Was there any way to tweak the card concept to make it work? There wasn't.
Ghostfire was clearly not flavored as being Eldrazi. If ever there was a time for Ghostfire, this was it. Devoid (the " Ghostfire effect") was a mechanic in the block. I'm always on the lookout for a chance to put a futureshifted card in the set, so Battle for Zendikar seemed like a perfect opportunity to reprint Ghostfire. If you've enjoyed any of Ugin's story-all of it started with this little piece of flavor text. That flavor text so spoke to the Creative team (as well as the players) that they ended up making Ugin and wove him into the story. The flavor text writer was just creating a cool possible future piece of creative. The writer of the flavor text (whom I'd credit if I could remember them) just made up everything beyond "it's invisible." Ugin, the spirit dragon, wasn't a character that we'd made yet. To help convey this flavor, the following flavor text was written: Only those gifted with the eye of Ugin, the spirit dragon, can see his fiery breath. Yes, it cost red mana to cast, but the spell itself had no observable quality to it. The rationale for it being colorless was that the magic was invisible. The more interesting part of this story, though, is the creative side of things. With 20/20 hindsight, I would have made devoid a supertype rather than a mechanic. (In vision design, we didn't name it, we just wrote it out like Ghostfire did.) Devoid had some issues, as players didn't like a mechanic that felt like it did nothing. It would later become a keyword mechanic named devoid. The " Ghostfire effect," as we called it at the time, was the perfect fit. I needed to find a way to make the Eldrazi feel different in a way that was applicable to any kind of spell at any rarity while being simple. Obviously, years later, I would find a use for this mechanic in Battle for Zendikar. This was just a normal direct-damage spell in every way but one.
The set had so much complexity that I was always looking for ways to capture our goals on simple cards whenever possible. I also liked it as a futureshifted card, as it captured the quality of being something you'd never seen but did so very simply. As many of the things I was predicting mechanically, I didn't know where or how we would use it, I just recognized it was a tool we'd probably need one day. I designed this card because I believed there would come a day where we would make spells that costed colored mana but were colorless. This card has yet to be reprinted, but it's probably had more influence on Magic than any other futureshifted card.
0 kommentar(er)
