The Color Identity of Snow – Creatures

Figuring out which creatures should be Snow in our set is going to be a bit of a problem. In the entire history of magic there are 29 Snow creatures. Since Snow is going to be a big deal in Frostmere, we're going to need quite a few more than that. To get an idea of what Snow creatures can do, we should look at their history. All but one of these cards were in Coldsnap. The last was a Future Sight card. Looking at these, we see a few themes repeating.

1. Flying. 11 of 29 Snow creatures have flying.
2. Activated abilities. 21 out of the 29 have at least one activated ability. 17 of those abilites are activated with Snow mana.
3. 2 can give first strike
4. 2 can regenerate
5. 2 can sacrifice creatures for an effect
6. 2 use ice counters
7. 4 can pump themselves or others. (+1/+1 and +1/+0)
8. 2 are multicolored
9. 3 are artifact creatures
10. None of them require Snow mana to cast.
11. 12 of them are unnecessarily snow. Meaning, they have no cost associated with snow mana.

We will keep a few of these conventions, and replace some others. A few rules for our Snow creatures.

1. Flying. This is a big part of Snow creatures. There will be more Snow flying creatures than non-Snow flying creatures in the set.
2. There will be at least 2 Snow creatures that can regenerate.
3. Ice counters will see some use in this set.
4. There will be some +1/+1s in Snow.
5. There are no multicolored Snow cards in the set, and therefore no multicolored Snow creatures.
6. A great deal of them will require only Snow mana to cast.
7. There will be no unnecessarily Snow creatures. They will all have either a mana cost or activation cost that requires Snow mana.

Let's get designing!

First of all, let's make a colorless snow creature.

This guy is your basic 2/3 for 3, with a decent ability. Nice and snow.

Here's another:

I feel like Snow creatures should generally have toughness higher than power. Now that we have a few colorless snow guys let's try something a bit different. Since so is so pervasive on this plane, it influences all colors of mana. Here are some examples:

Now that you have an idea of what kinds of creatures we'll be seeing in this set, feel free to design a few and post them here.

Here's a sneak peek at a few things we will see in this set:

1. A snow lord
2. A Snow Planeswalker
3. A new ability word, Icy, that counts the amount of Snow permanents you control.
4. A new mechanic, Mount, that lets your creatures combine to do cooler stuff.
5. Enchantments that do things we've never seen before.

Next Friday's post will be about Enchantments and Snow.