Art is a still shot from the beloved TV show Firefly. I never played in Mercadia block, but the treacherous bazaar feeling always reminded me of Firefly.
In Reddit, at the Custom Magic subreddit, there was a challenge to come up for a card that could be in a hypothetical Future Sight 2 set.
Since when you have a hammer, all you see are nails, and I still had my Special Promotion ability keyword rummaging through my head, I went with that.
I was thinking on how could I apply that keyword for creatures. Because of memory issues, I knew it could only be a vanilla or virtual vanilla. Black is supposed to be third at haste, and Future Sight (although less than Planar Chaos) was not afraid of some colour bleeding.
In the end, the creature is something quite simple and not overpowered, so common seemed like a natural fit (I have a saying: if something can be a common, let it be a common…). I think the contest was looking for something a bit more splashy, but every set needs its commons, and this one does it job of showing a new cool mechanic!
I am not sure of its design space. Perhaps converted mana costs don’t need to be even, and the recruitment cost can be rounded down. But I’m sure the creatures need to be of low complexity. ETB triggers, french vanillas and that’s it. At most, you can squeeze a spring large set out of this.
Final touches of flavor came from me feeling like previewing a return to a previous plane and Mercadia was the first thing that popped into my head. In that block, mercenaries, like rebels, fetched each other from the battlefield. This is a new take on representing that kind of mechanic.
Update: funny how eventually they did just this with the Squad mechanic.
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