Sorry for the late post! This design was more challenging than I had expected. But let’s get into it!
The Silent is somewhat more complex than the Ironclad, both to play and to describe. She has fewer discrete archetypes, but they have less overlap, making her one of the most challenging character to build decks for. Her first main archetype is poison: a damage over time effect which tends to be highly parasitic. A completed poison deck will rarely play traditional attack cards, but there is a variant based around the rare card Envenom, which stacks poison based on unblocked attack damage. I am highly dubious of using poison counters in my designs in general, both because of their notorious imbalance and their strong flavor connection to the Phyrexians, but I think it would be a complete flavor fail not to use them somehow here. Her second main archetype is shivs–zero cost attacks which exhaust when played and are exclusively generated by other cards. This is perhaps the hardest to connect to Magic mechanics, although it reminds me of the predefined artifact tokens somewhat. Her last main archetype is discard, which appears as an additional cost on cards in order to trigger discard synergies of other cards and provide incremental value, and she has a lot of dense draw cards to support this archetype. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the Silent’s association with skills and the dexterity buff, which boosts block.
In terms of color identity, I am inclined to say that the Silent is Black-Blue-Green. Poison is traditionally Black and Green in MTG, with White as a distant third color. Blue is primary in proliferate, an essential cousin to poison, with Green and Black following closely, Discard as a cost is primary in Black, but the way the Silent has draw to support discard also reminds me a lot of the Blue “looting” ability–drawing a card, then discarding a card. Shivs, as mentioned, are the hardest to pin down mechanically, but whether they end up as tokens, counters, or something else, they’ll almost certainly be supporting the poison mechanic considering it is so parasitic. (For those not up to date on terminology, a mechanic being parasitic means that it only works with other instances of the same or very similar mechanics, rendering different mechanics unhelpful.) The flavor of the Silent as being a sly and intelligent assassin who works with poisons also feels like a classic Sultai design, so that’s a great sign.
The Silent tends to have fairly cheap cards considering that many of her cards synergize with playing many cards in each turn. I think a mana cost around 4 is probably about reasonable. Poison tends to play very aggro, as it requires unblocked creatures, so she can’t be too expensive. That means a less bombastic effect than the Ironclad, more of a value engine than a game winning play.
In terms of poison, we’ll be working with toxic, the fixed version of infect. That “death by a thousand cuts” strategy of poison counters fits very well with the envenom variant of Silent’s poison deck, which is helpfully one that can include plenty of shivs. The card art even shows a shiv becoming poisoned! So we need some kind of engine based on toxic, and to avoid being a total rerun of Phyrexia: All Will be One, it shouldn’t be corrupted. I was originally planning to have shivs be a type of equipment token, like Toggo’s rocks, but since I only wanted for them to give Toxic 1, I think they’d work better as keyword ability counters. We’ve never had Toxic counters, and they don’t yet work in the rules, but there’s nothing particularly preventing them from working in the rules except that they have not yet been defined. I like making them keyword counters rather than generic “shiv counters” that get their rules text from the Silent because it provides resiliency if she is removed and makes it easier to make them work as expected with proliferate. To keep the deck reasonably paced, I like the idea of them being generated once per turn on one creature.
Once I knew I wanted a once per turn shiv generation ability, I knew I wanted to have a discard cost for it. Originally, I considered making this a cost for an activated ability, but I wasn’t sure quire how to cost it so that it was difficult but not back-breaking to play. Then I hit on the idea of it being the first time you discard a card each turn, encouraging the player to play looters and instant-speed self-discard effects like cycling and channel. These are very common in Blue-Green-Black, but don’t have a dedicated commander for them in all three colors. It still needs an extra cost, so considering the huge amount of card draw in these colors and the existing requirement for discard synergies in the deck to capitalize on the self-discard effects, discarding another card seemed reasonable.
The last part that remains to be done is the power and toughness. Since Silent is so defensive, she should have the bare minimum power to trigger any toxic abilities she gets (1 power). A defense of 5 seemed correct at first, making her difficult to remove and likely to survive combat, but not so much though that she’ll be attacking on clogged boards or impossible to remove for decks without white or black unconditional removal. However, my awesome beta, Morde, brought up that Silent has the lowest max HP of all the characters, so making her a little more frail as a 1/4 feels more correct in the end.
And here we are! Yet again, huge shout out to the STS wiki for finding this awesome official Silent art so I can have some art on this cool card. Flavor text is from the Sensory Stone event.
Unless there’s something particularly exciting between now and next Sunday, I’ll follow this up with the Defect next week, so stay tuned for more Universes Beyond: Slay the Spire!