Craterclaw Colossus Was Designed To Upset Me, Specifically

Hi there. My name is Red Pixlh3art, and I write for the Commander’s Herald. I’ve been playing Magic since around 2017, I fell in love with Commander first and have since gotten into limited and cube, and I’ve primarily been a Mardu player. My first “real” commander was Alesha, Who Smiles at Death after a brief affair with Tariel, Reckoner of Souls before my little pod of my high school friends and I actually learned how the game works and put together that maybe you shouldn’t spend seven mana on a 4-power creature that slowly steals creatures from opponents’ graveyards at random. 

Despite loving red as a color arguably the most (I mean, it is my name, and have you seen my hair?) I’ve never really gotten into the “me when I have artifacts” Commander deck subtheme, and have never made a deck around them. Most importantly, as a truly veteran Commander player, I hate green. I hate ramp, I hate how good a lot of green effects are for Commander specifically, and I especially hate how a lot of green commander staples that should have comparable versions in other colors just don’t, or only have versions of those staples that are strictly worse.

Craterclaw Colossus was a card that Wizards of the Coast designed to upset me, specifically and individually, and I am going to prove it.

Returning to my last point above: green has a bunch of fucking effects that it simply should not have access to based on what its color identity is supposed to be, and the colors that I like (most especially white) have cards that should theoretically be identical or even better, but they’re not, because I guess green needs it.

Exhibit A: Heroic Intervention.

Heroic Intervention gives your whole board hexproof and indestructible for a turn. You cast it when you control 20 dinosaurs and I have cast a boardwipe because if I don’t I will be mauled to death by 20 dinosaurs, and you get to say “Haha, idiot, I had two green mana open! You can’t touch my things, now time for my dinosaurs to stomp you to death!” It’s an extremely powerful spell. And sure, in a format where I can permanently exile a creature of arbitrary size for one white mana, it’s reasonable to want a way to protect them from that, even in green. You have Snakeskin Veil, Tyvar’s Stand, and all of those. But in my humble opinion, the tradeoff for being able to ramp into having 20 dinosaurs is that when I try to respond and kill all creatures (not just yours!), you should lose your 20 dinosaurs about it. You, the green player, already have more mana than everyone else and will therefore likely recover quickly, if not more quickly than everyone else. And if you dumped your whole hand doing it, then that’s your fault for dumping your whole hand.

But you can just play Heroic Intervention.

I, a white player, should have access to effects like that. After all, my guys are very small and very boardwipe-able, and white is The Fairness Color, it is The Protection Color. There are indeed plenty of monowhite effects that say “nuh-uh!” in response to someone killing your guy, like Gods Willing. Green has the functionally-similar Snakeskin Veil and Tyvar’s Stand, and unlike Gods Willing, which can let me slip past your blockers, those two spells can make your creature even bigger than it was when I tried to kill it.

So what’s white’s version of Heroic Intervention? Because, I mean, arguably, white of all colors is the one that should have a boardwide “no thank you” ready to go in case they get boardwiped. Indestructible is arguably most thematically white (see: Avacyn, Angel of Hope), so surely we, in The Protection Color, have an instant-speed response to boardwipes that is as good or better than Heroic Intervention.

We fucking don’t.

“But Miss Pixlh3art,” I hear you thinking, “you white players have Teferi’s Protection! That’s the best fucking one-turn protection spell in the game!” And we do, and it is. That’s why it’s a Game Changer in Commander, and why it’s like 35$ and hasn’t been reprinted that often.

Teferi’s Protection costs one more mana than Heroic Intervention. In a color that makes way less mana than green does.

Does it protect against more things? Absolutely. The “life total can’t change” clause beats combo players damaging you directly, the “creatures phase out” clause beats things like Blasphemous Edict or Sunfall that get past both hexproof and indestructible. But it still costs one more mana, and is, again, a Game Changer, putting it in Bracket 3 at minimum. Any Bracket 2 green player can run Heroic Intervention, and statistically, the number who do is every single fucking one of you. So I don’t think that there’s really an adequate comparison there.

Literally the single closest analog that white players have to Heroic Intervention (an effect that makes arguably zero sense for monogreen specifically to have, but whatever) is fucking Dawn’s Truce, from Bloomburrow. Same mana cost (colorshifted), instant speed, gives hexproof and indestructible to your whole board. But Dawn’s Truce still makes an opponent draw a card. That’s the cost that white players apparently have to pay in order to match what green players can do for free.

“Surely there’s a white effect just as good as Heroic Intervention–” there isn’t! Duty Beyond Death makes you sacrifice a creature and doesn’t give hexproof and it only saves creatures, not all permanents. Everybody Lives! saves your other opponents too, and presumably even protects the player casting the boardwipe from their own effect, which no green protection spell ever worries about. Flawless Maneuver doesn’t give hexproof and is one more mana if you don’t control your commander. Akroma’s Will is two more mana and is clearly meant to be used aggressively. Even when used defensively, it may give protection from all colors, but it doesn’t give hexproof, and there are a few stray colorless things you really don’t want to be targeted by.

Editor’s Note: If you doubt that final claim, please play against any colorless value player who controls Ugin, Eye of the Storms, and then tell us how Akroma’s Will totally protected you when Heroic Intervention would not have. Have fun getting your whole board exiled for the low, low price of playing mana rocks. A player in our pod has done this to us more than once.

And that’s not even the only place where green has an objectively better effect than white does! Don’t even get me fucking started on these two:

Give me a white Garruk’s Uprising, WotC, you fucking cowards. Give me a 3-mana enchantment in white that draws me a card each time I make a little guy. None of this “only once each turn” bullshit. If green players get “every time you play a monster, draw your next monster, also everything gets trample,” I really think it’s not too big of a fucking ask to make a white permanent that can draw us more than one card per turn while also not relying on our opponents. Sure, it’s “in the white color pie” to give equal stuff to opponents (Secret Rendezvous) or to only work when they do stuff (Trouble in Pairs) but consider: it’s not in green’s color pie to draw a shitload of cards in a single turn, yet here we fucking are.

Just fucking give me a white card draw engine that works more than once each turn and doesn’t rely on my opponent!

Editor’s Note: No, I am not referring to Mentor of the Meek. The only way that I, a white player, could have that kind of spare mana would be if I was also playing fucking green. I still love you, Mr. Mentor of the Meek, I have endless respect for you and for the work you’ve done for the community, but I simply cannot afford to pay two extra fucking mana per little guy to draw one card in this economy. 

So. With all of that definitely necessary context that was not at all just me venting out of the way, let’s talk about Craterhoof Behemoth.

Craterhoof is, like, the Commander “I would like to win the game now” card. It’s emblematic, it’s iconic. Until perhaps these past few years, where Commander has (at least in my specific and highly isolated meta which is clearly representative of everyone’s experience, obviously) become more about getting enough value to win or just assembling some way to combo off, Craterhoof Behemoth was arguably the way that people evaluated win conditions in Commander. It’s the town bicycle, everyone got around on the thing. And I’m not even using past tense to illustrate that Craterhoof is in any way past its prime–it’s not. I’m sure I’ll lose to it or a card just like it for many, many years to come. I’ve just seen lately, in my own personal meta, fewer cards like it that just win the game almost regardless of what theme you’re playing, and more decks whose win cons rely on one or two other pieces in their theme to really work.

Editor’s Note: Check up on your local theft player. Make sure they’re doing okay. Ask them about a cool, game-winning card they’ve stolen and resolved and actually won the game with, recently. They definitely won’t well up with tears or sigh with profound melancholy.

Craterhoof Behemoth is an amazing, powerful, and iconic win-the-game card. And in Reality Fracture, much like the similarly iconic Snapcaster Mage, it has a color-shifted version.

Close Scryfall right fucking now. Do not look at the card yet–I know your ass does not remember what it does without checking because you’ve been fried by Marvel and Hobbit preview season and only have a finite amount of memory for cards you haven’t actually touched yet. Let me get there. Give me my comedic timing, please.

So. If we were to color-shift Craterhoof to red, how would we do it? Well, I would argue that Craterhoof Behemoth, by the sheer virtue of its effects and how they work, really should have been a red card from the beginning, and still reads a hell of a lot more like a mono-red card than a mono-green one.

Return to the color pie. Green is about slow, steady progress that eventually becomes implacable and inevitable. Red, on the opposite end of that spectrum, hits fast and hard and burns out quickly. Green is about investing time and effort towards a late-game payoff, red is more about snorting a line and shouting “I’m gonna live forever!” and running at the speed of sound for 10-15 seconds before cracking your head on a telephone pole and going to the hospital.

With that contrast in mind, let’s look again at Craterhoof Behemoth:

Hey, wait a minute.

This fucking creature is only a late-game green payoff, only an example of green’s inevitability, because it costs eight mana. Everything fucking else about it is red! It has haste–the emblematic and iconic red keyword, that, notably, only makes your creature better than other creatures the turn that it’s played, and then it stops mattering. Unlike other iconic keywords like first strike and trample, haste in particular is really only a big benefit for one turn. First strike and trample and deathtouch and what-have-you stay on the card afterwards, where haste is only a benefit the turn the card comes down, at which point it may as well vanish from the text box.

Editor’s Note: We know about fucking Gingerbrute. We also know about Ognis, the Dragon’s Lash, and every other creature that specifically references the haste keyword in its text box. We do even know about the various hedgehogs from Sonic. Those are vanishingly non-existent edge cases, and you are not clever for pointing them out. We, however, are very funny and clever for pre-empting you with this hilariously minor “um actually” moment, and are not at all just being pedantic and calling it funny.

Red is all about short-term gains that vanish at the end step. That’s what impulse draw is, that’s why red has so many mana rituals, that’s why it has so many creatures like Ball Lightning–all of it is in service of that “risk it all for this one turn” fantasy.

So, uh, with that in mind… why the fuck is Craterhoof Behemoth a green card?

Think about it! It has haste–which, yes, green creatures are allowed to have haste and they frequently do have haste and that’s because green creatures are also allowed to have white’s trademark vigilance and black’s trademark deathtouch because WotC has long decided that green creatures can do whatever they want–which is, historically, red’s keyword. It has an effect that massively buffs your entire board, including itself, for one turn and one turn only. You play it and you either win that turn or it becomes a vanilla 5/5. 

You know. Like a red card would.

And now you’re thinking “well, Miss Pixlh3art, that’s cherrypicking. Obviously nobody ever plans to have a turn after resolving Craterhoof Behemoth, and it’s not designed to last any longer. Lots of good effects are temporary. Look at literally every instant and every sorcery.”

That’s true! Thank you, also, for calling me “Miss,” that’s very polite of you. Anyway, you’re correct that it’s not just mono-red that specifically has that “do a big thing once and never again” energy, there are plenty of white creatures that enter the battlefield and then do nothing afterwards. YouTuber Spice8Rack calls them I think “Dutch Vanilla” creatures and I don’t remember which video it said this in, and do not currently have the free time to listen back through all of its on-average four-hour videos to check. But, as a counterpoint, consider the following:

Red Pixlh3art’s Slightly Adjusted Craterhoof Behemoth: “Haste. When this creature attacks, each creature you control gets +X/+X and trample where X is equal to the number of creatures you control.”

I was generous enough to let the stupid thing keep haste, but I would argue it’d be more flavorful towards green’s whole vibe of inevitability if it didn’t have that. The creature is going to fucking get you, and this version of Craterhoof is arguably more terrifying because it can go again if you use something like a fog effect to buy yourself a turn, where the current version of Craterhoof loses to something like a kicked Orim’s Chant. But this Craterhoof lets me fucking stop you from giga-murdering me with a single copy of Terminate, where the original doesn’t give a fuck about dying once its trigger resolves.

You know. Like a red card would.

And before you try to tell me that Craterhoof needs haste or otherwise it would be dogshit:

Crackerhoof Behemoth Moonshaker Cavalry, in addition to being yet another fucking example of white having worse versions of green effects, does not have haste. It’s true that it also does its thing on ETB, but clearly WotC does not think that the creature itself needs to actually have haste in order to do its big “kill everybody and win the game” move. It doesn’t even give trample, which I would argue is much stronger than flying for an effect like this. The blue player with a Murmuring Mystic (or his upgraded form, the twink from Final Fantasy), is way scarier to a Moonshaker player than to a Craterhoof player. But this card still absolutely wins games all the time and it’s really not a big deal that they changed a couple of details that make the card a little worse.

I also think that the buff happening on ETB is much more white than it is green, because the truly diabolical white players will just flicker this motherfucker if you didn’t die on the first go-around. Green doesn’t have that option. It’s further proof that the original Craterhoof really is all or nothing.

So. With all of this context out of the way, showing you that the original Craterhoof Behemoth functionally a red card in terms of the way that its effect is written and designed, surely, the way that Wizards would color-shift Craterhoof into being a red creature would just be to make it cost 5RRR and change nothing else, right? After all, the card’s original design is so mechanically and flavorfully red, especially with the context of today’s more modern color pie philosophy, that the card doesn’t need changing, right? Snapcaster Mage to Stingcaster Mage barely required any changes. Sure, he lost flash and got haste, but flash is flavorfully blue and haste is flavorfully red, and the original Craterhoof already had haste. So it’s perfect, and they don’t need to change it besides making it red.

Right?

Right?

RIGHT???

Oh hey, it’s one mana cheaper. It’s an artifact creature, which, sure, because the original was natural, it makes sense the “opposite” version is artificial (even if Echoverse cards are not strictly “opposites” as much as they are “improvements according to Jace, who is probably wrong”), it… doesn’t buff toughness and instead only buffs power, which feels… a little insulting, but sure, and… hold on. I’m sorry.

ARTIFACTS??? Fucking ARTIFACTS???

Oh come the fuck on, you guys! What, only green win conditions are allowed to care about having creatures? Red decks can’t care about creatures for an effect that buffs creatures? What the actual fuck are we talking about???

Ahem. Pardon me. Allow me to explain.

Craterclaw Colossus (a name which, given the fact that the original was called “Craterhoof Behemoth,” proves my prior article correct that Reality Fracture really is Jace’s shitty fanfiction because wow is he bad at naming and renaming shit), in an attempt to be an homage to Craterhoof Behemoth, buffs a board full of creatures based not on the number of said creatures, like the original, but instead based on the entirely unrelated number of artifacts that you have.

Editor’s Note: We know about artifact creatures. Shut up. Even if you mostly play those, which already massively narrows this card’s scope in comparison to its predecessor, you have to admit that it is objectively worse to make a card want a high volume of two permanent types when you are altering an existing card that only wanted one.

I fucking hate this thing so much. What the hell do you mean that you told me you were going to give me “mono-red Craterhoof” and came back with “hey how many Treasure tokens do you have rn?” Fuck offffffff! I said at the beginning of this article that I do not and never have played “me when I diddle my artifacts,” which WotC apparently thinks is the only thing good, expensive red cards are allowed to care about! What happened to red being the contrast to methodical, careful blue wizards by being the wizard who focuses all of their power on throwing fucking lightning at you and not caring about whether they blow their hands off about it? Isn’t this color about aggression and recklessness? This is an objectively aggressive card (and wow it sure is reckless by not buffing toughness for some fucking reason, heavens forfend a red player be able to overcome blockers with first strike), sure, but the fact that it for some reason cares about how many stupid rocks you have instead of how many dudes you’ve brought to come kill everyone is just so weird to me.

Like, sorry, one second–Gavin? Hey, Gavin. I know that you definitely read the Commander’s Herald and are definitely definitely still reading this long and objectively insane article. It seems like you all have it in your heads that red, as a color, really really loves artifacts, and I promise you, from the bottom of my soul: every fucking color loves artifacts. Blue loves artifacts. White loves artifacts, especially when they’re tokens, because white loves tokens. Black has plenty of artifacts and even artifact synergy pieces. Even green has insanely good artifacts like The Great Henge despite being the single color in the game that should be the most ontologically opposed to liking artifacts. Artifacts are not so very tied to one color that that color is not accurately fulfilling its identity unless it cares about artifacts, okay? I am a red player and I generally do not seek out artifact synergies. I would like for it not to feel illegal that I both play the color red and also like creatures specifically. Okay? Okay.

So, yeah, for the apparently astronomical improvement of costing seven mana instead of eight, this card (in comparison to Craterhoof, in the context of Commander, etc. etc., disclaimer disclaimer) just needs to fucking suck ass! We’re so sorry, it wouldn’t be true to red’s color identity if we let it have a good card with no caveats. Only green is allowed to have good cards in Commander, you stupid fucking red player! If you wanted red cards to be good you should have been playing Standard during Bloomburrow!

I truly do not fucking understand why they did this. Even Moonshaker Cavalry, an obvious reference to Craterhoof but not so obvious that it is an explicit, in-story remake of it, still understood that Craterhoof’s effect to buff creatures by having creatures is actually fine at eight mana. But rather than doing that, they tinkered with this a little too much to make it ~different~ and prove that Jace is totally original and not just changing mana symbols and calling it a day, I’m so sorry to say it: this card is not actually a side-graded Craterhoof Behemoth.

Why?

Because it’s actually just a downgraded version of this fucking thing:

Hey, remember this fucking thing from EoE Commander? I sure do, because one of my roommates has a barely altered Inspirit precon and it regularly builds unbreakable boards of fuckass artifacts. It beats my hand-crafted decks fairly often, mainly because a bitch can only play the one copy of Vandalblast.

Craterclaw Colossus is a shittier version of Depthshaker Titan in every single way. Depthshaker is a much stronger out-of-nowhere red game-ender because, unlike Craterhoof, it doesn’t need you to control many creatures at all. A player with 10 creatures is going to get boardwiped objectively more often than a player with 10 Food tokens, and Depthshaker can make those Food tokens into hasty trampling 6/6s the turn it comes down, where stupid Craterclaw needs both a board of at least a decent number of creatures and the Food tokens. Depthshaker is way easier to pull off, way less obvious the turn before it happens, and it even commits harder to red’s fantasy of having an all-or-nothing turn because it fucking sacrifices the artifacts it animated at the end of turn. It also animates all your artifacts, so it eats up your value pieces, your mana rocks, and even the artifact lands that you’re for sure playing because you’re a fucking artifacts player.

Depthshaker Titan not only commits way harder to the bit than Craterclaw, it’s harder to stop while someone’s building up the board for it because we can all only play one copy of Vandalblast, where your local Angels player presumably runs 10 creature boardwipes. It also actually does something later on if your opponents Fog you or whatever, because it and the other 10 artifact creatures you still control (which you do, because you’re a fucking artifacts player) still have trample and melee the turn after. It’s got the same mana value but is more symbol-agnostic, has the same power and toughness, and actually buffs the rest of your board’s toughness. It also currently costs less than a fucking dollar, which I sincerely doubt Craterclaw will even after it comes out.

And the worst part of all of this is that Depthshaker Titan itself is just red’s shittier version of this stupid thing:

Because Wizards of the Coast hates Mardu players and only lets us have good cards when the blue and/or green players have an objectively better version of it first. 

All of this, dear reader, is why I know someone at Wizards designed this stupid fucking thing to upset me specifically: they know I’m a green-hating red player who doesn’t build artifact decks, so they took iconic and powerful green wincon that should have been a red card, Craterhoof Behemoth, and color-shifted it into red, but made it care about the card type I find most annoying just to make sure I would never play it. And they made it worse than the original in every way except for mana cost (the thing green specifically is least impacted by) just to pour salt in the wound.

So, all of this is to say, WotC, are you fucking listening in on my Commander games? I made the joke about Gavin earlier, but like. Did you actually fucking make this card to upset me? Me, Red Pixlh3art, and presumably no one else on the planet? Why in the world did you change this specific color-shifted card so much and also do it in the way that would most upset me, specifically? What did I fucking do to you, other than write a solid half-dozen parody articles that very harshly criticize your CEO?

Oh, wait a second–I just read that back, and I, um… well. That’s… fair, I suppose.

Here, how about this? Since Reality Fracture isn’t done previewing yet, let’s make a deal: you give me Elspeth’s Uprising and Pyretic Intervention, and I promise, I’ll never relentlessly dunk on Chris Cocks ever again.