The Color Identity of Snow - Lands

The Color Identity of Snow – Lands

This is going to be last blog post about the color identity of Snow.  We'll be exploring the most basic card type, lands. (See what I did there?)

Since the inception of Snow as a type, lands have played a big part in creating its identity. For many years, only lands had the power of snow. One of the first blog posts was the introduction of my Snow project, and I showed you this card:

 This was the basis for the whole set, and I've always wanted lands to be the centerpoint of Snow.  We are going to expand on lands with a few different cycles. Today I'm going to showcase a common, uncommon, and rare cycle of non-basic snow lands. There will most likely be more cycles of lands in the set, but these are all I've come up with so far. We'll start with common.

The common cycle lands don't produce mana, and they all get sacrificed after being used. I wanted the lands to feel like ice. Powerful and fragile. There are quite a few cards that deal with lands in this set. I wanted there to be many more lands than usual in Frostmere.

The uncommon cycle is next.

There are a cycle of allied color snow lands that have the abilty word Frigid. So far, I've only designed these lands with the ability, but I'm sure there is some design space to be found there. Good for mana fixing, especially combined with my first proposed rare lands.

This was my first take on the rare lands. A mixed fetch land that gets a single type of land untapped, or any snow land, tapped. After some thinking, I decided that these were taking up way too many rare slots, so I made it into a single, multipurpose card.

I still wanted a cycle of rare lands, so I made them filters.

The nice thing about these is that you can splash both the color this land provides and snow with these, as they transform all the filtered mana into snow mana.

There are other lands in the set, and most of them are snow. I wanted a lot of the identity of snow to be in the lands.

In other news, I may have promised a Snow Planeswalker last week, so here he is!

Next week, we'll veer away from snow and talk about a new mechanic and some designs based on it.

The Color Identity of Snow - Enchantments

In making Snow a theme for Frostmere, I had to give it something that nothing else has had before. After some fooling around with different mechanics, this is what I came up with:

Notice the type line. Yes, it's true. Snow has enchantments that tap. Although Frozen Totem is not the first one to do so, (I'm talking to you Flowstone Embrace) it's the first time that tapping enchantments are a part of the flavor of the set.

A rule I set out for myself, as mentioned in last week's article, is that everything in this set that has the Snow type needs to have Snow in either its mana cost or ability costs. As I was designing Snow Artifacts, I noticed that there were an inordinate amount of them that had Snow mana costs. It felt unelegant to force Snow mana costs on artifacts without any activated abilites, so I tried switching the type of card. Snow enchantments have generally the same feel as artifacts, but are able to be targeted by a different subset of cards – Naturalize still works, but you can't Shatter a Frozen Totem. This seemingly innocuous side effect makes Snow better against Red, the color weakest against enchantments. Somehow, the cold winning against the inherent heat of the color red feels right in Frostmere.

I am aware of the fact that enchantments aren't supposed to tap, and these enchantments feel very artifact-y, but the beauty lies in the fact that they need to be dealt with in a different way than artifacts. Here's a few more examples our snow enchantments:

Let me know what you think, and next Friday we'll talk about lands, and maybe a Planeswalker (or two).

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.

The Color Identity of Snow - Instants and Sorceries

First of all, let's look at what Snow has done in the past. As you can see, it's going to be difficult to get a color identity for Snow as it has only appeared fully realized in one small set.  The few cards that appeared in Ice Age and Alliances aren't much help.  The two main things that Snow can do are:

1. It makes mana. The original Snow-covered lands are not the only example. There are 12 lands, two creatures (Thermopod, Boreal Druid) two enchantments (Winter's Night, Snowfall), and one artifact (Coldsteel Heart) that produce Snow mana.
2. It counts the amount of Snow permanents you (or another player) control. There are three cards that count the number of snow lands (Cold Snap, Drift of the Dead, and Snowblind), and six that count snow permanents (Heidar, Rimewind Master, Rimefeather Owl, Rimewind Cryomancer, Skred, and Rimewind Taskmage). Each of these cards does something different with the number of permanents, but they all keep a tally.

Next, let's look at what we'd like Snow Instants and Snow Sorceries to do to evoke a feeling of coldness. These things are not necessarily absent from what Snow has done, but it's the things we like it to do more of. We'll try to get something from each color, if possible.

1. Preventing permanents from untapping. This is a normal effect of blue spells that have a cold connotation, such as Frost Breath, Frost Titan, Permafrost Trap, and Wall of Frost.
2. Direct damage. There are a few icy red spells devoted to dealing damage, such as Karplusan Wolverine, Skred, Glacial Ray, Pinpoint Avalanche and Winter Sky.
3. Damage prevention. Glacial Crevasses, Sunstone, Cover of Winter. Although only one of these cards is white, getting lost in a blizzard is a good trope for Frostmere.
4. Messing with flying creatures. Adarkar Windform, Blizzard, Whiteout. A very green concept, and a good one for snow.
5. Destroying creatures and lands. Chill to the Bone, Avalanche, Icequake, Thermokarst. Getting rid of creatures seems to be something Snow is very good at, using many different methods. Direct removal of a specific creature, no matter how big, is something snow is able to do. It has that in common with black.
6. Putting ice counters on permanents for different effects. Rimescale Dragon, Rimefeather Owl, Iceberg. Not based in a single color, but something that Snow should do more of.

Let's put everything together and see if we can't make a new Snow Instant right now. It should have a mix of two or more color identities while keeping it cold at the same time.

Blinding Sleet has what we need for a good Snow card. It could be printed as a Red/Green or Red/White card, but it feels right for Snow. This is what I mean.

Next time, I'll talk about Snow Creatures and how we can make them effective and flavorful.

-olaf.