White Colossapede. White gets creatures with this stats and bonus effects for this cost at rare, so it changes how the colour plays in limited without undercutting white's weaknesses.

Edit: "With" changed to "without" ; Colossapede changed to Hollowhenge Beast.

Changed to colorshifted Hollowhenge Beast I assume.

Why would like to undercut a color's weakness? Isn't like the half the color pie about determining a color's weaknesses? "No big creatures" isn't exactly that for IMO but still.

Not that long ago I encountered a similar card (5/5 vanilla for ). Here was my response it:

> White doesn't currently do (and never has done) large creatures at common. With large being creatures with 4+ power. There seems to be exactly four exceptions to this out of ALL the mono-white common creatures ever printed: Yoked Plowbeast (alara power shenanigans), Lairwatch Giant (giant tribal), Loxodon Convert (a subtler new phyrexia black to white color shift ie. Nether Horror?), and Thraben Sentry (conditional and also features trample for some reason?). Do you have an explanation as to why you think should have access to large creatures at common?

Since there are so many modern exceptions I think a card such as this is acceptable as long as there's reasonable explanation for it. Doing a colorshift for the sake of colorshift seems hardly like one though.

This is a set based on Planar Chaos. So, at the very least, this isn't a color shift for the sake of color shift. It's a color shift because of the need for color shift.

I'm sure, given a flavorful answer, we could explain why White can have top-heavy creatures on par with Green. I'd also like to hear what that answer is. I'd also like to see how the other colors get shuffled because of this. Does Green become the defense? If that's the case, how does that change Green's overall strategy?

How is that not a color shift for a sake of color shift? It's still very cynical to just do a color shift because that's something you "need to" do fill a slot. IMO all the colorshifts in Planar Chaos had something to say about either the past or the possible future. Or specifically about the (alternative) present - with past and future being the themes of Time Spiral and Future Sight.

Obviously making a fattie is telling us something but it already emphasizes the issue of white and green being too similar (like black and red). The "weenies for white" idea is comparable to how white and green pump spells differ from each other with white only doing small amounts (+2/+2 or so).

Though, if we think it as an "alternative present" then certainly the main question is "so how did green end up"?

Also you can justify everything with flavor so that's somewhat pointless. Though we have to remember that the game is structured entirely around the concept of flavor: without it the mechanics don't make any sense and are rather pointless; it's something that was realized with the more flavorful tone in the "newer" MXX coresets - they looked back to alpha in how to create evocative cards.

...

I think I just rambled with no real point. Eh, whatever.

There are two ways to go about making a Planar Chaos set. What seems like an obvious choice is to go bottom up. Think of how a color philosophy could be represented and design around it. Discover what that means. Adapt accordingly.

The other way, which seems just as valid to me, is to create top down. Just say that something is different. Ignore all precedent, and don't be lead by flavor. Then find the justification for how that happened. Discover what that means and adapt accordingly.

That's what I mean by saying 'color shift because of a need for color shift'. If the intent is to make a color-shifted set, I don't see a problem with 'just changing things for the heck of it'. I am assuming that the designer will eventually find a reason why the change is different as they move forward, or eventually toss the card as not working/inappropriate.

I mean, if the end result of top down and bottom up look the same, who are we to say one method is more right than the other? As long as a reason for the color philosophy break eventually comes forward, and it seems reasonable enough, then I don't see a real problem with placeholders like this. Eventually, though, I'd like an explanation to emerge.

Keeping in mind, of course, that this is KeresAcheron's set, and it's his choice to do what he wants with it. I'm only speaking about what I would like to see. But what do I know?

The flavour is that most large animals make more flavour sense in white than in green: Elephants and Rhino live

The meta-textual point is the originally white had Pearled Unicorn to green's Grizzly Bears. If Savannah Lions was never printed, green would be the weenie colour, not white. And Planar chaos green got Gaea's Anthem instead of white, making green the weenie colour.

The mechanical idea is changing how white functions as a defensive colour: Normally white defensive reward comes down to flyers, with white have no other way in limited to leverage its defensiveness into a long game strategy. By removing white weenies and giving it small defensive toughness creatures you change how it plays in limited. This simultaneously blurs it towards green (fatties) and blue (bad small creatures, sometimes gets fatties.)

I should probably making a document with a coherent vision. I've currently been using this set as dumbing bin for basic cards without a coherent alternative colour pie.

The point of shift was give White a card that changed it's limited colour pie without changing their constructed colour pie. White Angels and Blue Sphinx at rare/mythic rare have power toughness to mana cost values that would normally be unacceptable at common, discounting their abilities. (e.g. Argent Sphinx, Guardian Seraph, Indomitable Archangel, Restoration Ange, Sublime Archangel, Curator of Mysteries, Condunrum Sphinx, Aegis Angel, Angel of Finality, ect.)