Skitter MTG alter
Posted Sep 26, 2019, 4:29 PM UTC
60469
!No bonus vs infant types?!< Unplayable.
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She can beat up Little Girl though.
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That was ONE TIME!
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Could use a fluff quote- “Meh, I can take her”
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While we're talking about alters, The Scarab God is DEFINITELY Valkryie, and Kaho Minamo Historian is Eidolon.
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Couldn't Lazav also work for Valkyrie? Becoming what is in your GY sounds thematic, even if she doesn't normally "become" the stuff.
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[[Karador, Ghost Chieftain]]
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I feel like Glaistig Uaine would be more like Gyrus, Waker of Corpses, who's nothing is that he reanimates the dead as shadows
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Heh. My playgroup calls The Scarab God "Khepri"
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This is great work! It got me thinking of what colors the characters of Worm would be. In between classes right now so this is just very quick thoughts off the dome, but so far we've got:
-Tattletale as Izzet or Grixis
-Bitch as Gruul
-Skitter as Orzhov, maybe a splash of blue in there
-Regent as Rakdos, Imp is very similar but with a splash of blue
-Grue as... I don't really know. Maybe Orzhov?
-Parian as Selesnya
-Foil as Boros
How'd I do?
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By colors, not guilds. The guilds don't fit.
TT is UB
Bitch GR
Skitter is UR, no question in my mind.
Regent is UB
Grue is WBU
Parian is WUR
Foil is WR
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Yeah, it wasn't clear but I was using the guild names as shortcuts for the color identities, not saying these characters fit in the Ravnican guilds.
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I mean, Regent and Imp fit pretty squarely in Rakdos anyways.
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I think Imp grew into more of a Dmir philosophy by Teneral, though. She doesn’t do political manipulation, but she’s less reckless and less chaotic. The heartbroken were chaos enough.
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Why do you view Grue as blue or Parian as black and blue? If I were to pick, I’d probably have Grue as WB and Parian as straight white. I’d also probably put Tattletale as straight blue with her focus on the unwritten rules and the cops and robbers aspect of parahumans, neither of which seems very black.
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Grue is blue because the shared pallette is all about misdirection and stealth.
I had Parian as white blue red; red for disposable minions, white for investment in those minions, blue for battlefield control.
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So mechanics only, not character?
Edit: because if its mechanics only, Tattletale (card draw) and Regent (steal/tap) should be straight blue, Grue should be straight black with fear, and Parian would be a WG populate esque card.
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Mechanics do not govern whether a character is a certain color or not, personality does. The mechanics are constantly changing, but the personalities associates with those colors are enduring. Grue...doesn't really care about knowledge, or secrets. At the least, they're not the ends, but the means to an end. That end is power, position, and wealth towards the goal of security for his family. Definitely black, maybe black white for the team/family focus.
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Skitter is definitely WB, that's like her fundemental conflict as a character. She's white in the sense that she believes in a world in which everyone collaborates together for their mutual benefit ("finally, everyone was working together") but she also is willing to go to great lengths to accomplish her goals, which fits Black's philosophies to the T. Taylor's always had a nominally good reason for the cruel things she does, whether that's traumatizing innocent customers at a bank or hijacking the nervous system of several thousand capes. Does the good outweigh the bad? Taylor's vision of the world as it should be is undeniably better in many ways, but is it worth the actions she takes to get there? I think these are the questions that WB characters force us to ask.
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Nah man, Skitter is WG. Self sacrifice and cooperation, whether you like it or not. I've done massive write ups about this, which I will post here later. Her driving goals are not curiosity or knowledge, and she willingly gives up freedom, literally, for the greater good. That's blue and red both right out.
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I can kinda see Taylor as GW, but I think WB fits better Taylor does have an element of self sacrifice to her, but this fits black's "greatness, at any cost." Taylor is capable of doing incredibly cruel things to herself for the greater good, but she's also willing to inflict that cruelty on others to get her way. Taylor tells herself that it's all justified each step of the first way, but if you step back and examine what she does it's not so clear. It's why Contessa's last question to Taylor is basically "were you a hero or were you a bully?" To me Green implies an acceptance of a natural order, a willingness to accept things for what they are. Taylor embodies the exact opposite of this in many ways: her whole revolution is against the way the people around her behave, culminating in a final act where she rips free will from thousands of capes in order to impose by force the collaboration that she craves. I guess you could argue that Taylor's struggle against her own shard is a kind of green behavior, but even here I see it as more black ideology about the supremacy of the self.
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I fundamentally disagree with the premise that these kind of color mappings are about motivations or feelings - they are about means and actions.
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The MTG developers fundamentally disagree with you, so I don't really know what to say. Rosewater has written plenty about this stuff. Here's a quote straight from the mtg wiki:
White puts value in the group, the community, and its civilization as a whole. White believes that suffering is a by-product of individuals not prioritizing the good of the group. White's ultimate goal is peace—a world where there is no unnecessary suffering, a world where life is as good as it can be for each individual, a world where everyone gets along and no one seeks to disturb the bonds of unity that White had worked so long to forge. To govern and protect its community, White makes use of and puts value in a number of broad concepts; morality (ethics, grace, truth), order (law, discipline, duty), uniformity (conformity, religion), and structure (government, planning, reason). White is a color commonly associated with good and justice, but if left unchecked or if everyone is not working toward the same unified goal, White can become authoritarian, inflexible, and capable of sacrificing a small group for the sake of a larger one. Everything necessary to preserve the laws, rules, and governance that White created.
After all, in the end "everyone was finally working together".
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Colours are more about how to do something than what to do though. Example - every colour has card draw, but it's more common in some and they go about it differently: white draw is rare and often tied to life gain, blue draw is the most common and is often straight draw, black draw costs life or permanents, red draw requires you to immediately use the card or lose it, and green draw is based on number or power of creatures. Similarly, every colour has token swarms (though it's most common in white and green), etc.
So the analysis isn't, Skitter does X and X is a blue mechanic, therefore blue. The question is, is the way that Skitter does X a blue way to do it?
And once you get to that question, personality or feel is a huge part of it.
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TT is dimir as fuck
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This is true, idk why I didn't start there but yeah I agree.
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Nice!
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Oh fuck this is so good
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Shut up and take my money
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Did you do the art? It's fantastic!
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No sir, it was painted by u/dsp-alters based on art that was previously posted here by u/ariirf
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Is it up for sale?
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Nope!
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But I want it :(
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I want this alter for my Temur EDH.
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The abilities are a surprisingly good fit!
Flying is Atlas or the jet pack thing Weaver had.
Insect tokens speaks for itself.
The looting ability (draw/discard) represents her situational awareness Thinker ability and her ability to make plans on the fly.
The "return to hand" represents how hard she was to kill.
Those things said, the blue/red color combination screams TINKER to me not MASTER. I'm sure someone has already done the "map colors/color pairs to Worm classifications" thing. Skitter strikes me as probably black/white, she really wants order and is willing to use basically any means to get it.
Blue/Red screams Tinker mostly because of Izzet, but representing the thinker aspect in blue and the disposable minions in red (like goblins) makes sense. I don't think you could cleanly map PRT designations into mana colors since there's so much variation on how they're used, like a Regent-style Master would fit well in red or blue, but a Bitch-style Master would be pretty squarely in green.
Yeah the color doesn't fit Skitter perfectly, but I think thematically the card fits her really well, probably the best Legendary creature to alter for her
That's the thing with most characters with any development, they usually exhibit traits from 4+ colors. In addition to
White - she desires to bring order
Black - (eventually) is willing to do most anything to accomplish her goals
She also has
Blue - uses her intellect and thinks her way through situations analytically (sometimes)
And
Red - acts impulsively (very frequently)
So like you said - black white represents her desire to being order at any cost but I feel red blue represents her tendency to unilaterally make dangerous descions and think her way out of them on the fly
As for green, while she mechanically matches it (bugs) the connection feels surface level at best as she doesn't exhibit much in the way of traditional/naturalistic thinking.
If you think about colors as feelings/motivations, everyone is 4-5c. Because they aren't.
They represent the most stand-out attributes, tendencies, and actions. If we are going to mix lore, having an explicit affinity to more than one type of Mana is an exceptionally rare thing.
Skitter does UR things and thinks in UR ways, even if she has motivations that overlap with other colors.
Skitter is UR, I'll stand by that :)
100% this.
I do disagree with you, though. I'd peg her as solidly WB. I think people associate religion with White/Black too much (because Orzhov), but that isn't what the color pair is about.
She's not very artistic, she's not very impulsive, she doesn't value knowledge for its own sake, she doesn't put any significant effort into researching before a fight.
She does justify, rationalize, and vilify. She takes absolute moral stands for other people but gives her own group free passes. She acts for the benefit of her group, but as an extension of herself. She acts to take from others, but follows a code for how she's allowed to. She doesn't necessarily work to benefit herself, but there is a very specific group who benefits from her actions, and that group is the people she declares protection over. She works to become stronger to protect her group, and when the chips are down she isn't afraid to make (personal) sacrifices or compromises for more power.
But mostly, when people discuss what they think about who Skitter was as a person, the thing they all fixate on is her morals. And I think that's very telling.
I like your reasoning, even if I disagree with it.
I think it might boil down a difference emphasis on motivation vs mechanics.
Mechanically, I do not think there is a strong argument for WB, while there is for UR (I've made it in other posts, but her tactics and combat style are a distinct blend of stuff from both U and R individually, and the shared UR pallette.)
Motivationally, the UR argument is weaker, but not almost completely gone in the same way that WB is mechanically.
Eh, there are bugs in black, too.
They’re typically large, highly venomous insects, and in general Skitter and Weaver held back from venom unless she was confident someone would survive it.
Spiders are almost exclusively green, with only one artifact colourless and one red spider.
Interestingly, counter to what I was expecting, Insect-type cards that are swarm-like or hive-like tend to be Black, so I will definitely concede that to you!
In summary, I could definitely see a Skitter-themed BG deck that would fit some of the flavour of her fighting style. Interesting that it’s a totally different interpretation of the character than OP’s, which I still think is a legit view as well!
Skitter would probably love the Golgari and wish Selesnya would just work with them
Blue/black fits better.
Red is aggression, but black is sacrifice and death. Skitter has no problem sacrificing millions of insects to achieve her goals.
On top of that, blue/black is Dimir, the guild of manipulation, information gathering/spying, etc.
Hard disagree on color combo.
UR is typically represented by the izzet guild, which definitely is steampunk, but if you break down the mechanics of each of the colors, they fit Skitter perfectly. (and the other guilds fit her even less, especially orzhov)
Skitter's combat style is about misdirection, evasion, mindgames, overwhelming situational awareness (blue!), escalation, ruthless ultraviolence, judicious use of chaos, and use of environment hazards and traps (red!).
Also, both red and blue have 'control' effects in their pallette, which no other color has access to afaik.
She has nothing to do with 'nature' or the 'natural order', huge creatures, life, law, death, decay, rebirth, etc.
Skitter seems far more Dimir than Izzet.
Red isn't just aggression. All colors have some aggression and attack, that's the point of the game - to damage your opponent.
Red is about DIRECT aggression, hitting people straight in the face, attacking recklessly with no regards to safety. Which is why red has so many monsters with more power than toughness, and so many spells that are simply "deal damage to target."
Escalation and growth is green. Ruthlessness is black. Intelligent use of environment can be considered anything BUT red, because red is straight-to-the-face aggression.
Eh, I'm leaning more Esper. She's always been that logic-driven person, and her Thinker ability from the bug swarm only exacerbates that.
Skitter doesn’t plan very long term, she’s reactive. Though there are times when she supposedly has goals, she rarely sees them through. They’re more excuses to herself.
Order’s not such a big part of her character.