Let’s follow up the previous article with something a little bit different than what we’ve done with this feature in the past. Artifacts in Magic the Gathering aren’t just limited to pieces of equipment or other types of devices. There exist an entire class of creatures that are also artifacts. So let’s take a stab at turning one of these artifact creatures into an NPC for DMs to include in their 5e games, either as an ally or adversary for their PCs.
The Adaptive Automaton first appeared in 2012 as part of that years base set. It is an artifact creature that also has the construct type. It’s a 2/2 creature for 3 mana of any color and when it enters the battlefield, you choose another creature type. The Automaton gains that type as well and grants other creatures of that creature type +1/+1 and thus can be a fairly cost effective way of pumping up the power and toughness of a good amount of your board if you’ve built it around a certain theme like “elves” or “soldiers.”
Looking at this card, there’s again a lot of mechanics that won’t directly translate over to D&D mechanics. But I think there are a number of things that we can do to capture the feel of the creature in 5e mechanics. The fact that it’s a construct is clear from the name, so we can start with a lot of a golem’s abilities, resistances, and condition immunities. But the more interesting part of the creature comes from the “adaptive” portion of the name. Instead of just assigning the creature a number of individual resistances, I decided to let it gain resistance to the types of damage that it was taking, but also giving clever PCs a chance to overwhelm this adaptive armor.
Furthermore, I decided to give the creature the ability to change the damage type of its natural attack as a bonus action in order to let it take advantage of any weaknesses its opponents have (or more likely, get around their resistances). These two abilities are the highlights of the stat block as far as I’m concerned, and I think that several of these creatures could make for a very interesting encounter as the PCs work to find away around these creature’s resistances.
So there you have the first stab at turning a magic card into a full-on stat block. How do you think I did? Are there any other creatures (artifacts or otherwise) that you think would make for a great encounter? Let me know below.
Ben Erickson
