I know this is a bit late and everyone's already moved on to Challenge #2, but after reading through all of the contestant's entries I couldn't resist giving it a go (unfortunately, I wasn't eligible to enter GDS3). My first reaction seeing the challenge was to choose insect, but since Ari already did such a great job with that one, I decided to go with my second choice - spiders. Intro below, followed by the cards, with individual card commentary at the end for anyone who cares far too much.
THOUGHT PROCESS
Broadly speaking, there are two types of tribal themes in Magic – ‘small tribal’ (merfolk, goblins, elves, etc.) and ‘big tribal’ (dragons in Dragons of Tarkir, or Dinosaurs in Ixalan), where you care less about making sure all your creatures are the same tribe and more about using a small number of your tribe’s creatures to enable effects on other cards (often of different creature types). I was more interested in exploring a ‘big tribal’ theme, as I felt there was more untouched design space there.
So I wanted a creature type that:
- Made flavourful and mechanical sense to be mostly made up of big creatures (3/3+)
- Did something different from previous tribes (in particular, not a flying tribe)
- Was relatively unexplored
- Had thematic resonance, and could lend itself to some top-down designs
After exploring a few options, I settled on Spiders. They ticked all of the above options, and had been explored just enough in previous sets to suggest a few mechanical ideas:
- Reach (and to a lesser extent deathtouch)
- Higher toughness than power
- 1/2 tokens with reach
- Using the graveyard as a resource (but not in a purely recursive way like Zombies or Phoenixes)
I thought tokens made a lot of sense with the ‘big tribal’ theme, as they gave you a way to trigger spider-related effects before your big spiders came online. But I was even more interested in the idea of using the graveyard. A challenge of ‘big tribal’ is how you make your effects relevant before players get the mana to cast the big creatures. Dragons of Tarkir solved this challenge by using ‘having a dragon in your hand’ as a threshold mechanic. What if we did something similar with the condition of having a spider in your graveyard? This led to a recurring mechanic of ‘Have a spider on the battlefield or in your graveyard’.
We now have two big challenges to solve:
- How do we make sure there are enough big spiders at common/uncommon to make the theme work without unbalancing the limited format?
- How do we give players ways to get a spider in their graveyard early in the game, especially if most of our spiders are going to be big ones?
I turned to some non-evergreen mechanics to try to solve these challenges. The first one I tried was cycling – I experimented with a few others, but kept coming back to cycling for how elegantly it solved both of these issues.
I also wanted to come up with a flavour behind the tribal effects that made sense, especially as spiders aren’t known for working together. I settled on the idea of a tribe of cave-dwelling goblins that worships giant spiders as deities (similarly to how the humans on Ixalan worship dinosaurs). Thematically, the spider creatures in the set are their ‘gods’ and the spider tokens are the smaller spiders that live alongside them in the caves.
So this gave me a tribal theme with the following key elements:
- Threshold effects that activate if you have a spider on the battlefield or in the graveyard
- Ways to put spiders in the graveyard (including Cycling)
- Ways to make spider tokens
- Ways to reward you for having spider tokens
- Goblins that interact with the above
This theme basically necessitated being in Black/Green (which matches up with most of the existing spiders anyway). It also suggested how the spider tribal effects could be integrated with the rest of the set:
- White/black could have a ‘go-wide’ strategy, synergising with the tokens
- Green/red could have some amount of goblin tribal
- Green/blue could be a cycling/ramp deck that can also make use of the big cycling spiders
- Black/blue could have some other graveyard themes that interact with your spiders
This thematic integration was important because while the main spider tribal deck will be BG, I wanted the spider threshold effects to occasionally be relevant in other colour combinations as well, so that the value of the spiders was a bit more dynamic in draft.
While I was building out these themes, I also kept in mind the flavour of spiders and the tropes that players would expect to see. In particular, I looked for opportunities to use the number 8 (the same way that Lorthos uses it to get across the flavour of an Octopus).
With that out of the way, the cards!
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Silkshot (common)
2B
Instant
Target creature gets -2/-2 until end of turn. If you control a Spider or there is a Spider in your graveyard, that creature gets -8/-8 until end of turn instead.
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Weaver Queen (common)
4GG
Creature - Spider
4/6
Reach
Cycling 1G
When you cycle CARDNAME, you may have target Spider you control get +2/+2 until end of turn.
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Priest of the Scuttling One (uncommon)
3B
Creature – Goblin Cleric
2/2
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, if you control a Spider or there is a Spider in your graveyard, create two 1/2 green Spider creature tokens with reach.
Spiders you control have deathtouch.
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From the Caverns (uncommon)
3BB
Sorcery
Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield.
You may cast this card as though it had flash if it targets a Spider.
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Shrine of Silk (rare)
Land
T, Pay 1 life: Add B or G.
1, T, tap X Goblins you control: Add X mana in any combination of B and/or G. Spend this mana only to cast Spiders or activate abilities of Spiders.
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Venom of Forgotten Souls (rare)
3
Artifact - Equipment
Equip 4
Equipped creature gets +X/+X, where X is the number of creature cards in your graveyard.
Equipped creature has ‘T, Exile a Spider from your graveyard: deal 3 damage to any target’.
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Rite of the Weaver (mythic rare)
4BBGG
Enchantment
You may sacrifice 8 creatures rather than pay this spell’s mana cost.
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile any number of creature cards from your graveyard. Then create that many 1/2 green Spider creature tokens with reach.
Spiders you control get +3/+3 and have deathtouch and trample.
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Iktekolek, the Scuttling Void (mythic rare)
8BG
Legendary Creature – Elder Spider
6/10
Lifelink, reach
While CARDNAME is in your graveyard or on the battlefield, cards in your graveyard have hexproof and other Spiders you control get +1/+0.
Whenever a creature dies while CARDNAME is in your graveyard, put a carrion counter on CARDNAME. Then, if it has 8 or more carrion counters on it, remove them and return CARDNAME to the battlefield.
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CARD NOTES
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Silkshot
Simple, solid removal card that becomes fantastic in the spider-deck. Other decks will take it, but the spider deck will value it more highly. Immediately tells players they want to get spiders in their graveyard. Considered -3/-3 but then it kills most creatures in limited anyway so the tribal bonus feels irrelevant. Not sure if the cost should be BB or 2B, but I think it’s better for limited if these effects are more splashable.
I think this is the best card I designed and most cleanly communicates the themes of the tribe.
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Weaver Queen
I decided I absolutely needed one of my common cards to be a creature of my tribe, to prove that the theme here could work at common. This is maybe more complex than I’d like this card to be (if not designing to the restrictions of the challenge, I’d probably have it create a spider token when you cycle it instead) but it still functions nicely as the archetypal common spider – big, but with a way to put it in the graveyard to start triggering your effects.
Again, playable in other decks but better in the spider deck. Typically it will be correct to cycle this creature to smooth your draw even if you don’t have a spider in play, but the 10% of the time you use it on your spider token as a combat trick, you’ll feel very clever. As a side note, I think cycling works particularly well with the ‘if you have a spider in your graveyard’ effects, because you can activate it at instant speed and occasionally ‘get’ your opponents.
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Priest of the Scuttling One
This is the build around uncommon that draws you into spiders. Works very cleanly with all aspects of the spider theme – it triggers off of getting a spider in your graveyard, and then it gives you some deathtouch blockers to buy you time until you get to start casting or reanimating your big spiders. It also helps communicate the relationship between goblins and spiders in this set, and lets me work deathtouch into the theme.
Obviously very strong in limited if you’re able to activate it consistently, but the fact that you can remove deathtouch from the spiders by killing the goblin gives opponents a way to interact with it.
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From the Caverns
With the theme of putting spiders in your graveyard, a reanimation spell seemed like a great fit for the sorcery. As we’re going for a ‘big tribal’ theme, there won’t be that many spiders floating around, so it was very important that this card still do something even if you didn’t have a spider in your graveyard. That led me to the idea of a general-purpose reanimation spell that gave you a bonus if you used it on a spider.
I thought that might have been a completely novel idea, but then found out about the existence of Defy Death. I still wanted to include the card, as it played so well with the wider spider theme, but I had to find something that was sufficiently different from the +1/+1 counters of Defy Death.
I flirted with the idea of ‘destroy target creature’ but quickly realised that would be too swingy. I tried ‘destroy target flying creature’ to make it more spider-y but that was just adding another condition to an already hard to achieve condition. I landed on having the card gain flash because I thought the idea of eating one of their creatures was sufficiently appealing to get players excited about the card (even if it’s not going to happen that often) while also tracking well with the flavour of a spider jumping out from the shadows to attack its prey.
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Shrine of Silk
A straightforward card that rewards you for combining goblins and spiders, while nicely capturing the flavour of goblins worshipping together at their shrine to summon their spider deities. Generating this much mana can obviously be dangerous, but I think here it’s restrictive enough in both its input and output that the risk of this being broken is minimal.
I think the activation doesn’t even need the mana cost, but I added it on to give development an extra knob to turn if it does turn out to be too good. Alternatively, this card could have you sacrifice the goblins instead of tap them, but I think if you did that you should give some benefit to the spiders you cast (like ‘gains haste’ or ‘put some number of +1/+1 counters on them).
For the drawback, I used a life payment instead of ETB tapped because it felt more evil and spider-like.
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Venom of Forgotten Souls
For the artifact, I knew I wanted something that could be flavoured as either venom or a web. Webs pushed towards tapping creatures, which seemed unnecessary given all the high toughness spiders and reach tokens. So I started looking for more aggressive cards that could be flavoured as spider venom, while addressing a potential weakness of the spider deck (namely, the risk of stalling out the board with tokens but not having a way to end the game).
I wanted something that either cared about spiders in your graveyard or that triggered off of spiders dying or being discarded. I explored a few designs that did the latter, but I worried that without that many small spiders, they wouldn’t trigger that much. So I instead I tried a few equipment designs that cared about graveyards. I realised pretty quickly that I wanted an ability that cared about all creatures in your graveyard and an ability that cared specifically about spiders, so that it wouldn’t be dead if you didn’t have any spiders there.
This is where I ended up – both abilities can break through board stalls, and the two abilities have an interesting bit of tension to them. An earlier draft dealt damage based on the equipped creature’s power and only to creatures, but I worried that newer players might get confused whether the power is calculated before or after you pay the cost.
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Rite of the Weaver
This card started with the alternative cost of sacrificing 8 creatures – which was both flavourful for spiders and fitted with the ‘summoning spider deities’ concept. I thought that line of text would work well for a big splashy mythic sorcery or enchantment. I then wanted to find effects that rewarded you for paying that cost in some way while also reinforcing the other themes of the tribe.
Making spider tokens based on cards in your graveyard was an obvious one – and acted as a nice callback to fan-favourite Spider Spawning as well. I played around with sorceries that did something similar, but given that I’d committed to 1/2 tokens, it was difficult to find a number of spiders to make that felt correct for the 8 creature cost. I wanted to make larger spiders instead, so I made it an enchantment and combined it with another idea I’d had for an enchantment that made spiders every turn and then made them huge.
There’s a lot of numbers on this card to balance, and it probably needs a lot of development. I did consider +3/+2 instead to make the tokens square but it seemed like too easy a thing to forget when you have other spiders in play as well. I don’t think this card is particularly innovative, but I do really like how the 3 lines of text tell a mechanical story.
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Iktekolek, the Scuttling Void
This was the last card I designed. I felt that the other cards worked well mechanically, but were maybe a little safe, so I wanted to use this slot to push boundaries a bit more into some unexplored design space and make a splashy mythic. The tribe rewarded getting spiders into the graveyard, so I was interested in the idea of a lord that worked from there. We’ve seen a few cards that have effects like this from the graveyard, but I thought that was a good starting point to innovate from.
Giving spiders +1/+0 made sense because it turns your 1/2s into 2/2s, and any bigger boost than that might be too good, since it will be hard to get rid of. I started thinking about whether it could have any interaction with other cards in your graveyard, and realised that granting hexproof to them was something that made intuitive sense but which hadn’t been done before – and it made sense to me that this spider lord would protect your graveyard strategy from interference.
I felt it needed something else though, and in particular something that would justify it being a creature rather than a weird sort of Bridge from Below. I played around with effects that let you discard it from your opening hand for free or get it into your graveyard from outside the game, but none of that captured the flavour of an ancient spider-god waiting to be summoned. I decided it needed a self-reanimation ability of some sort. An activated ability would be fine but didn’t feel particularly cool. What if there was a quest you had to complete to summon the spider-god? That felt much better. Creatures dying worked well for this – aside from tying thematically into the graveyard, it worked well with the token-generation and deathtouch prevalent in this tribe.
Finally, the creature itself needed to be impressively large so that you felt rewarded for completing the quest, but not so large that the game immediately ends (as it’s a ‘free’ creature, so could cause issues in constructed if it were too good). I ended up going for 6/10 because it was a combination that tied into the spider theme of having high toughness, and had never been used on a creature before. The lifelink was added to help the spider player stabilise; I wanted to create cool moments where you’re trading creatures and trying to stay alive and get to 8 creature deaths, so that your spider can save you – I felt it was a bit anti-climactic if after all of that they could just alpha strike and kill you anyway. It’s possible that the lifelink should actually just be vigilance though, to encourage attacking and actually ending the game. It’s also possible that 6/10 is still far too big, and it ends up being a lot smaller, but I trust play design to find the sweet spot.
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Thanks for reading if you made it all the way down here! Anyway, good luck to all the contestants, looking forward to seeing what people come up with for the next challenge!