Welcome back to UB Slay the Spire! While recent official designs are very exciting, I don’t really have work time to design more flipwalkers until I finish the Uthe Subsector for my Traveller Tuesday project, which has already been delayed by a week and will probably not go up this Tuesday either. (I’m planning a smaller article so that I don’t miss two weeks in a row.)
Edit 3/1: This didn’t go up when I posted it on Sunday. Here it is now. Many thanks to my awesome beta reader, Morde, for catching this!
The Defect takes Slay the Spire in a very different direction than the Ironclad and Silent. Rather than deriving almost all of its value from its cards, the Defect can channel orbs which provide long-term power in the form of damage, block, or energy. Lightning orbs deal three damage at random to an enemy, frost orbs gain two block, dark orbs grow in power over time, and plasma orbs grant an extra energy per turn. These orbs can also be evoked and destroyed for instant benefit, with lightning dealing eight damage at random, frost gaining five block, dark dealing its stored power as damage, and plasma granting two extra immediate energy. These numbers can be increased with the unique focus buff. The Defect also has two notable non-orb builds, a zero cost deck based around recurring “Claw” attacks which increase in power, and the familiarly named “Storm” deck which plays power cards for cumulative effect.
The Defect’s color identity is somewhat difficult to pin down. It is clearly core in blue, as an automaton, an artifact creature which is themed around computers, logic, and knowledge. Its power-themed deck also has a very blue feel both because the player is constantly honing the ability of the character to reach perfect mastery and because the player is playing with very typical blue effects like card advantage, free spells, copy effects, and storm. Many of these are effects blue shares with red, and the lightning and fire themed direct damage orbs also feel very archetypally red. And while I believe these are the strongest influences on the Defect’s color identity, they’re by no means the only ones. (This hypothetical precon environment also works best if all the commanders have three colors anyway.) While an argument might be made for the Defect to have white as a third color, considering its Sensory Stone text talking about balance and white’s affinity for small creatures, I believe the Defect’s third color is green.
“But isn’t green the color that hates artifacts?” I hear you ask, dear reader. “Doesn’t green prefer stompy creature strategies, the total opposite of this slow value generation through instants, sorceries, and artifacts?”
To which I say, yes, in general, but not always. Mirrodin block, Scars of Mirrodin block, The Brothers’ War, and other artifact sets have shown that green can care about artifacts, and the March of the Machine preconstructed decks have even shown us the Red-Blue-Green color combination caring about artifacts. There’s also something incredibly animalistic about the way the Defect fights for itself when it has to, with cards like “Go for the Eyes”, “Rip and Tear”, “Scrape”, and the iconic “Claw” all showing it fighting with its bare hands in a way that belies its supposedly detached and logical nature. The Defect is a robot, but it is also a living creature that does not want to die and will not go down without a fight. And while the Defect is inherently connected to artifice, it also has a deep connection to natural forces. Lightning, frost, darkness, and plasma are all depicted as elemental sources of natural power, something the Defect merely channels out of the world around it.
This really reminds me of Kaladesh and of aether, a force of artifice and science which was drawn from and shaped by the natural world. Aether was represented in the form of energy counters, and energy counters are incontrovertibly connected to Temur (Red-Blue-Green) by the iconic “Temur Energy” deck that shaped and defined the Modern environment of its time. Green cards like Attune with Aether and Rogue Refiner were both banworthy in their time and showed this elemental power combining with artifacts to create something greater than the sum of its parts. With new energy cards in blue and red coming out in the UB Fallout WUR energy deck, and only two cards in RUG with energy in their text over $2, it’s never been a better time to bring Temur energy to Commander, so I’m going to put together an energy-themed take on the Defect that still hits that “artifacts matter” theme.
The first thing I want to do is decide what should be represented on the card. I think four abilities, one for each type of orb, is a good plan–that won’t leave us with much room, so we’ll have to keep things concise. Lightning orbs should of course have the classic lightning bolt effect of direct damage to any target. Frost orbs sound like a great fit for stun counters, a blue defensive tool that happens to work well with proliferate if you want to proliferate your energy counters. (I am not liable for any flipped tables if you do.) Plasma should presumably be the ability that generates the energy. Dark orbs are the tricky ones. We know it should be a green ability, since we have a blue and a red ability. We know it should center around using it multiple times. Perhaps something like putting +1/+1 counters on the Defect equal to its power would work?
This doesn’t yet really do artifact things, so maybe these orbs could be artifact tokens you can sacrifice to get their effects? That way you could build this deck with an “eggs” subtheme (eggs are cheap artifacts that you can sacrifice for value) and benefit from cards like Gimbal, Gremlin Prodigy which want you to have many differently named artifact tokens. My original plan was that these tokens would trigger only when they’re destroyed, but the wording for that was really clunky, so a tap effect that can be used without paying its costs when the orb is sacrificed seems like a good way to represent that with slightly better wording. That means these need to be small effects–one direct damage, a stun counter on one attacking creature, one energy, and one +1/+1 counter. Then the sacrifice ability, which should come from the Defect, can activate it multiple times without paying that cost. In order to make sure the Defect can only do this to the orbs, we’ll need them to have their own subtype (Orb). It’s pretty narrow, but it’s also so generic in flavor that it could become a real subtype for artifact tokens with tap abilities where other cards create orbs, untap them, sacrifice them, etc. I decided not to give this subtype rules baggage even though it means the card will be wordy both so that it can be interpreted without needing to look it up and because mono artifacts were, sadly, a terrible idea.
Unfortunately, that’s all the space on the card even with questing beast size text. I went for a mana cost of 3, the cheapest of the set (spoilers!), and a toughness of 1/4 to show that the Defect doesn’t usually rely on its own power to attack, though it can in a pinch. 1/4 survives a fair amount of small removal, important on a cheap engine commander. We don’t even have room for flavor text here, so I’ll just shout out the STS wiki yet again for finding this awesome official Defect art so I can have some art on this cool card, and show you the final card.
Unless there’s something particularly exciting between now and next Sunday, I’ll follow this up with the Watcher next week, so stay tuned for more Universes Beyond: Slay the Spire!