This card will probably not hit what you want it to without heavier board state manipulation than would a standard edict effect, but it still does something interesting.
With neither Parallel Lives nor Anointed Procession in the deck (Doubling Season is a pipe dream obvs), I disagree, but I don't mind Kiki-Jiki not being in. Also, this being green and ONCE AGAIN not having Concordant Crossroads makes me sad, but I at least picked one up a while back, so whatever.
In the order that I hashed out my thoughts on these:
Contrary to the first comment, my problem with Archon's Tithe from a design perspective is that it's a bunch of things white does get (or did get...) but all duct taped into one card. It's not a very great design in my opinion. It's the sort of thing that you'd see in a Commander product and immediately divine why it was made.
The two commanders are both very good. Thruti costs less than Alms Collector but loses flash (which is a huge deal for this ability) and gains some lifegain that's pretty solid. I like it. Kybir does what he does pretty well. 4/4 vigilance legend for 2WW is decent, and his abilities are restrictive enough for him to be a build-around.
Collective Meditation feels extremely strong (roughly half of Grand Abolisher is still ridiculous, especially the part where you're immune to counterspells on your turn), and while I think it can mostly work, be careful with giving effects from generic-only artifacts to single colors. Not every color should have a permanent that copies Nevinyrral's Disk, for example.
Serra's Shrine isn't necessarily T1 busted without leyline support, it's just busted over time. Recovering enchantments is easy because they are kind of an undervalued card type, so you have things like Starfield of Nyx. Oops, guaranteed WWWW per turn as long as Starfield stays out, and sometimes you can combo it anyway. Play Parallax Wave, remove all five counters, sac it, there you go, you've just exiled five creatures permanently for negative WWWW. And that's hardly the worst thing I could do with that, probably.
Repentant Shinobi doesn't work, but you've acknowledged as much. It's still kind of a flavor failure imo because it doesn't really fit how I think white would do this (he's still sneaking around and taking stuff back, as opposed to, say, legal action of some kind -- and drawing cards on damage is often depicted as theft, so it sounds like he's skimming a little off the top of someone's treasure horde for his boss, too!). White forms of "stealing," e.g. civil asset forfeiture, tend to be more Azorius/Esper than monowhite. The Brand effect can probably be put to use in white -- but not like this.
Frostveil Plains seems like an auto-include in any mono-white deck using Extraplanar Lens. Granted, I usually see red playing EPL, but you are going to play snow lands with EPL to provent other people from abusing it. This is more useful than Master Decoy and the like.
Ivory Empyreon is good. Very playable, can get ridiculous pretty easily.
Lastly, Arc of Justice is just a strong effect that I could kind of see get printed... kind of. It's a slightly odd effect ("target creature or legendary permanent," surely you can see that that's a slightly odd collection of effects; it does sound like something purpose-designed as a counter, you know), so I don't know how likely we are to see that get printed unless WotC somehow runs out of ideas.
Sevinne's ability affects any spell cast from the grave, so Spelltwine, retrace, and aftermath mechanics all work with him. Nothing inspiring however.
I'm afraid not.
Spelltwine's copies aren't in the graveyard; they're in exile. Spelltwine and Sevinne have no real interactions of note aside from Spelltwine being a good card, because Spelltwine will only ever touch the graveyard if it's sent there by an opponent milling you or making you discard.
I strongly prefer the first version for its first two abilities, but of course, it's the third ability that gives the card the most power... and the first version doesn't really work as far as I can understand. Let's pretend it does, though: I also really don't like how it can allow you to retarget damage from only one type of target to other types, such as the first example you give. Shivan Meteor is now thirteen to the dome without needing Stuffy Doll (in multiplayer, this means you don't have to worry about choosing only one person to hit with it). Like, this is one of those things a lot of people would miss and be completely blindsided by.
The other version's trigger actually works and is a better ability. Considering the stats and everything else (and how relatively cheap "instants and sorcery spells you control have lifelink" seems like it is, cf. SfGM), the power level is probably okay. My brain was going "nah for limited that's overbearing" but I'm not 100% sure that's actually the case.
I like the idea you're going for, but not so much you card choices -- but as you said, you speak from the perspective of someone who doesn't play standard. In supplemental products of the e.g. Modern Horizons kind, sure! But in standard, many of these are still very, very good. Even the white card is not completely without its uses depending on the deck. Powerful cards that care about you having a beefy life total, or the act of getting there, might appreciate Healing Salve 5-8. I mean, it's no Chaplain's Blessing, but it's usable. It has a slight amount of flexibility.
Spark Taskmage is straight-up gross in a format without anything better than Shock at CMC1, and Aether Taskmage is extremely solid. (Also, even though I know that you're probably modeling it after Aether Adept, I can't help but think that, man, blue never got an actual "bear," did it? I'm not sure offhand that there's a 2/2 with a pure upside ability for 1U offhand.)
Purifying Taskmage... can green get away with 2/3 at 1G outside of rare, a place I don't feel these belong? I guess there's a first time for everything. But Naturalize is an extremely good, playable card. However, it does suffer from the fact that it gunks up the main deck a bit by being low on utility if the opponent isn't playing enchantments or artifacts, and running this in side feels like a thing that wouldn't happen that much. Yet I would not be surprised to see this get some play in a standard with it in. The replacement, Beastcaller Taskmage, is okay, I guess (I like it because I have an Ayula EDH so it's a chump blocker that buys me back a Grizzly Bears, but in that regard, it's probably a weak card for EDH).
Dread Taskmage is probably the one that scans best cost-wise and everything and is the one I like the most out of the original five (shout-outs to it being an orc, too -- good choice of alternate humanoid creature type here), but of course, regeneration is retired, so Terror would never be reprinted in Standard. However, its relative similarity to Nekrataal (loses first strike to gain a bit of flexibility on kill spell timing for the same total cost) is about the right power level for a card like this, I feel like.
I'm not 100% sold on the way you wanted to do this ("wish for this named card" does the job but is not the most inspiring thing on the planet), and sometimes the execution is off (note the comparisons to Aether Adept and Nekrataal -- a lot of these cards have comparable counterparts that you should also be wary of outstripping, unless maybe that is also part of the theme), but I like the idea of reviving old, seemingly "unusable" cards.
I'll break this one down piece-by-piece. The first and most obvious issue is wordiness. It's no Tidal Influence but a quick and dirty render resulted in some pretty small text.
Therocles2RGW
Legendary Creature - Human Warrior
~ can't be blocked by creatures with less power.
NOTE: This is worded differently iirc ("Creatures with power less than ~'s power can't block it."; see Aura Gnarlid). Moreover, this effect is fine and it makes the card work pretty well; Naya colors would be good at making a creature that's harder to fend off as it gets bigger, and this is nicer than Trample or other options.
Heroic - Whenever you cast a spell that targets ~, put a +1/+1 counter on ~. Then you may have ~ fight target creature an opponent controls.
Yeah, it works.
When ~ enters the battlefield, search your library for a legendary card and reveal it. If you reveal a card named The Twelve Labors this way, put it onto the battlefield attached to ~. Otherwise, put that card into your hand. Then shuffle your library.
3/3
And this is where you do not stick the landing. I understand what you're trying to do, sure. But is this supposed to be something to get Therc to start on his labors immediately, or is this a utility card? It's not that this is unclear, it just does both. With no protection for either Therocles or the Twelve Labors, I feel like this will feel extremely fragile, which is something that was kind of a case with any creature that wanted to stack heroic triggers like Fabled Hero or Hero of Iroas. I know "it dies to removal" is a bad argument, but this is a hearty investment just to get started on which will leave you open to losing it early, and then you have to go through quite a few hoops to get there... with something that "dies" to more than just killing the creature (bouncing it means your Twelve Labors is gone, for example), plus which wants enchantment recycling in some cases because you can't get the Twelve Labors out of your graveyard... basically, as it exists now, Therc's best use is as a medium-strong creature with a better Time of Need attached. I'd probably use this guy to tutor up something besides the Twelve Labors and just use him as he normally is.
So my proposition is to change this ability to:
"When ~ enters the battlefield, search your library for a legendary card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library."
Or:
"When ~ enters the battlefield, search your hand, graveyard and library for a card named The Twelve Labors and put it onto the battlefield attached to ~. Then shuffle your library."
I'm kind of with SecretInfiltrator that that second version is not great, though. Cards that namecheck other cards are not a thing I'm a big fan of. Leave that mechanic to Yu-Gi-Oh! -- which means that Return to Amonkhet should pretty much only care about the contents of card names. Another option is to just make Therc stronger and leave out the tutor effect entirely. Maybe up his cost and make him an 8/8 (thus once he gets 12 heroic triggers, he has 20 power and, in theory, one-shots someone -- listen, this sounded like a better idea in my head, but you get what the significance of that is, right?)
[summarily mauled to death by hardcore Yu-Gi-Oh! fans for my snide remark]
The Twelve Labors3W
Legendary Enchantment - Aura
Enchant creature
Whenever a legendary permanent enters the battlefield under your control, put a +1/+1 counter on enchanted creature.
At the beginning of your upkeep, if enchanted creature has twelve or more +1/+1 counters on it, you win the game.
An alternative is to add some kind of recursion effect to the Twelve Labors, otherwise you have to deal with the thirteenth step -- I mean, the Thirteenth Labor -- where you have to fish this out of your graveyard if your opponent stops you. The odds are good that, in a "Legendary Matters" set, especially if there's a better choice of creature than Therc (even a functional reprint of the lowly Darksteel Myr is probably better here because it's immune to most kill spells), this could have a serious bearing on the meta if enough of the cards are good, so people will board in enchantment destruction, right?
Overall, there's some good ideas here, but there's also times when you need to pump the brakes a little, and I guess I'd have to see the rest of the set to make a better assessment on certain things I mentioned here.
I don't know man. I played a Trostani, Selesnya's Voice deck before and with Populate you usually want the beefy big sized tokens first and go wide after. So sacrifice the tokens is kind of a setback. I think red can contribute more by just add some haste to your tokens. The 5/5 flying demon tokens would be fine, though.
Token saccing would probably be "sac smaller tokens to make bigger tokens" e.g. Bloodsoaked Altar or Ghoulcaller Gisa, stuff like that. There's some creature that lets you sac things to make demons, I think? I don't remember. And if not, why, exactly?
Alternately, the C14 Ob Nixilis, if getting his emblem isn't a huge imposition, because even dumping your crappy tokens is a cool thing to have for that.
I hadn't realized this until this thread. How many people here are familiar with the Series Fate? As in Fate Stay Night, Fate Zero, Fate Apocrypha, or Fate Go? Because of this franchise, I have exclusively thought of King Arthur as Female for over a decade and would be sorely disappointed if MTG's King Arthur is male. I realize this is a minority thought pattern but this thread has lowered my hopes of getting a good King Arthur.
I actually was thinking about this too. But also, clearly we need to instead have a Planeswalker version of Andersen because this is more of a fairy-tale plane than an Arthurian plane.
We got a freaking serpopard in Amonkhet and some deeper Arthurian references are too obscure now?
Eh.
AKH/HOU literally only did Egypt (the Ten Plagues still count!), so it had more space where it needed more of the weird stuff like serpopards and Sobek (okay, seriously, think back to before Sobek was a meme, before Amonkhet came out... did you really know about Sobek, or did you just assume he was a thing because a croc-headed god totally makes sense for ancient Egypt? Okay fine, I'm blowing this one out of proportion a little) and khopeshes and Ammit.
Eldraine already has more going on than that, with its Brothers Grimm inspirations and the Arthurian stuff, with the Arthurian themes taking a backseat. I feel this is less unreasonable than people are saying. Also see a couple other posts in this thread pointing out that MaRo didn't rule out the obscure entirely.
I feel like I've seen a lot of people who know more about Arthurian legend than the average person (and let's be real here, I'm pretty sure the average person knows **** and all about Arthurian legend, relatively speaking; Arthur, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, sure, maybe a couple of Knights of the Round Table, but that's about it) getting very salty about this. Folks, in this case, you need to make sure you don't get blinded by the fact that you're probably a bigger nerd than an "average" person here. Your perspective is inherently distorted unless you know what is actually in other people's brains. I appreciate the disappointment! But I think that, in the end, the themes being easy to grok for the layperson will help the setting more than the more-knowledgeable not being able to smile at as many deep cuts will hurt it. (Also, focusing too much on obscura may make it hard for the setting to truly develop an identity of its own.)
I would rather the Arthurian aspect have been fleshed out with a setting using dedicated medieval fantasy tropes. Most of the Grimms Fairy Tales don't feel medieval, their distinct elements aren't tied to medieval tropes in specific.
That's probably because the Brothers Grimm wrote in the 19th century, so even any attempt to produce something in that time period would be kind of inauthentic.
You know, I actually kind of agree... this combination might be kind of shaky. But also we are basing this off of relatively few things and MaRo saying that a lot of people are overshooting how deep of a dive into Arthurian legend Eldraine will be.
While they don't actually administrate either Commander banlist, it probably irks them that every commander deck they print is duelcommander-illegal out of the box and if they can conveniently change that (by no longer jamming Sol Ring in every deck, but replacing it with a card of comparable demand and utility), they might.
Probably 0 decisions revolve around asking “what about 1v1 commander”?
can confirm that this applies to players too, aint nobody playin that (Please don't take this as a serious statement on the state of duel commander as a format in any way, my local playgroup is just not into 1v1 and prefers the tension and decision-making associated with multiplayer commander.)
Also, I feel Wizards strongly pushes Commander as a multiplayer format, so uh, yeah, not a factor at all, especially since that effectively assumes that they will be edited by players looking to 1v1. Commander precons are suited for Commander newcomers and veterans alike, right?
And on a Panharmonicon-like effect that triggers on casts... probably not. It would be good for Chulane but otherwise seems a little hard to justify right now. Post-rotation, pretty much the most notable cards that would be affected are Hydroid Krasis, God-Eternal Oketra, and Beast Whisperer. Admittedly, doubling GEO and Hydroid triggers is strong, but it just seems really narrow (and of course provides benefits largely to Chulane's deck...), while Panharmonicon itself works with so many more things.
Granted, I say this knowing no cards in ELD proper. Could be that all creatures in the set have on-cast triggers! I mean, I doubt that's the case, but my point stands: it's a guess at this point. And my guess is that it wouldn't be too helpful a thing inside of Brawl aside from this deck.
Yea, I loooooooved Drew Tucker's art in those old sets.
Drew Tucker's artstyle is extremely impressionistic and it bugged me how disproportionately people hate it. I'm not saying everyone has to like it, obviously, but people get way too fired-up about art in Magic when they don't like it and I'm surprised I haven't ended up in more fistfights over things like the old The Dark Ashes to Ashes, or Winds of Rath, or... wow, he did things in the Lorwyn era too? (He also did Psychotic Episode and a couple more cards in the Time Spiral block, which is perhaps something that makes more sense in a way because throwback block)
Probably not; you can't pick what card type this hits.
But this deck is pretty solid.
Contrary to the first comment, my problem with Archon's Tithe from a design perspective is that it's a bunch of things white does get (or did get...) but all duct taped into one card. It's not a very great design in my opinion. It's the sort of thing that you'd see in a Commander product and immediately divine why it was made.
The two commanders are both very good. Thruti costs less than Alms Collector but loses flash (which is a huge deal for this ability) and gains some lifegain that's pretty solid. I like it. Kybir does what he does pretty well. 4/4 vigilance legend for 2WW is decent, and his abilities are restrictive enough for him to be a build-around.
Collective Meditation feels extremely strong (roughly half of Grand Abolisher is still ridiculous, especially the part where you're immune to counterspells on your turn), and while I think it can mostly work, be careful with giving effects from generic-only artifacts to single colors. Not every color should have a permanent that copies Nevinyrral's Disk, for example.
Serra's Shrine isn't necessarily T1 busted without leyline support, it's just busted over time. Recovering enchantments is easy because they are kind of an undervalued card type, so you have things like Starfield of Nyx. Oops, guaranteed WWWW per turn as long as Starfield stays out, and sometimes you can combo it anyway. Play Parallax Wave, remove all five counters, sac it, there you go, you've just exiled five creatures permanently for negative WWWW. And that's hardly the worst thing I could do with that, probably.
Repentant Shinobi doesn't work, but you've acknowledged as much. It's still kind of a flavor failure imo because it doesn't really fit how I think white would do this (he's still sneaking around and taking stuff back, as opposed to, say, legal action of some kind -- and drawing cards on damage is often depicted as theft, so it sounds like he's skimming a little off the top of someone's treasure horde for his boss, too!). White forms of "stealing," e.g. civil asset forfeiture, tend to be more Azorius/Esper than monowhite. The Brand effect can probably be put to use in white -- but not like this.
Frostveil Plains seems like an auto-include in any mono-white deck using Extraplanar Lens. Granted, I usually see red playing EPL, but you are going to play snow lands with EPL to provent other people from abusing it. This is more useful than Master Decoy and the like.
Ivory Empyreon is good. Very playable, can get ridiculous pretty easily.
Lastly, Arc of Justice is just a strong effect that I could kind of see get printed... kind of. It's a slightly odd effect ("target creature or legendary permanent," surely you can see that that's a slightly odd collection of effects; it does sound like something purpose-designed as a counter, you know), so I don't know how likely we are to see that get printed unless WotC somehow runs out of ideas.
Spelltwine's copies aren't in the graveyard; they're in exile. Spelltwine and Sevinne have no real interactions of note aside from Spelltwine being a good card, because Spelltwine will only ever touch the graveyard if it's sent there by an opponent milling you or making you discard.
However, it does work with the other two.
The other version's trigger actually works and is a better ability. Considering the stats and everything else (and how relatively cheap "instants and sorcery spells you control have lifelink" seems like it is, cf. SfGM), the power level is probably okay. My brain was going "nah for limited that's overbearing" but I'm not 100% sure that's actually the case.
Spark Taskmage is straight-up gross in a format without anything better than Shock at CMC1, and Aether Taskmage is extremely solid. (Also, even though I know that you're probably modeling it after Aether Adept, I can't help but think that, man, blue never got an actual "bear," did it? I'm not sure offhand that there's a 2/2 with a pure upside ability for 1U offhand.)
Purifying Taskmage... can green get away with 2/3 at 1G outside of rare, a place I don't feel these belong? I guess there's a first time for everything. But Naturalize is an extremely good, playable card. However, it does suffer from the fact that it gunks up the main deck a bit by being low on utility if the opponent isn't playing enchantments or artifacts, and running this in side feels like a thing that wouldn't happen that much. Yet I would not be surprised to see this get some play in a standard with it in. The replacement, Beastcaller Taskmage, is okay, I guess (I like it because I have an Ayula EDH so it's a chump blocker that buys me back a Grizzly Bears, but in that regard, it's probably a weak card for EDH).
Dread Taskmage is probably the one that scans best cost-wise and everything and is the one I like the most out of the original five (shout-outs to it being an orc, too -- good choice of alternate humanoid creature type here), but of course, regeneration is retired, so Terror would never be reprinted in Standard. However, its relative similarity to Nekrataal (loses first strike to gain a bit of flexibility on kill spell timing for the same total cost) is about the right power level for a card like this, I feel like.
I'm not 100% sold on the way you wanted to do this ("wish for this named card" does the job but is not the most inspiring thing on the planet), and sometimes the execution is off (note the comparisons to Aether Adept and Nekrataal -- a lot of these cards have comparable counterparts that you should also be wary of outstripping, unless maybe that is also part of the theme), but I like the idea of reviving old, seemingly "unusable" cards.
NOTE: This is worded differently iirc ("Creatures with power less than ~'s power can't block it."; see Aura Gnarlid). Moreover, this effect is fine and it makes the card work pretty well; Naya colors would be good at making a creature that's harder to fend off as it gets bigger, and this is nicer than Trample or other options.
Yeah, it works.
And this is where you do not stick the landing. I understand what you're trying to do, sure. But is this supposed to be something to get Therc to start on his labors immediately, or is this a utility card? It's not that this is unclear, it just does both. With no protection for either Therocles or the Twelve Labors, I feel like this will feel extremely fragile, which is something that was kind of a case with any creature that wanted to stack heroic triggers like Fabled Hero or Hero of Iroas. I know "it dies to removal" is a bad argument, but this is a hearty investment just to get started on which will leave you open to losing it early, and then you have to go through quite a few hoops to get there... with something that "dies" to more than just killing the creature (bouncing it means your Twelve Labors is gone, for example), plus which wants enchantment recycling in some cases because you can't get the Twelve Labors out of your graveyard... basically, as it exists now, Therc's best use is as a medium-strong creature with a better Time of Need attached. I'd probably use this guy to tutor up something besides the Twelve Labors and just use him as he normally is.
So my proposition is to change this ability to:
"When ~ enters the battlefield, search your library for a legendary card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library."
Or:
"When ~ enters the battlefield, search your hand, graveyard and library for a card named The Twelve Labors and put it onto the battlefield attached to ~. Then shuffle your library."
I'm kind of with SecretInfiltrator that that second version is not great, though. Cards that namecheck other cards are not a thing I'm a big fan of. Leave that mechanic to Yu-Gi-Oh! -- which means that Return to Amonkhet should pretty much only care about the contents of card names. Another option is to just make Therc stronger and leave out the tutor effect entirely. Maybe up his cost and make him an 8/8 (thus once he gets 12 heroic triggers, he has 20 power and, in theory, one-shots someone -- listen, this sounded like a better idea in my head, but you get what the significance of that is, right?)
[summarily mauled to death by hardcore Yu-Gi-Oh! fans for my snide remark]
An alternative is to add some kind of recursion effect to the Twelve Labors, otherwise you have to deal with the thirteenth step -- I mean, the Thirteenth Labor -- where you have to fish this out of your graveyard if your opponent stops you. The odds are good that, in a "Legendary Matters" set, especially if there's a better choice of creature than Therc (even a functional reprint of the lowly Darksteel Myr is probably better here because it's immune to most kill spells), this could have a serious bearing on the meta if enough of the cards are good, so people will board in enchantment destruction, right?
Overall, there's some good ideas here, but there's also times when you need to pump the brakes a little, and I guess I'd have to see the rest of the set to make a better assessment on certain things I mentioned here.
Alternately, the C14 Ob Nixilis, if getting his emblem isn't a huge imposition, because even dumping your crappy tokens is a cool thing to have for that.
Eh.
AKH/HOU literally only did Egypt (the Ten Plagues still count!), so it had more space where it needed more of the weird stuff like serpopards and Sobek (okay, seriously, think back to before Sobek was a meme, before Amonkhet came out... did you really know about Sobek, or did you just assume he was a thing because a croc-headed god totally makes sense for ancient Egypt? Okay fine, I'm blowing this one out of proportion a little) and khopeshes and Ammit.
Eldraine already has more going on than that, with its Brothers Grimm inspirations and the Arthurian stuff, with the Arthurian themes taking a backseat. I feel this is less unreasonable than people are saying. Also see a couple other posts in this thread pointing out that MaRo didn't rule out the obscure entirely.
I feel like I've seen a lot of people who know more about Arthurian legend than the average person (and let's be real here, I'm pretty sure the average person knows **** and all about Arthurian legend, relatively speaking; Arthur, Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, sure, maybe a couple of Knights of the Round Table, but that's about it) getting very salty about this. Folks, in this case, you need to make sure you don't get blinded by the fact that you're probably a bigger nerd than an "average" person here. Your perspective is inherently distorted unless you know what is actually in other people's brains. I appreciate the disappointment! But I think that, in the end, the themes being easy to grok for the layperson will help the setting more than the more-knowledgeable not being able to smile at as many deep cuts will hurt it. (Also, focusing too much on obscura may make it hard for the setting to truly develop an identity of its own.)
But that's just, like, my opinion, man.
That's probably because the Brothers Grimm wrote in the 19th century, so even any attempt to produce something in that time period would be kind of inauthentic.
You know, I actually kind of agree... this combination might be kind of shaky. But also we are basing this off of relatively few things and MaRo saying that a lot of people are overshooting how deep of a dive into Arthurian legend Eldraine will be.
Also, I feel Wizards strongly pushes Commander as a multiplayer format, so uh, yeah, not a factor at all, especially since that effectively assumes that they will be edited by players looking to 1v1. Commander precons are suited for Commander newcomers and veterans alike, right?
And on a Panharmonicon-like effect that triggers on casts... probably not. It would be good for Chulane but otherwise seems a little hard to justify right now. Post-rotation, pretty much the most notable cards that would be affected are Hydroid Krasis, God-Eternal Oketra, and Beast Whisperer. Admittedly, doubling GEO and Hydroid triggers is strong, but it just seems really narrow (and of course provides benefits largely to Chulane's deck...), while Panharmonicon itself works with so many more things.
Granted, I say this knowing no cards in ELD proper. Could be that all creatures in the set have on-cast triggers! I mean, I doubt that's the case, but my point stands: it's a guess at this point. And my guess is that it wouldn't be too helpful a thing inside of Brawl aside from this deck.
Drew Tucker's artstyle is extremely impressionistic and it bugged me how disproportionately people hate it. I'm not saying everyone has to like it, obviously, but people get way too fired-up about art in Magic when they don't like it and I'm surprised I haven't ended up in more fistfights over things like the old The Dark Ashes to Ashes, or Winds of Rath, or... wow, he did things in the Lorwyn era too? (He also did Psychotic Episode and a couple more cards in the Time Spiral block, which is perhaps something that makes more sense in a way because throwback block)