#polukranos

Polukranos, World Eater

Always glad to hear when people enjoy the content I make, thank you. As for Polukranos, that’s a good question. When designing creatures, especially creatures from Magic, it can get tricky when you’re working with a popular tribe that all work in the same way (hydras and minotaurs are a great example). It’s sort of a balancing act between making sure the creature has everything people expect from that tribe, but also has enough to differentiate it from others like it.

In the case of Poulkranos, as you pointed out, it doesn’t appear to have anything that sets it out, but in fact, it actually does! If you see its Multiple Heads feature, you may be tempted to just skim over it since you know that ability from other hydras. But if you look closely, Polukranos actually has a combination of Multiple Heads and Monstrosity– I combined them so they would take less room on the statblock, and because Polukranos the card already has a version of Monstrosity that works slightly different than other creatures. 

Daily Doodle: Polukranos

This was a big one! I spent maybe 3-4 hours on this, so I have made sure to include a few progress pictures as well. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to draw, and although this one was the most recent, time consuming, and niche, it is the one I decided to go with.

I think it turned out really well! It was kind of an odd subject to draw, and without the textbox, you can very easily see how awkwardly Polukranos is knotted up. I was also caught in this awkward duality of having too much and too little detail. The necks take up a lot of space, but are primarily big blank areas. I tried to fix this by having heads everywhere, but that lead to the awkward scrunching pose.

Anyway, my motivation for this is that I have been getting very into Magic: The Gathering lately. I decided to buy a lot of the cards I use online and even splurged to get the alternate art styles for most of them, but my baby Polukranos didn't appear to have an alternate art!

I wanted to match the art styles of the cards that are going to end up in the deck, but I still have a long way to go before I am anywhere near that level of skill. I think making my own card was a huge project in its own regard, so this is a major success in a lot of ways.