Channel the Goddess
Enchantment - Aura Blessing
Enchanted player
Whenever enchanted player is dealt combat damage that player may return target card in their graveyard to their hand.
Acting as a conduit, the power passed from unconscious thought to dangerous reality.

Lifeblood of Maraka

Enchantment - Aura
Enchant Player
At the beginning of each end step, Enchanted player's life total becomes equal to the number of lands he or she controls.

Earthen Fortitude –
Enchantment – Aura (R)
Enchant land
Enchanted land has ": Creatures you control gain indestructible until end of turn."

Let's start the voting!




I vote for Tevish_Szat.

Tevish

Dudibus.

Tevish: 2
Dudibus: 1.5

And Tevish takes it! Lifeblood of Maraka shall be added to the spoiler.

Please write a criterion for the final round. Mythic.

So, part of me really wanted to make Anjara the criterion, but the problem is she is, in her very concept, Not Mythic. A basically filler legend with every indication of being a small, utility sort of creature? Yeah, no.

I learned last time I did a mythic criterion that it's a heavy burden. But, it's what I've got, so here we go.

~~~

The Starstill is an event that broke the world, and no corner was left unchanged. Frostwynd was entombed in ice, Illpyre burned to a crisp, but what of Maraka? Surely, before the Starstill came, the strip that became Maraka was a varied place. It had its mountains, its river valleys, its waters, and its cities.

Where are they now? Naturally, some of Maraka's former shape relied on elements lost to Frostwynd or Illpyre: Rivers became dammed if they flowed from sources in the endless, bitter cold of Frostwynd. Perhaps oceans, brought to a boil in Illpyre, drained away from Maraka to fill the gap of steam and spite, leaving former islands high above the surface of the land. But this hellscape, pleasant temperatures and desolation is not Maraka.

Speaking logically, the wind in the Starstill is going to be constant: you have a constant high pressure zone over Illpyre and a low in Frostwynd, which establishes something of Maraka's water cycle: Water flows into Illpyre and quickly evaporates, where the wind blows it back towards frostwind. But as the air chills, rain and snow fall. The edge between Maraka and Illpyre would be hazy as the new rivers fan out into desert deltas, their last vestiges drying away, the ground too scorched to admit open pools, but the barrier between Maraka and Frostwynd would be immense: Where the water doesn't melt, it stays, and from pole to pole a wall of ice would form. The higher it stands, the more it forces the warm, wet air upwards, until most of the moisture precipitates out long before it reaches the pinnacle, carving channels in the face of the ice where it no doubt sometimes calves off into the borderlands. This is the source of the new rivers, cold and clear and fed by rain and some pathetic melt. But this is not what we observe in Maraka.

Certainly, civilization would have been hit hard as the channels of water changed drastically, perhaps even volently. But Maraka is not exactly small. There is room for kingdoms here. Unless the terminator fell in the middle of an ocean, there would have been habitation, and people ready to stake their claim to the last arable land and defend it no doubt against the incursions of refugees from day and night alike. It would be built up, fortified, holding the teeming multitudes of sapient races that could no longer fit in the rest of the world. No doubt many would die, from starvation or the cruelties of their fellow intelligent peoples, but it's the nature of people to act as a vapor, expanding to fill all available space and yet trivial to pressurize. Logic predicts that the lands of Maraka would, by now, look a good bit like Ravnica. But that is not what we observe.

We observe, in Maraka, a land thick with life but thin with sapients, a green and good land but not a land that the displaced masses overtaxed. Not a land that survivior kingdoms and the legacy of a former world moved to exploit. And as that is doubtless the nature of people, whether those people are human or not, I posit that they must have been prevented. Some apocalypse, some world shaking event happened in Maraka, to stop mortals from bending it to their multitudinous will. This is an event based not in light or darkness, fire or ice but in life. It stems from the very essence of green mana.

It's been a long time, but civilization has still made negligible progress in Maraka, but I don't think that's too surprising in the face of what we already know. Life itself arose to defend Maraka, to make Maraka what it is. The doom that came to mortals here didn't just happen, it's still happening. It is still alive, because it stems from life.

Your job is now to Create the Marakan Apocalypse. It must be an Instant or Sorcery (representing an event that may repeat when necessary, whatever Wrath of Gaia you can imagine) or else an Enchantment or Legendary Enchantment (Representing a state of being that has been established, whatever force or prohibition you can imagine). Creatures and (naturally) Artifacts or Planeswalkers are right out.

The TL;DR of Tevish's (incredibly well-thought-out and eloquent) post is: We'd expect Maraka to have remained a sprawling urban paradise like it was before the Starstill, or to have developed into one in the time since it happened, but for some (inherently ) reason, it's more wild and feral than that. Make a card that explains how this happened / why this is.

First of all, change Natural Rebirth's tokens to Ouphes and add the flavor text:

Ouphes are the reincarnated spirits of those who have died in Maraka, charged with the chthonic duty of keeping its sprawling groves away from human hands.

Then, my card:

Preservation of Nature –
Enchantment (M)
When Preservation of Nature enters the battlefield, you pay put a creature card from your hand onto the battlefield.
Sacrifice Preservation of Nature: Counter target noncreature spell.
The life-force of Maraka ensures that the eternal strifes of Illpyre and Frostwynd will never penetrate its tranquil groves.

Might of Maraka
Enchantment
Creatures you control have power and toughness equal to the number of lands you control.
Defend your home and it will do the same.

I always imagined Maraka to be the product of some great work of magic that protected the forest from outsiders. Basically, some not-an-elf decided that drastic measures were required to save nature from the Starstill. Nature was given a way to fight back.
Also, I'm not sure that dead people should become ouphes. That's not really in line with what ouphes are.

Savage Serenity
Enchantment
Noncreature permanents are 2/2 green creatures with deathtouch in addition to their other types.
In order to survive you must be stronger than that that would destroy you.

The Maraka is a brutal and deadly place, full of life that must struggle to survive on Starstill. Everything has evolved to survive by being more dangerous than that that would destroy it. This is why civilization can't get a foothold. It is a constant, savage food chain that incorporates anything that steps foot in Maraka. A pool of apex predators bent on nothing but eating or being eaten.

It was just a thought. What are ouphes, though, exactly?

Ouphes are kind of like a wingless type of fae. Kind of like larger, grounded fairies or trickster nature spirits.
From the Salvation wiki:
"Ouphes are small humanoid creatures. They are often associated with the (green) natural world, and are related to faeries and possibly gremlins. All ouphes tend to be small in stature (about the size of a dwarf or kithkin) with pointed ears, but otherwise vary widely in appearance, including the human-like brownies and pyknites, and the animalistic brown ouphes. The first creature to bear the type was Brown Ouphe in Ice Age (though the Shelkin Brownie from Legends and Niall Silvain from The Dark were retroactively issued errata to become Ouphes as well.

Most ouphes are asocial, and many are hostile toward artifice. They have a reputation for being extremely annoying.

Ouphes inhabit numerous different planes, including Dominaria (where they thrived during the Ice Age), Shadowmoor, Mirrodin, and Phyrexia. "

I really wanted to make a land, just to be cheeky, but I can't come up with anything satisfying enough for mythic.

Return to Nature |
Enchantment - Aura (M)
Enchant land
At the beginning of your upkeep, target permanent other than ~ that doesn't have the same name as enchanted land become a copy of enchanted land.
When all permanents other than ~ have the same name as enchanted land, sacrifice ~.

Let's start the voting!






I vote for TP, though I think the cost could stand to be reduced to .

TPmanW.

Yeah, I'd like TP's but more aggressively costed.

TP and I agree about being more agressively costed.

TP, but at the same or a higher cost.