Aaron's Random Card Comment of the Day #19, 10/21/10
There is a bit of rambling I could do about how ill-equipped the design toolbox of Portal: Three Kindgoms was to attempt tackling a top-down set of such magnitude, but that doesn’t really apply to this card. Southern Elephant is a fine “design” in as much as it is as mundane as the creature it is representing.
Vanillas with interesting numbers do represent one of the finite—and most well-defined—areas of Magic design, so it always blows me away when we find one that hasn’t existed before. It took a very long time for a 
4/3 to be put into a “real” set—Champions of Kamigawa’s Order of the Sacred Bell, a full fifteen years after Dr. Garfield clearly illustrated that green got better than Hill Giant at common on Day One (with War Mammoth).
The inverse of the Order—the Blanchwood Treefolk to its Spined Wu... (see all)
Posted By:
Aaron_Forsythe
(10/21/2010 11:33:01 AM)
I'm betting on an Elephant sub-theme in Masters Edition 4.. with this one, the Arabian Nights one, Elephant Graveyard, and maybe something else I'm forgetting. Guess I'll find out in two months.
Posted By:
GainsBanding
(10/22/2010 2:53:04 AM)
My best friend actually has a little English P3K, I dunno how he got it. But I definitely agree that there should be more availability of the set, as it had some real gems in it.
Posted By:
willpell
(6/5/2011 4:46:46 AM)
It's so frustrating that the Portal 3K cards are so limited and hard to get in the US or even in English for that matter!
Sound off if you want to see them made available somewhere other than MTGO for us US players!
Posted By:
ong312
(6/3/2011 1:19:40 AM)
"There is a bit of rambling I could do about how ill-equipped the design toolbox of Portal: Three Kindgoms was to attempt tackling a top-down set of such magnitude" -Mr. Forsythe
P3K was such a labor of love and SO AWESOME with it's limited design toolbox, it seems like it should be studied and emulated. That kind of coherent storytelling, and even its historical setting, with the top-down balance and variety it had despite its simplicity is something the rest of the game has never approached. It could be rejiggered into a whole block...
Posted By:
BegleOne
(6/7/2011 8:55:07 PM)
that's not very northern
Posted By:
DaaNz
(3/23/2009 5:41:47 AM)
By Green standards this is terrible. It was probably trying to be a P3K War Mammoth, but an extra point of toughness (encouraging it to block, not attack) doesn't make up for losing trample, and even if it did, Mammoth is pretty marginal itself.
Posted By:
jeff-heikkinen
(4/12/2010 12:39:43 PM)
But to me a non-trampling elephant is crap. Elephants trample, they virtually cannot attack any other way. Same goes with rhinos.
Posted By:
tavaritz
(10/1/2011 4:19:05 AM)