Apologies for the slight scheduling hiccup this week, but nonetheless congratulations to our winners: @dabudder, @dumbellsndragons, and @gollumni!
While I don’t necessarily agree with your critical take on my good friend Arni, this does feel like a pretty natural space for Boast to play in that was surprisingly unrepresented. The body of the creature itself feels appropriate and the first strike helps ensure that it’s safe to attack in with, and the effect seems both exciting enough to justify being mythic, but not inherently so powerful as to be broken. Indeed, I suspect the only reason a design like this didn’t appear in the set was to avoid doubling up with Embercleave in Standard, which already provides a lot of reach to red agressive decks - giving them a second way to go over the top by turn five was probably just a little too much. All that aside, this design was an elegant application of the mechanics from the set, taking advantage of the natural restrictions of the mechanic itself.
What I appreciate most about this one is the rather aggressive costing: while there were several elements of the set that encouraged Dwarf/Vehicle/Equipment synergy, none of the ones that saw print felt particularly powerful or compelling. This makes for a potentially playable base that might make some of those less powerful payoffs worthwhile, with a reasonable benefit for running it in a Dwarf-heavy deck while not being necessarily restricted to it. Attacking with 3 power on turn two can be quite the beating, but I suspect the 3/4 body is just enough to keep it from being especially relevant all the way through the late game - which is generally how you want to balance aggressive attackers. I like the way it requires you to risk the Battlesuit itself in order to protect your other Dwarves, always giving your opponents some degree of counterplay.
This is a much subtler design, but I was impressed with how well it interacted with several of the archetypes in the set: it slots into the RW Boast archetype, the BR sacrifice archetype, and the UR spells archetype. While the spell itself isn’t particularly powerful, I think that’s something of a boon - being a late draft pick actually takes advantage of its flexibility by allowing it to serve as filler for any of those archetypes by virtue of not being picked too early. I think my biggest nitpick is actually the name: “obituary” conjures up the image of my grandmother grimly perusing the newspaper, while there are more poetic options like “elegy” or “eulogy” readily available. All told, I’m pleased that you were able to get this one in just under the wire, as I particularly appreciate flexible Limited designs in a challenge like this one.
Since I slipped up and got this out a day late, I’m going to go ahead and roll straight into the runners-up while we’re at it. Congratulations as well to: @hiygamer, @starch255, and @teaxch!
This is a cute addition to the RW Aura/Equipment theme in the set, and especially clever alongside Runes that are able to enchant either creatures or equipment. This serves as an equipment to place Runes on, but also grants hexproof to the equipped creature making enchantments on it more likely to stick around. The color-fixing element is comparable to the existing Rune payoffs in the set, but on this is intentionally broadened to include all targeted spells - Auras are the obvious ones, but expanding it to instants, sorceries, and even Mutate gives it the possibility of enabling some other interesting things within larger formats. I'm not totally convinced the color fixing is enough to make it constructed playable on its own and I probably would’ve liked a slightly more pronounced payoff, but I’d be interested to see whatever archetypes it manages to enable nonetheless, and I really appreciate its being aimed at broader formats while still capturing one of the important themes of the set itself.
I can definitely relate to your feeling that Funeral Longboat could’ve been delivered on more flavourfully, and I respect the direction in which you took it. Exiling creatures from your graveyard to crew a funeral boat makes a lot of sense to me, and while sacrificing creatures just to throw them a funeral service seems a little counterintuitive to me, I can see how that plays well with the mechanical themes in RB - I probably would’ve done just the former, since sacrifice themes tend to put creatures in the graveyard on their own. The biggest mechanical issue here is that this simply isn’t how Crew works: you could either do an alternate crew cost a la Heart of Kiran (which would still require a traditional Crew ability), or an activated ability similar to Peacewalker Colossus (which could be done instead of Crew). Deathtouch on something with 5 power feels a little excessive, but I suppose with menace it’s just there to ensure that any block is a two-for-one - or a two-for-two, assuming you sacrificed a creature of your own to crew it in the first place.
Sleipnir is a familiar element Norse mythology, and using Pegasus Courser as a model for expressing it as a card design was a pretty clever choice. In a practical sense it’s a little difficult to use this, since by virture of adding all its stats to the rider, it will always be easier to just block and kill Olunuar itself. This makes it slightly frustrating that the recursion effect doesn’t cover itself as well, and makes the recursion a little unlikely to ever see much use. The flavour feels great though, and definitely offers up a Sleipnir interpretation that delivers more on both what those familiar with the myth would expect and those unfamiliar would expect from a flying horse. I could see its effect on either a tap ability or with the recursion covering both itself and the other attacking creature, either way would cover the gap that makes this flavourfully satisfying card feel a little bit hard to play in practice.
Thanks as always to everyone who submitted. Now that we’re caught up again, I’ll be working on getting commentary ready for posting, but of course feel free to let me know if you've got any questions between now and then.
