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Renaissance Set - Creative Team
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Here is my shot at explaining a white color Gorgon:
Rosalie, the Stone Gardener
On Rezatta, even the eyes of a gorgon see the beauty of art. Rosalie, one of the greatest sculptors in the history of the plane. Perfectly she poses her subjects before lithifying them for the ages. Perhaps a few rather beautiful young men and women even have come to her to be her models, that they forever might be beautiful pieces of art. How much more extravagant must these become when the muses return?
Nahiri, the Lithomancer
Lithomancer's Focus
Declaration in Stone
Aurification
Stonehew Giant
I love the gorgon tribe. I think a good gorgon would be so cool!
I think the Crusades are more tied to the Middle-Age in the collective mind (think Assassin's Creed etc.)
@SpiritDragon @brcien
Poor Bolas, so much spite xD
@brcien @MagicChess
I tried to find a way to make a white gorgon make sense by looking at this article about White's Philosophy: THE GREAT WHITE WAY REVISITED.
Looking back at some posts explaining the philosophy of Nahiri, a mono-White villain, can also bring interesting solutions.
Out of all this little brainstorm, I think this is the White Gorgon I like the most (I made her the Michelangelo character):
Michella is one of the most recognized artists or Rezatta, only Avinzi himself can dispute her the title of best artist of all times. Her inspiration often comes from the Rezattan Church, and many of her most prestigious works depict religious scenes, for example when she painted the whole ceiling of the Corte Magnifica's chapel. Still, her most defining masterpieces are a series of sculptures made out of illustrious people that she turned to stone after their death so the community would remember them forever.
Ideal—Everyone and everything is beautiful in a myriad of ways.
Bond—I can't resist a challenge.
Flaw—I am too attached to details, I feel like my work is never really finished.
After ningyounk mentioned the ideals, bonds, and flaws concept from DnD, it reminded me of one of the "Planeshift" products that WotC made for DnD that allowed you to visit the many planes in MTG while playing DnD! More specifially the Ixalan one! Take a look at the last seven pages of the file!
https://media.wizards.com/2018/downloads/magic/plane-shift_ixalan.pdf
That's a very good catch, actually the description for White's ideals send you to the same article I mentioned just above ^^
Whenever [cardname] blocks a creature, exile that creature at end of combat. At the beginning of your next upkeep, compose X, where X is the exiled creature card's power.
[2/5]
What if instead of blocking like @Faiths_Guide said it is tap discard a card then Compose X, where X is the number of cards in your hand...
That way you compose all of your "remaning ideas" and whenever you lose an idea (discard) you get the product
Exiling attackers feels white to me (Settle-the-Wreckage-esque). It gets the Gorgon part down (turning them to stone), and also ties into the set thematically by creating art with her victims (composing).
@DoctorFro
Discarding feels neither white nor Gorgon-like to me.
White doesn't really do discarding though (barring some major set themes like in Innistrad.) Discarding as a cost is usually black or red, having an effect scaling proportionally to the number of cards in your hand is mainly a blue or green thing. So I'd say that effect is a mix of black and/or red + blue and/or green. (Hence why it's really weird in White.)
Having discard as a mechanical theme is an element that has to be weaved into the structure of the set early on, it doesn't really work as a subtheme because it's one of those themes like Exile or Colorless-matters that require a lot of extra support from the set to work. Innistrad II had a graveyard theme, the madness mechanic, and plenty of support cards to make discarding a thing that would do something in the set. Still R&D said it was very difficult for them to make it work because the right balance of discarding cards vs. cards that cared about discarding was immensely hard to get. We planned none of that, so warping the Muses around the idea of madness and discarding would not be possible at that point unless we cancel everything and start back from square one both mechanically and thematically ^^
TL;DR: Discard is a difficult theme to adress, it requires too much support.
Any thoughts on my solution above? ^
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/avivzi-idea-crafter?list=user
https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/machiabrelli-dim-advisor?list=user
I'm not sold on two points:
1) Flavourfully, it looks like she's transforming her enemies into statues, like a regular Gorgon. It doesn't feel like the solution to the "White Gorgon Problem" to me, if a black or green gorgon did that, I wouldn't bat an eye as it feels a bit like deathtouch.
2) I don't feel like the level of splashiness is at the level you'd expect from a Legendary. You can't really build around it and it's not doing something new or especially splashy. It feels like a strong glue card to me, but if this was the Michelangelo card, I'd feel a bit overwhelemed I think.
Oh, I thought we did want her to be turning enemies into statues (as expected of the creature type), and then sculpting those statues. The mechanic was supposed to be a bit like Loyal Sentry
It might not be splashy enough... true.
So, what do we want her to do if she's not turning people to stone?
Yeah I saw the reference to Loyal Sentry ^^
It's a riddle: What is a white worgon? I personally don't know what the answer is, though we don't need to design her mechanical identity right away. If we like the character enough I'm sure we'll come up with something eventually.
So she could turn her enemies into statues as long as it was done in a way where people would say "So, that's what a White Gorgon is!" It's more a general flavour package (for instance I think making the exile ability a combat-relevant ability pulled it away from what I personally expect the answer to be.)
Here are two random designs for the white gorgon where I try to hit the flavour of the character sheet I wrote above. I'm designing both top-down from the flavour of a sculptor that makes statues out of famous dead people to honour their memory, making them immortal in some way:
Looking at these I realize adding a creature type that hints at a statue would probably not be a bad idea, oh well.
My point with the first one is to make a version where you don't have to exile an opposing creature (the returned creature is supposed to be a statue, I'm not sure it's very clear as this is a little roughly designed.)
My point with the second one was to have a version that exiles an opposing creature but still felt like its purpose was not to be "mean". It actually incentivizes you to exile your own creatures from a deck-building point of view. I don't know if that came out the way I wanted, but the second ability is a twist on Compose.