Original Card: Marjhan ­

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• Upped from rare to mythic.
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• Made Legendary
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• Removed line about sacrificing if you control no Islands.
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• Changed cost of untapping Marjhan from sacrificing a creature, to donating an Island to your opponent.
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• Removed 'only during upkeep' restriction. ­
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• Changed secondary ability from reducing power to ping flyers, to swallowing creatures by gaining -1/-1 counters, then returning them if Marjhan explodes.
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• Decreased power and toughness by -1/-1.
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Edit: Originally, I changed the ability to ping flyers to reducing their power. I wasn't thrilled with that. ­

Technically, Reveka, Wizard Savant should be my Mythic blue creature. But Reveka's ability isn't mono-blue, so I promoted Marjhan to a Legendary Mythic creature. How many Leviathans can there be in Ulgrotha anyway? I always got the impression that that plane was small, and this fish is aiming to swallow a sperm whale whole.

Marjhan, as a whole, doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. Some of this is just early stages grandfathering. Sacrficing creatures isn't a very blue thing to do. Losing Islands to your Leviathan is, and giving them to your opponent helps reduce the intense number of drawbacks this creature originally came with. Cool.

The really tricky part is that second ability. Not blue, and not particularly interesting for a giant Leviathan. I tried messing with it, and ended up with this, but I'm not too happy with it. The flavor is terrible... it just doesn't make sense.

Alternatively, I also came up with ": The next time ~ attacks, each opponent taps an untapped non-flying creature they control." That hits the flavor well. "Giant sized Leviathan splashing through. Out of the way!" Unfortunately, I'm just designing my own ability here... it doesn't much look like the original. I guess I'll figure this one out later.

Also, a couple editing errors. "untapMarjhan" and "onMarjhan".

Hm... maybe he can give -0/-1 to your flying creatures to give opponent's creatures -1/-0. Maybe for an activation of ? Still doesn't solve the problem that the ability doesn't make sense flavor-wise, though.

BTW, jmg, I don't know if you've noticed, but your style of posting <li>s without a containing <ul> somewhat breaks the Recent Activity log. I filter out most HTML, but allow ul and li... but it turns out I auto-close ul, but don't auto-open it.

So it'd be better if you either go full HTML <ul> &#173;<li> &#173;<li> &#173;</ul>, or use simple Markdown lists (start a line with a *, with blank lines separating prose text from lists).

On this card: How about taking a cue from Colossal Whale and having Marjhan get -X/-0 to exile an attacking creature with power X or less? (Until Marjhan leaves the battlefield. Or maybe UEOT.)

Huh. So it does. Oh well, time to change bulletin methods.

As for Colossal Whale... this is an idea. I'll have to toss it around. I wouldn't want to copy the whale's ability directly. I was also going to say that large leviathans should attack, and doing something to attacking creatures implies that Marjhan is untapped... but you can untap Marjhan (in mid-combat even, since I got rid of the upkeep restriction.) Maybe I can turn that second ability into a tap ability that hunts down and exiles creatures? The -1/-1 thingy could stay too, representing the Leviathan getting too full to properly fight, eventually bursting. I think I got a game plan for this.

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Okay, Marjhan now swallows creatures whole. The flavor of this card makes sense in my mind. Though, I never would have thought this was kosher for blue if Colossal Whale hadn't done it first. Odd that. I wonder how long they argued that one out in the pit.

Also keep flipping back and forth on whether the counters should be based on power or toughness. Hard to swallow big things. Hard to keep sharp things down. One nice thing about using power is that it combos with blue's ability to reduce power...