Self-Appointed Flavor Judge – Dragon Sexes, New Eldrazi

Court hasn’t been in session for a while, so I guess its time.

For reasons of gender equality, all the Dragonlords are lords. However, they are not all male. Actually, if you look at Spanish versions, you can see that there are actually two senors (Ojutai and Silumgar) and three senoras (Dromoka, Kolaghan, Atarka).

Here’s an interesting note on them. Let’s look at the two versions of each side by side:

The art is a nice touch. Each of them is flying when young, but can’t be bothered when older. They needed to be active when young. The Elder versions are now the leaders of their own nations, and can take it easy.

… but here’s a nice touch as well: Remember that Silumgar and Ojutai are males and Dromoka, Atarka and Kolaghan are females. Now, look at their stats. I don’t know if this is deliberate, but apparently female dragons grow stronger with age, while males begin to whither. Its not as if they are anywhere close to death at 5/4 or 3/6, but each has lost toughness.

One thing I would like note as well, is that the two males are also the two blue dragons and they are the most used in Standard. This probably wasn’t deliberate, but something they should look out for in future cycles.

Then, onto the Eldrazi.

You know the problem I’ve always had with Call of Cthulhu RPG (well, one of many)… Giving stats to monstrosities you shouldn’t give stats to. This mistake has been made in other similar games as well. When you give them stats, you make them not feel like a horror, but rather a puzzle. They are trivialized.

Now, Eldrazi are supposedly the MtG version of the Mythos monsters. I can’t really blame WotC for giving them stats, because they simply had to and we already have Planeswalkers, who should have pretty infinite power represented by cards. (Although they aren’t as omnipotent as they were when I first started.)

However, I feel like taking away the graveyard clause might have been a mistake.

I understand why they took it out. The tools for reanimating have been nerfed over the years and thus the clause isn’t needed anymore (for Standard, other formats have to manage on their own). Also, there’s a lot of text on the new Ulamog and Kozilek as it is.

On the other hand, that clause had good flavor as well. Sure, you’ve won over Kozilek, but you know what? Its going to come back. You can never actually beat it. That quality brought a level of that Mythos horror into the creatures. Of course their pure size and other abilities work as well, but that little bit of text (actually, quite a bit of text) just pushed it into another level.

Of course, in practice they wouldn’t usually die anyway, but still.

One thought on “Self-Appointed Flavor Judge – Dragon Sexes, New Eldrazi

  1. On thing to notice is that none of the titans use the depth of field in their image with the exception of (old) Kozilek. The flying rocks and clouds make it look bigger. You cannot see the anything on Ulamog’s picture to compare it to and Emrakul actually looks a bit small. The new version of Kozilek manages to look even smaller since those tiny flying islands from the earlier “shot” are now behind it and are a lot larger than in the older one.

    The same goes for other eldrazi too (with a few exceptions). There is nothing to compare their size to and thus they look small. You can witness the same effect in actual world too by comparison to Moon. It looks kinda small on the sky but when you spot it right above the tree line/horizon where you can compare its size more accurately it always looks a lot bigger.

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