Summer at the beach

(There’s an earlier version of this card in Verano guiri.)

So what does summer do? In Spain, a typical picture of the coast beaches includes pale people, wearing very little sunscreen and turning crab red.

The enchantment (that could’ve been a Planechase plane… perhaps another day), in its first iteration, affected “all creatures that have been continuously on the battlefield since the beginning of the turn”. That is, those that had already been for a little while at the beach. It was quite a mouthful though.

One of the axioms of design is “less is more”, so I looked for ways to reduce that criteria, and the easiest was this. I love cards with short text because they are so elegant and aesthetic.

The cost was a difficult decision. The only similar precedent I could find is Darkest Hour, from Urza’s Saga; but there’s also Blood Moon having a similar vibe. The cost had to have red in it. But since the flavor this card is playing upon involves the sun, it felt wrong not to have some white.

For a while I was going to go with RW, but this could be a nice hoser against Crusade and similar cards, so I made it into hybrid to allow it in monocolor red decks. White can use it to, hum, bypass protection from white perhaps? I’m sure the Johnnys in the audience will find a way to break it.