Interestingly, in the original pitch by Michael Ryan and myself, the crew stayed on Mercadia for the entire block, and the second set was a murder mystery built around who killed Starke. We were going to weave clues through the names, art, and flavor text and have a contest to figure out who killed him. The answer was going to be Volrath disguised as Tahngarth. (In our version of the story, the audience learns Volrath is there long before the crew does—Volrath had a lot more to do in our version). Many things changed, including who Volrath was disguised as.

In the revamped version of the story, after Volrath kills Starke and unmasks himself, he returns to Rath where he ends up getting killed. That meant if we wanted to represent him as a card, we had to do it in Nemesis. As a character, Volrath is blue-black, but Nemesis had no multicolor cards in it, so we had to do him as either mono-blue or mono-black. We had done numerous Shapeshifters in blue, but never in black, so we thought it would make for a more novel design. (Note that the card was not originally a Shapeshifter in creature type because, at the time, legendary creatures were creature type Legend.)

The challenge to the design was to create a mono-black creature that felt like a Shapeshifter. We ended up designing a card that allowed you to discard a creature card to temporarily change size. This is one of the Weatherlight crew designs that I'm unhappy with (although not the most unhappy, we'll get to that one). While it did capture a Shapeshifter feel, it didn't really capture the cleverness of Volrath. One of these days, I'd love to redesign him as the clever blue-black Shapeshifter he was supposed to be.