my knowledge there is no non-black card in the history of magic which searches for any type of card (I may be wrong, not the first time if so). The next thing we should notice is the relative speeds; one is an instant and one is sorcery. But what mainly sets the two cards apart is what they do with the card when they find it. In the case of Vampiric Tutor, after having paid a single mana and losing two points of your life, your chosen card is placed on top of your deck. Where as, with Diabolic Tutor the card is immediately placed into your hand ready for use.

Now here comes the tricky part, what speed do we aim for? Tutoring in itself is a powerful ability and tutoring at instant speed is immensely powerful which is not our goal. But a sorcery speed tutoring ability hardly seems the domain of an avatar does it. So we got for the middle ground, an instant speed tutoring which can only be done at a given time. This itself is a common place thing in Magic, it’s just not often observed by people unless they make use of the instant speed rule often (Blue and Red players, I’m looking at you!). In fact, there is a perfect format we can follow:

‘At the beginning of your upkeep you may…’

Having now decided speed, the ability is the next point. We have already discussed that the card will ‘trade’ cards from the deck for something, and that the cards will be searched out before selection. But what do we trade? Well, we could involve a mana cost but this seems too bland for an avatar in my opinion and we’re trying to tie in the feel of ‘trading’ rather than buying. So let’s go with the simplest option; we’ll trade cards from the library, for cards in the hand. But at what ratio and is there any additional cost? Well, using Diabolic Tutor as our abilities base model it suggests that four mana is the cost required to find and take a card.

Now based upon a personal system due to observations I’ve made, discarding a card seems work out as a reduction in cost by two, but to place a card back into your library is only a reduction of one if it goes on the top. So we could say that if we place the card at the bottom of the deck, the cost is twice as much so we have a cost of two. This means we need to make up two more points of cost in order to balance this ability. Now because we have settled on a black theme, life loss and sacrificing seems to be the route to follow. But how do these equate in mana terms?

Well, life loss seems to be on a one for one bases where sacrificing is dependent on what you sacrifice. So to keep things simple, we’ll use a life lose cost. So to road up our ability: you pay two life and place a card from your hand on the bottom of your library, then search your library for a card, put it in your hand then shuffle your library. Why shuffle you ask? Well, it’s because it is a basic rule for any search card that the deck becomes randomised afterwards. Cards that don’t do this are sorting cards not search cards; prime examples are Index and Catalogue.

This means that our end ability goes along the lines of:

‘At the beginning of your upkeep, you may pay two life. If you do, search your library for a card and put it in your hand. Then shuffle your library and place a card from your hand on the bottom of your library.’

You’ll notice I have placed the trading back a card after the shuffle. This is to add more flavour and certainty to the card, while still retaining the feeling of cost.

So we now have our ability but what about the beast himself. Well, we already know quite a lot about him actually; his black and will be an avatar. The remaining questions are cost, P/T, other abilities and rarity. We will start with the P/T as this will indicate the base for the cost. As an avatar, he is meant to signify the will of a god which could be wrathful or cool and methodical. Both fit the black feel, but to be honest I’m drawn towards a methodical thinker (Must be the blue in me!) so we’ll follow that line. So the avatar is the aspect of a thinker, who plans before he acts. These leans towards a more toughness heavy creature, as it then gives the user time to control the field and search for his win condition. So we can say:

‘Toughness is greater than Power’

So, what values do we use? The range on existing avatars is quite wide so that doesn’t help us. What we need is another creature to draw comparison to, something like…Niv-Mizzet! The guild master is a reasonable comparison because he draws cards, probably the closest we will get to our ability. It seems that old Niv has a P/T ratio of 4/4, but we are after toughness higher than power ratio. So let us just drop the power by two, leaving us with 2/4 for our avatar. Now we must work out the cost of this ratio, using good old maths:

‘Base cost = Power/Toughness Ratio + 1 + Colour factor’

There are a few things we need to establish before we can use this formula. First is the P/T ratio, how does 2/4 fit into it. The answer is, it doesn’t but we can get around that by taking a ‘representative’ figure, a middle value between the two halves. In our case, that’s a ratio of 3/3. The next thing is our colour factor, and what do I mean by that. This is included in the formula to show that some abilities and attributes are easier and harder for certain colours. P/T is the realm of Green so green creature cards would have a colour factor of ‘-1’, where as blue creatures would have a colour factor of ‘+1’ because blue doesn’t get big creature cheap. But what about black; what lies within its domain? Well, we can all agree that black is primarily as hate, either for creatures, lands, hand size or deck so it’s not a negative colour factor, but we can also agree that the ability has a black feel to it so its not a positive figure. This means the only value for our colour factor is ‘+0’. As such, a 2/4 creature should cost a CMC of four mana.

Now we need to figure out the value of our ability. The truth is, the ability cost two because it’s only just better than Vampiric Tutor, but is far worst than Diabolic Tutor. So we now have a running total of six, which must now be divided between coloured and colourless mana cost. Well, the creature itself is black so at least one point must be black, and because the ability is black, we can assume another point must be black as well. So our end result is without adding any other skills or even factoring in whether the creature is legendary or not. And to be honest, I feel the creature has enough flavour without any extra sprinklings, so we’ll leave his as is.

STEP 3: THE FINISHED CARD

Well, here we are folks. I’d like to thank the people over at the ‘World Beyond’ forums for this image.

Yet again, I have made the fatal mistake of not play testing the card before releasing the article and that’s simply because I didn’t think do it, a huge mistake for any card designer to make. Well I hope to rectify that mistake with this card, but it’s not a good idea for me play test the card myself for two main reasons:

1. I’M BIASED: It’s my card, and as such I have a certain level of ‘love’ for the card. This makes it hard for me to make objective opinions about the card.

2. EVERYONE’S DIFFERENT: People play cards in different ways. I need as many different takes on the card to see if it really works in a balanced manner.

So I’m sending out this call now, for play testers. Anyone is welcome to apply and you will get recognition in my articles. All I’m after is a few people who are happy to try the card out in a deck of their own construction, and I will place the results and conclusions at the end of the following article.

You can discuss this article in the MDV forums here.

Articles Spotlights from 2006
The Games People Play - Tactical Magic.
If I worked at R&D
The Beginner’s Guide to Rogue
Druid Week Primer
Opting In: Ravnica
MDV Idol: Finale!
Avatar Week Primer
Delusions of Mediocrity: Getting Stuffy in Here.
Raiding Ravnica: Guildmages and You!
Lands-More than Mana: Part One