Chromium

More elder dragon legends! If you didn't see my Arcades Sabboth remake, take a moment to go back and take a look at it. The short gist -- except for Nicol Bolas, all the elder dragon legends are iconic and horrible. They're iconicly horrible. (Nicol Bolas is just stupidly overcosted and too abusable by reanimation.) The flavor ties are shallow or completely nonexistent. The mana costs are too high. Three of them are essentially vanilla, thus violating the Craw Wurm Theory. In other words, they're bad.

Chromium is the absolute nadir of the cycle, though. He gets the base 7/7 flying bit, but his add-on -- you know, the thing that lets Arcades Sabboth be the world's first Wall Lord or lets Nicol Bolas hold down your opponent and put worms in his or her mouth -- is Rampage 2.

Let that sink in.
Rampage-flippin'-2. There are only two worse keyworded abilities in the game, and one of them is Rampage 1.

The short of it? We're going to just redesign the card from the ground up. Rampage is terrible, out of color and terrible. It's just the worst fit possible for black, white and blue, let alone still being terrible in red and green, where it's much more at home. Did I mention that Rampage is terrible?

So, what we want is to find an aggressive overlap between black, white and blue.

• Each color has a strong tutor theme. Black routinely tutors for anything; white can grab enchantments and equipment; blue can grab artifacts, instants and sorceries.
• Black and white have a life-gain theme. They do it in different ways -- black typically drains the life, while white is more prone to simply gain it -- but both do lifelink.
• Black and blue have some mana-generation themes. Blue's mana generation almost always goes into artfacts, while black's is typically either short term or bombastic. (Compare Dark Ritual and Nirkana Revenant.)
• All three have recursion themes. Black and white recur creatures, while blue and white recur artifacts. Blue recurs instants and sorceries. White's got an enchantment recursion theme, as well, and I suppose Hakim, Loreweaver's still a real card.

Chromium's the blue elder dragon legend -- that is, he's blue and its allied colors -- so I'm going to make him base blue. Compare to Arcades Sabboth, the white elder dragon legend, and my revised version of him that revolved around a white take on white, blue and green abilities.

That's a pretty obvious re-do. I like it, think it's fun, and know I'd grow to hate it after a few weeks of seeing it in EDH. Recursion is a funny thing -- a little of it gives some good redundancy and beats decks running crappy or not enough removal. Too much recursion? That leads to lead to linear, boring decks and invalidates all but the harshest removal options. (There's a another dimension to this, of course -- a deck that dicks around recurring the same card over and over again could leave itself open to something fast, lithe and unconcerned with subtlety. Burn won two straight Legacy SCG Opens, dig?)

Still, I think tutoring and cheating mana costs is the way to go on Chromium.

This is much wordier, but I like it more. I'm a sucker for flexibility, and I like it when a card allows you to intentionally underplay it for greater real effect. It's also a lot different than Sharuum, which the original nails a little too closely; while I didn't think of the sphinx while making that Chromium, he would probably strike a lot of people as another version of one of the most-hated EDH generals.