Blue has removal; it usually doesn't DESTROY things. Now, blue creature destruction can certainly happen, but you have to do it carefully. For instance, the blue Diabolic Edict is not too far a stretch, especially if it's worded like "target opponent sacrifices a creature of your choice".
This was my first suggestion for blue, so I'm on board with that idea.
We are getting closer to the deadline. We need to just pick something that makes sense in color and that we can get across flavor-wise. Power-level and metagame concerns are secondary. We still need to come up with most of the originals, so let's get to work.
If people prefer the two-headedness, here's a redo on my homunculus, as the first one would start multiplying too quickly. I was thinking of giving it haste like Bonded Fetch...thoughts?:
Twinning Homunculus - :1mana::symu::symu:
Creature - Homunculus (r)
Twinning Homunculus can't be blocked except by two or more creatures.
Whenever Twinning Homunculus deals combat damage to an opponent, put a token into play that is a copy of it.
1/1
For the green original, I was thinking about Burning Tree Shaman and whether there might be meat on the activated ability bone.
Animal Farm - 2GG http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/imagerecord_l.php?record=198
Enchantment
Your opponents may not play activated abilities of creatures they control. You may play activated abilities of creatures you don't control (as if you were their controller?).
I just found that Cornell archive of old fantasy images. Pretty interesting stuff, if not particularly useful.
I agree, of course. They could have done this in a much more tongue-in-cheek way, considering we are all playing along with the fact that he's dead anyway. But they did it in the exact same fashion of the Owen and Eddie tributes, which calls into question their sincerity over those real deaths. And what about the limo driver? Is he or she not a human being?
I missed the first few minutes. Did they really not even do the traditional fade-in with Sherri's picture? That's crap.
Ladies and gentlemen. I have figured out what caused the explosion that took Mr. McMahon's life. A small spark is formed whenever the Chairman sits down, due to his giant brass balls clanking together.
JBL and Cole are pretending to break the fourth wall. They just made comments suggesting the news media's coverage of McMahon's death can't be trusted.
This is seriously a landmark event in television history.
Small issue with Twinning Homunculus...you end up with two "two-headed" creatures. Unless the flavor is something like the thing is perpetually splitting like Chronozoa, that might not be what u'r going for.
That's exactly what I'm going for. I like the way the two-headedness and the doubling play off each other. Because you need two creatures to kill it in combat and you can get a lot of copies quickly, it can act as a finisher. But at the end of the day, they're just 1/1s.
My friend and I were wondering what would happen if someone in the WWE extended family actually died during this angle; it's incredible and incredibly sad that we found out so soon.
What's really not incredible is that the news of her death and Vince's "death" appear right next to each other on that page. I do see a lot of the Vince stories now say "presumed dead," though. Why there would be any doubt at this stage isn't clear.
I don't think we should limit ourselves from shifting only enemy abilities. We're obviously very divided on what blue should get, so let's keep our options as open as possible.
As far as Arcadeus' suggestions, I think we should put some more thought into combat related abilities as blue is the least combat-oriented and none of the other colors are getting them (though red can use damage redirection in combat).
Can't block is related to unblockability, which blue does get. But it's also a fairly narrow ability that doesn't see much play. I like the suggestion of Raging River in that it's a splashy, cool card, but it's kind of a rules-text nightmare, and doesn't really interact with flying in a pro-blue way. Chaosphere, despite having my all time favorite flavor text, is an outright flying-hoser, so it doesn't really make sense.
But there are other variants of this that red gets which could be interesting. Blue got Siren's Call before red did. And then there's two-headed-ness ala Goblin War Drums:
Double Vision - 2U
Enchantment
Each creature you control can't be blocked except by two or more creatures. Tog! Hit the one on the left! Your left! Your other left!
Other names: Mirror Image, Confuse, Obfuscate
Easy to illustrate. Works with blue's imagecrafting and illusions. Makes flying even harder to deal with. I'll try to mock up some originals that play off this, but I think it has potential.
Twinning Homunculus - 1UU
Creature - Illusion (r)
Twinning Homunculus can't be blocked except by two or more creatures.
Whenever Twinning Homunculus attacks, put a token into play tapped and attacking that is a copy of it.
1/1
(Nacatl War-Pride and Chronozoa have different wordings regarding token copies, but this is templated off them. Could this be worded to "put a tapped and attacking token copy of it into play"?)
As far as the church is concerned tho, the video game isn't a form of art. Its science fictiony-video game-technology stuff like this that the church hates. They wouldn't care if it was a painting, or at least not as much.
Chris Offili, Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, Nikos Kazantzakis/Martin Scorsese and Madonna would like a word with you.
Seriously though, you are correct in saying that video games have historically had a harder time getting the same protections as other forms of art. This has generally been due to video games being considered as being media for entertainment rather than expression, i.e. the content is largely irrelevant, as Grand Theft Auto is closer in form to checkers than Citizen Kane (I'm positive a judge made such an analogy in a first-amendment case regarding video games...if anyone can help me find it, I would be much appreciative).
Fortunately, the Church can't make that argument, as if it suggests that video games don't deserve the same protection as paintings in regards to content, it has to reconcile why it finds the games ostensibly irrelevant content so offensive. It really is, as you say, an unfamiliarity with the medium that drives this backlash.
The same thing happened with comic books with the Comics Code in the 1950's. But now that the people who make the laws are people who are familiar with the medium and it's potential for artistic expression (because they grew up with comic books), we can have comic book literature like Watchmen and Persopolis that would have been illegal a few decades ago.
That's the great thing about progressivism. Your ideological opponents die before you do.
Dark makes a good case for not doing a destroy effect, but Aracdeus is right about not needing to put this in the context of the current metagame. I think blue has more flavor potential in its inherent indirectness than doing a straightforward destroy effect would allow. So I do like Cerebral Sluice (though I'm not wedded to the name) and think the Mental-Polymorph flavor is a good reason to do it if we can get the right art. We would need to do a killer original card using the same flavor for this to grok well, but I think we're up to the task.
I also like Dominate over Control Magic for green for the above reasons. And I also thought that Yavimaya Dryad would make a great black card. However, the planeshifts are primarily about flavor, so I think we should fine tune the names, and even the base card, to the art now that we have concepts mostly hammered out. The art can't be tangentially related to the mechanics we are shifted: they need to scream them.
I think we have clear, strong concepts for everything but blue, and we need to start suggesting art. I want to see anything and everything that looks even remotely like:
White: Lots of people being rounded-up and arrested, police state, draconian politicians, mass executions, fascism, people being stripped of their identities, the iron fist of the law
Black: Decomposing corpses in a landscape, swaths of death in otherwise flourishing forests, Cadaverous Bloom 2, a creature that does these things
Red: Reroute2, Goblin Flectomancer 2, lots of junk flying at a creature's head, swords bending backwards and pointing at their owners, fields that mangle weapons and armor
Green: an aristocrat going berserk/mutating, a psychedelic trance, vestiges of a ruined civilization, parasitic insects that use your body, green werewolves, revolt
As for blue, the idea of a scholarly blue mage physically reshaping/reusing his spells appeals to me, though we need to have something that connects to the graveyard visually. What do dead spells look like? Maybe a blue wizard magically ripping individual pages out lots of different old, tattered books in a big pile? It could be something even more abstract, like the 9th Sift.
Certainly the exterior appearance of the building is public, though the interior is probably another story. How realistic is it? I've never been there or played the game, but would you be able to tell where you were from the inside, provided you have that frame of reference?
It's pretty wild how important those details are. But even how copyright interacts with explicitly public spaces is by no means cut and dry. In the U.S., police can stop you from taking pictures of government buildings, bridges, subways, and other things that might be terrorism targets. There was also that bit of a controversy a few years ago in Chicago's Millennium Park, where park officials were stopping people from taking pictures of Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor's sculpture). claiming that it would be a violation of Kapoor's intellectual property rights.
It turns out they were mostly stopping people who looked like professional photographers, under the assumption that they were more likely to profit from the reproduction of a likeness of the sculpture. Is Sony profiting from their reproduction of this Church? It's in a for-profit product, though you would be hard pressed to say that's why anyone would want to purchase the game.
I know that's not the thrust of the Church's argument, but it seems like it would be the only leg they have to stand on. Blasphemy laws might still be on the books in the U.K., but they aren't exactly enforced.
I'm not in favor of doing black enchantment destruction. It is one of things that black has never, ever been able to do, but there isn't a consistent flavor to it in either white or green that a black version could really differentiate from. If someone can come up with up with a compelling planeshift+new card, I'm all ears, but right now I'm struggling to think of anything interesting.
Flavor-wise, I think these are the strongest suggestions so far.
White
Removing/nullifying all copies of a card - excommunication, exile, banishment, (ethnic) cleansing, rule of law at all costs.
White is very interested in order, purity and control. All of the major fictional dystopias show societies that are super-white and maintain order by banning the existence of troublesome elements: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, V for Vendetta, Harrison Bergeron, The Giver, etc.
I think this is a slam dunk. Black physically extracts ideas from crania, white sends in the Thought Police.
Blue
Destroy effects - Mental attack (brain explodes), natural forces (water), manipulation/mind control (forced sacrifice)
I think we should go with a non-physical form of destruction...telepathy, telekensis, etc. We also need to find a great/weird destroy spell to planeshift, one that already feels a little blue. If someone can concept that flavorfully, we can go from there.
Black
Terraforming - Spread of corruption, pestilence
The mirror-image of green...instead of life flourishing in the creature/spell's wake, it's consumed and perverted (see the end of Princess Mononoke). Black already gets a little of this with things like Nightcreep, but next to white, I think this is the strongest we have, flavor wise.
Red
Damage Redirection - Magnetism, machinery
This was my suggestion, so I obviously think it has potential. I think it works well with red's target-changing (look at the art for Reroute, as well as it's me-first mentality (we could make it more about the strongest redirecting damage to the sacrificial runt if people think this is too much like direct damage).
Green
Control Magic - Primitivism, devolution
This is also very strong, but it might be harder to find the appropriate art. a Jekyl->Hyde thing might be good. Were-creatures often got thrown into black because of their classic-horror connotations, but I think that's something that could work here (and we do have Werebear ). Think Lord of the Flies, Circe from The Odyssey, or The Incredible Hulk.
Ok, on more thought, maybe white might go for Eradicate.
Expatriation 2WW
Remove target nonwhite creature from the game. Search its controller's graveyard, hand, and library for all cards with the same name as that creature and remove them from the game. That player then shuffles his or her library.
This is by far my favorite suggestion for white, though I would call it Genocide to play up white's fascistic tendencies. I think black's gotten enough of "all copies" and the cards have been high-profile enough (Cranial Extraction, Extirpate, even Cabal Therapy), that shifting that ability to white would be grokable. And the flavor of white enforcing order by eradicating all traces of something it considers dangerous is awesome.
Since flavor is so important, I think we should start looking for some kick-ass art now that fits with the methodologies of the shifts. But that means we need to start hashing out what those are going to be.
Black's "swampification" is pretty straightforward...spreading trail of corruption, etc.
Green's idea is also pretty straightforward...going wild, devolving...but it might be harder to find art that is really evocative of that.
Red's damage redirection could be done with magnetism, like in my examples. But it could also be done via steampunky contraptions ala Goblin Flectomancer. I'm open to suggestions.
There are a lot of ideas on the table for blue's destruction...from tsunami, to brain-explosions to mind control over the permanent's controller. I would definitely rather have a non-physical flavor, but at this point we should start concepting the actual planeshifted cards...they are only going to come across if we nail the name, art and flavortext.
I'm still not sold on white getting tutoring...it already tutors for lands and enchantments pretty regularly, and...I think we need something that is more obviously a departure from its usual strategies.
I think Arcadeus has nailed the black shift. I really, really like the flavor, and it works with a lot of black's iconic mechanics, (the Shade ability, Nightmare/Korlash, drain life, Tendrils of Corruption).
I realize that black gets the most tutoring, but without major additional costs/drawbacks, it seems too generic. I think that whatever we end up doing for White, it should involve paying life or saccing creatures, something white never does (but could be in the flavor of religious zealotry).
Red is hard, but I think it's the right idea to go back to its Wall of Stone days and do something defensive. Might damage redirection be better than just prevention? It fits in with the trickster theme with cards like Shunt, and often ends up looking like direct damage. In honor of the late Mr. Wizard, here's a magnetism-flavored Zealous Inquisitor
Polarity Elemental - 2R
Creature - Elemental (u) 1R: The next 1 damage that would be dealt to Polarity Elemental this turn is dealt to target creature instead. Unless that sword's made out of wood, I wouldn't recommend swinging it right now.
2/2
and the new card
EDIT: I accidently made Stuffy Doll....new idea on its way.
EDIT2: Here we go
Homing Beacon - 1RR
Enchantment - Aura (r)
Enchant Creature
Flash
Whenever a creature you control would be dealt damage, that damage is dealt to enchanted creature instead.
I agree with dark...no bounce. I like black mana accel, but don't think we should do LD.
If green had control magic style cards, the flavor would have to be opposite of brainwashing, as that's how blue does it. Green is about the wild and untamed, so there's plenty of flavor room for your opponents losing control over their creatures. I think we will eventually see the day when Magic's rules support uncontrolled permanents; this might not be the best time to break out that idea, but it would fall under green. Functionally, an uncontrolled permanent is not much different from one that is under Arrest, so we could give green that kind of spot removal. It did already get Utopia Vow, though, so we might need to do something more radically different.
What about unblockability? It already has cards like Rhox and Thorn Elemental.
White definitely needs to get something involving black or red style drawbacks. When white gets very big creatures now, they are usually at the very top of the curve....cards like Wooly Razorback, Stoic Ephemera and Sunweb all have very white drawbacks and are still pretty unusual. But white can share in black's monomania if it is in the service of some higher ideal and not personal ambition. How about:
Vengeful God - 2W
Creature - Spirit
Trample
Whenever Vengeful God is dealt damage, sacrifice a permanent for each 1 damage dealt to it. Be careful what you pray for.
5/5
and
Quetzalcoatl - W
Legendary Creature - Spirit
Flying
When Quetzalcoatl comes into play, you can't play spells this turn. Add WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW to your mana pool.
6/6
I think we are planeshifting 5 cards (1 to each color) to demonstrate the ability we have chosen for each, then designing 5 new cards that have that ability.
And, like AoK, I was thinking that the "credit" mechanic from the pacts would be great for red. But because it only appeared as part of a cycle where every color got a card, it might not be flavorful enough.
I think Modular would be perfect for Green. Rosewater and Co. mentioned it when they were talking about Graft, so it would fit in perfectly from a mechanical standpoint. Flavorwise, the +1/+1 counters could represent a carapace or shell. "Chelonic" replaces "Arcbound," but any green creature can wear the armor once the Chelonic creature dies.
This was my first suggestion for blue, so I'm on board with that idea.
We are getting closer to the deadline. We need to just pick something that makes sense in color and that we can get across flavor-wise. Power-level and metagame concerns are secondary. We still need to come up with most of the originals, so let's get to work.
If people prefer the two-headedness, here's a redo on my homunculus, as the first one would start multiplying too quickly. I was thinking of giving it haste like Bonded Fetch...thoughts?:
Twinning Homunculus - :1mana::symu::symu:
Creature - Homunculus (r)
Twinning Homunculus can't be blocked except by two or more creatures.
Whenever Twinning Homunculus deals combat damage to an opponent, put a token into play that is a copy of it.
1/1
For the green original, I was thinking about Burning Tree Shaman and whether there might be meat on the activated ability bone.
Animal Farm - 2GG
http://fantastic.library.cornell.edu/imagerecord_l.php?record=198
Enchantment
Your opponents may not play activated abilities of creatures they control. You may play activated abilities of creatures you don't control (as if you were their controller?).
I just found that Cornell archive of old fantasy images. Pretty interesting stuff, if not particularly useful.
I missed the first few minutes. Did they really not even do the traditional fade-in with Sherri's picture? That's crap.
JBL and Cole are pretending to break the fourth wall. They just made comments suggesting the news media's coverage of McMahon's death can't be trusted.
This is seriously a landmark event in television history.
That's exactly what I'm going for. I like the way the two-headedness and the doubling play off each other. Because you need two creatures to kill it in combat and you can get a lot of copies quickly, it can act as a finisher. But at the end of the day, they're just 1/1s.
My friend and I were wondering what would happen if someone in the WWE extended family actually died during this angle; it's incredible and incredibly sad that we found out so soon.
What's really not incredible is that the news of her death and Vince's "death" appear right next to each other on that page. I do see a lot of the Vince stories now say "presumed dead," though. Why there would be any doubt at this stage isn't clear.
As far as Arcadeus' suggestions, I think we should put some more thought into combat related abilities as blue is the least combat-oriented and none of the other colors are getting them (though red can use damage redirection in combat).
Can't block is related to unblockability, which blue does get. But it's also a fairly narrow ability that doesn't see much play. I like the suggestion of Raging River in that it's a splashy, cool card, but it's kind of a rules-text nightmare, and doesn't really interact with flying in a pro-blue way. Chaosphere, despite having my all time favorite flavor text, is an outright flying-hoser, so it doesn't really make sense.
But there are other variants of this that red gets which could be interesting. Blue got Siren's Call before red did. And then there's two-headed-ness ala Goblin War Drums:
Double Vision - 2U
Enchantment
Each creature you control can't be blocked except by two or more creatures.
Tog! Hit the one on the left! Your left! Your other left!
Other names: Mirror Image, Confuse, Obfuscate
Easy to illustrate. Works with blue's imagecrafting and illusions. Makes flying even harder to deal with. I'll try to mock up some originals that play off this, but I think it has potential.
Twinning Homunculus - 1UU
Creature - Illusion (r)
Twinning Homunculus can't be blocked except by two or more creatures.
Whenever Twinning Homunculus attacks, put a token into play tapped and attacking that is a copy of it.
1/1
(Nacatl War-Pride and Chronozoa have different wordings regarding token copies, but this is templated off them. Could this be worded to "put a tapped and attacking token copy of it into play"?)
Chris Offili, Andres Serrano, Damien Hirst, Nikos Kazantzakis/Martin Scorsese and Madonna would like a word with you.
Seriously though, you are correct in saying that video games have historically had a harder time getting the same protections as other forms of art. This has generally been due to video games being considered as being media for entertainment rather than expression, i.e. the content is largely irrelevant, as Grand Theft Auto is closer in form to checkers than Citizen Kane (I'm positive a judge made such an analogy in a first-amendment case regarding video games...if anyone can help me find it, I would be much appreciative).
Fortunately, the Church can't make that argument, as if it suggests that video games don't deserve the same protection as paintings in regards to content, it has to reconcile why it finds the games ostensibly irrelevant content so offensive. It really is, as you say, an unfamiliarity with the medium that drives this backlash.
The same thing happened with comic books with the Comics Code in the 1950's. But now that the people who make the laws are people who are familiar with the medium and it's potential for artistic expression (because they grew up with comic books), we can have comic book literature like Watchmen and Persopolis that would have been illegal a few decades ago.
That's the great thing about progressivism. Your ideological opponents die before you do.
I also like Dominate over Control Magic for green for the above reasons. And I also thought that Yavimaya Dryad would make a great black card. However, the planeshifts are primarily about flavor, so I think we should fine tune the names, and even the base card, to the art now that we have concepts mostly hammered out. The art can't be tangentially related to the mechanics we are shifted: they need to scream them.
I think we have clear, strong concepts for everything but blue, and we need to start suggesting art. I want to see anything and everything that looks even remotely like:
White: Lots of people being rounded-up and arrested, police state, draconian politicians, mass executions, fascism, people being stripped of their identities, the iron fist of the law
Black: Decomposing corpses in a landscape, swaths of death in otherwise flourishing forests, Cadaverous Bloom 2, a creature that does these things
Red: Reroute2, Goblin Flectomancer 2, lots of junk flying at a creature's head, swords bending backwards and pointing at their owners, fields that mangle weapons and armor
Green: an aristocrat going berserk/mutating, a psychedelic trance, vestiges of a ruined civilization, parasitic insects that use your body, green werewolves, revolt
As for blue, the idea of a scholarly blue mage physically reshaping/reusing his spells appeals to me, though we need to have something that connects to the graveyard visually. What do dead spells look like? Maybe a blue wizard magically ripping individual pages out lots of different old, tattered books in a big pile? It could be something even more abstract, like the 9th Sift.
It's pretty wild how important those details are. But even how copyright interacts with explicitly public spaces is by no means cut and dry. In the U.S., police can stop you from taking pictures of government buildings, bridges, subways, and other things that might be terrorism targets. There was also that bit of a controversy a few years ago in Chicago's Millennium Park, where park officials were stopping people from taking pictures of Cloud Gate (Anish Kapoor's sculpture). claiming that it would be a violation of Kapoor's intellectual property rights.
It turns out they were mostly stopping people who looked like professional photographers, under the assumption that they were more likely to profit from the reproduction of a likeness of the sculpture. Is Sony profiting from their reproduction of this Church? It's in a for-profit product, though you would be hard pressed to say that's why anyone would want to purchase the game.
I know that's not the thrust of the Church's argument, but it seems like it would be the only leg they have to stand on. Blasphemy laws might still be on the books in the U.K., but they aren't exactly enforced.
Flavor-wise, I think these are the strongest suggestions so far.
White
Removing/nullifying all copies of a card - excommunication, exile, banishment, (ethnic) cleansing, rule of law at all costs.
White is very interested in order, purity and control. All of the major fictional dystopias show societies that are super-white and maintain order by banning the existence of troublesome elements: 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, V for Vendetta, Harrison Bergeron, The Giver, etc.
I think this is a slam dunk. Black physically extracts ideas from crania, white sends in the Thought Police.
Blue
Destroy effects - Mental attack (brain explodes), natural forces (water), manipulation/mind control (forced sacrifice)
I think we should go with a non-physical form of destruction...telepathy, telekensis, etc. We also need to find a great/weird destroy spell to planeshift, one that already feels a little blue. If someone can concept that flavorfully, we can go from there.
Black
Terraforming - Spread of corruption, pestilence
The mirror-image of green...instead of life flourishing in the creature/spell's wake, it's consumed and perverted (see the end of Princess Mononoke). Black already gets a little of this with things like Nightcreep, but next to white, I think this is the strongest we have, flavor wise.
Red
Damage Redirection - Magnetism, machinery
This was my suggestion, so I obviously think it has potential. I think it works well with red's target-changing (look at the art for Reroute, as well as it's me-first mentality (we could make it more about the strongest redirecting damage to the sacrificial runt if people think this is too much like direct damage).
Green
Control Magic - Primitivism, devolution
This is also very strong, but it might be harder to find the appropriate art. a Jekyl->Hyde thing might be good. Were-creatures often got thrown into black because of their classic-horror connotations, but I think that's something that could work here (and we do have Werebear
This is by far my favorite suggestion for white, though I would call it Genocide to play up white's fascistic tendencies. I think black's gotten enough of "all copies" and the cards have been high-profile enough (Cranial Extraction, Extirpate, even Cabal Therapy), that shifting that ability to white would be grokable. And the flavor of white enforcing order by eradicating all traces of something it considers dangerous is awesome.
Black's "swampification" is pretty straightforward...spreading trail of corruption, etc.
Green's idea is also pretty straightforward...going wild, devolving...but it might be harder to find art that is really evocative of that.
Red's damage redirection could be done with magnetism, like in my examples. But it could also be done via steampunky contraptions ala Goblin Flectomancer. I'm open to suggestions.
There are a lot of ideas on the table for blue's destruction...from tsunami, to brain-explosions to mind control over the permanent's controller. I would definitely rather have a non-physical flavor, but at this point we should start concepting the actual planeshifted cards...they are only going to come across if we nail the name, art and flavortext.
I'm still not sold on white getting tutoring...it already tutors for lands and enchantments pretty regularly, and...I think we need something that is more obviously a departure from its usual strategies.
I realize that black gets the most tutoring, but without major additional costs/drawbacks, it seems too generic. I think that whatever we end up doing for White, it should involve paying life or saccing creatures, something white never does (but could be in the flavor of religious zealotry).
Red is hard, but I think it's the right idea to go back to its Wall of Stone days and do something defensive. Might damage redirection be better than just prevention? It fits in with the trickster theme with cards like Shunt, and often ends up looking like direct damage. In honor of the late Mr. Wizard, here's a magnetism-flavored Zealous Inquisitor
Polarity Elemental - 2R
Creature - Elemental (u)
1R: The next 1 damage that would be dealt to Polarity Elemental this turn is dealt to target creature instead.
Unless that sword's made out of wood, I wouldn't recommend swinging it right now.
2/2
and the new card
EDIT: I accidently made Stuffy Doll....new idea on its way.
EDIT2: Here we go
Homing Beacon - 1RR
Enchantment - Aura (r)
Enchant Creature
Flash
Whenever a creature you control would be dealt damage, that damage is dealt to enchanted creature instead.
If green had control magic style cards, the flavor would have to be opposite of brainwashing, as that's how blue does it. Green is about the wild and untamed, so there's plenty of flavor room for your opponents losing control over their creatures. I think we will eventually see the day when Magic's rules support uncontrolled permanents; this might not be the best time to break out that idea, but it would fall under green. Functionally, an uncontrolled permanent is not much different from one that is under Arrest, so we could give green that kind of spot removal. It did already get Utopia Vow, though, so we might need to do something more radically different.
What about unblockability? It already has cards like Rhox and Thorn Elemental.
White definitely needs to get something involving black or red style drawbacks. When white gets very big creatures now, they are usually at the very top of the curve....cards like Wooly Razorback, Stoic Ephemera and Sunweb all have very white drawbacks and are still pretty unusual. But white can share in black's monomania if it is in the service of some higher ideal and not personal ambition. How about:
Vengeful God - 2W
Creature - Spirit
Trample
Whenever Vengeful God is dealt damage, sacrifice a permanent for each 1 damage dealt to it.
Be careful what you pray for.
5/5
and
Quetzalcoatl - W
Legendary Creature - Spirit
Flying
When Quetzalcoatl comes into play, you can't play spells this turn. Add WWWWWWWWWWWWWWW to your mana pool.
6/6
And, like AoK, I was thinking that the "credit" mechanic from the pacts would be great for red. But because it only appeared as part of a cycle where every color got a card, it might not be flavorful enough.
I think Modular would be perfect for Green. Rosewater and Co. mentioned it when they were talking about Graft, so it would fit in perfectly from a mechanical standpoint. Flavorwise, the +1/+1 counters could represent a carapace or shell. "Chelonic" replaces "Arcbound," but any green creature can wear the armor once the Chelonic creature dies.