The Great Designer Search 2, Challenge 4: Ethan Fleischer’s Epolith

My first batch of ideas for current front-runner Ethan Fleischer’s Epolith. My priorities while engineering this booster:

**Featuring as much splashiness as I could. I’ll test this theory as I move on to designing for the other worlds, but I can’t imagine that using the packs rare/mythic and mythic slot for anything but two mythics could be right. Unless you just can’t get there on two awesome cards, cuz including an underwhelming mythic would probably be suicide.

**Playing up the evolution theme hard, but avoiding being one note. To that end, there are three evolve creatures, two of them being simple common implementations who still manage to stand out. The Cave Bear, which is a slight variation on one of Ethan’s earliest designs, resonates because Grizzly bear resonates. Players can see this card, identify with it quickly, and get a clear picture of what the sets about. The Proto-Atlantean achieves this effect not with its stats, but with its typeline. If the evolve ability word wasn’t upfront enough about what kind of world we’re in, the Merfolk Fish should complete the explanation. The land, a functional reprint, plays up the theme of explosive growth and change while more subtly feeding into players’ ability to summon dinosaurs more quickly than normal.

**I wanted white cards to convey mechanical adaptation. As the world around the primitive humans grows more threatening, they learn to cope through artifice and enchantment.

Anyway, onto the cards:

After some discussion, it seems pretty clear that this can’t have static abilities. Triggered abilities can be a little tricky but the synergy with evolution is too cool to not fight for. I’d rather give up the graveyard and complexity that comes with it, than triggered abilities.

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