After more than 30 years in existence, Magic: The Gathering has created a ton (and I mean a TON) of characters. While most of the minor ones don’t have any cards to represent them in the game, most of the major characters do.
Surprisingly, there are a number of key characters from throughout the collectible card game’s 30-plus years of lore that have never once seen print. And while Wizards of the Coast has done a decent job of finding and adding many of those characters to the game such as the case with characters like Commodore Guff and Greensleeves, there’re still so many more missing.
VIDEO: What If: Cards for Cardless Magic: The Gathering Characters
Let’s take a look at five such characters and speculate as to what their respective cards might be like, starting with…
Feroz
A planeswalker who lived much of his life on the plane of Ulgrotha, Feroz is perhaps most well known for two things: His name being on the card Feroz’s Ban, an artifact that makes it harder for players to play creatures, and for being married to another much more well known planeswalker, Serra.
His main appearance outside of card names and flavor text was in the 1996 Homelands comic book published by Armada Comics. In the story, he is largely a blue planeswalker with hints of white mixed in as well. He’s also associated with multiple artifacts and was the founder and first master of Ulgrotha’s Wizards’ School, which hints at a background in academia – especially after you
So, what would this old planeswalker of yore look like in card form?
Well, he’d be a planeswalker, of course, and he’d probably be white-blue, with a heavier emphasis on the blue.
For abilities, I could see his first ability mimicking the card Feroz’s Ban, adding a 2 generic mana cost to creature spells. We’ll give that a +1 loyalty cost.
According to lore, Feroz taught shapeshifting magic to Ulgrotha’s beast walkers. So let’s go with something along those lines for his second ability. At a -1 loyalty cost, ley’s say that you can make a creature you control have base power and toughness equal to Feroz’s loyalty.
As for his final ability, Feroz is known to have used a number of artifacts in the game including Aladdin’s Ring, Clockwork Gnomes, the Roterothopter, and more. So, let’s do something that lets you search for an artifact. We don’t want it to be too overpowered, so let’s do something like this: “-X: Look at the top X cards of your deck where X is twice the amount of loyalty spent. You may reveal an artifact from among them and put it into the play. Put the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.”
As for final stats, let’s start it at loyalty 3 and a mana cost of four (1WUU).
Vuel
Those familiar with the character Volrath, which has two cards associated with it, should probably be familiar with Vuel. After all, Vuel eventually became Volrath thanks to Phyrexian meddling.
But before that, Vuel was a promising young warrior and the son of Kondo, a Jamuraan sidar (or general) during the Mirage Wars. He was present when a young Gerrard Capashen came under Kondo’s supervision and, as the two grew up side-by-side, found himself to be quite the friendemy of the other.
In the story, Vuel and Gerrard had to undertake a rite-of-passage trial – one that Vuel failed at thanks to some third-party sabotage. The failure led to him being exiled from his clan.
As for Vuel as a Magic card, I’m thinking a double-faced card with one side being Vuel and the other being Volrath.
Let’s make Vuel a white-red legendary human warrior. He understands order and respects his father, so white, but he’s also rash and quick to anger, which is where I feel the red comes in.
Costing two (a white and a red) we’ll give him haste, first strike, and power-and-toughness skewed slightly towards offense (2/1). We’ll also give him a death trigger to symbolize his exile and subsequent eventual change into…
Volrath, a black legendary Phyrexian shapeshifter creature. Pulling inspiration from the original card from Nemesis, we’ll dial things down a bit as this is supposed to represent an earlier version of the character.
Let’s make him a 4/2 – double the power and toughness of the other side – and the following ability:
“2: Discard a creature card from your hand or exile a creature card from your graveyard: This card gets +X/+X until end of turn where X is that card’s mana value.”
Oliver Farrel
A religious leader on the continent of Sapardia, Oliver Farrel was a high-ranking priest in Icatia who left to create his own fanatical order of followers as he felt the Leitbur church and Icatian government were far too soft in their handling of the Order of the Ebon Hand a dark, rival cult founded and led by the cleric Tourach.
In splitting from Leitbur and Icatia, Farrel founded his own cult, known as the Farrelites. Farrelites quickly became attractive to Icatia’s downtrodden through gaslighting and scapegoating. In the name of virtue and justice, Oliver Farrel’s fanatical Farrelite followers found fervent fulfillment through unsavory means such as kidnapping, murder, and overall brutal vigilante-like tactics.
Oliver Farrel’s card should symbolize this in a holier-than-thou sort of way.
A white legendary creature (human cleric), Farrell should have an ability that punishes the existence of nonwhite creatures. Perhaps something like: “Whenever a nonwhite creature enters under an opponent’s control, create a tapped 2/2 white Cleric token.”
And we’ll couple it with an ability that is a callback to the original Fallen Empires cards Farrel’s Zealot and Farrel’s Mantle: “Whenever a white creature you control attacks and isn’t blocked, you may have it deal 2 damage to target creature defending player controls.”
Not bad for a 2/4 creature for WWW.
Kristina of the Woods
Kristina of the Woods is a planeswalker from the Dominarian island nation of Corondor. In the story, this green-aligned planeswalker had been associated with a number of other planeswalkers that she’d fallen in and out of love with including Taysir and Sandruu before finally marrying Jared Carthalion with whom she would have a child.
Later in Magic lore, she was among Urza’s Nine Titans in the headstrong planeswalker’s ill-concieved invasion of Phyrexia. During that invasion, she was “accidentally” killed (or murdered, depending on how you look at it) by the black-aligned planeswalker Tevesh Szat.
As for Kristina’s card, she would (of course) be a green planeswalker. As she’s known for her many relationships with other planeswalkers and just being an overall helpful person, we’ll give her a static ability that benefits other planeswalker cards by providing them with an extra point of loyalty whenever loyalty is added to that card.
As for activated abilities, let’s take a page from the War of the Spark playbook and give her a single minus ability that plays into her color. For a -2, until the end of the turn, whenever you tap a land for mana, add an additional G – essentially putting a Wild Growth on all of your lands.
For mana cost, let’s say three (1GG) and give her a loyalty of five – an odd number so you can’t kill her with her loyalty ability, she could be killed “accidentally on purpose” by other means.
Leshrac
The last planeswalker on this list (well, for this video at least), Leshrac is a human-like black-aligned planeswalker. Known as “The Walker of Night” (or simply, Nightwalker), he’s known to have lived during the events of the Ice Age when, along with assistance from another planeswalker, Tevesh Szat, he influenced a naïve necromancer named Lim-Dûl and right on through to the Mending when Nicol Bolas defeated him and used his spark to seal the rift above the island nation of Madara.
For a card for Leshrac, a character that thrives on darkness, manipulation, and a fetish for the undead, let’s consider this one:
A mono-black planeswalker costing 2BBB (pulling inspiration from the mana cost of the red planeswalker Jaya Ballard, also from the Ice Age stories), we’ll give him a starting loyalty of six to emphasize his power.
His first ability will be draw from his night walking prowess via discard, inspired by a combination of the cards Thoughseize and Mind Ravel: “+1: Look at target player’s hand and choose a nonland card, that player discards that card. Draw a card.”
For a second ability, let’s go with Leschrac’s love of necromancy along with some synergy with Leshrac’s +1 ability and we’ll have it inspired loosely by the classic card Animate Dead: “-2: Put target creature card from a graveyard into the battlefield under your control. Put a -1/-1 counter on that creature.”
For Leshrac’s ultimate ability, let’s go for a simple wrath-type ability that benefits the army you might have raised through his second ability: “-X: All creatures without any -1/-1 counters on them get –X/-X until end of turn.”
