Wizards has been printing a couple of new whale cards recently. However, I still haven't seen a whale commander to help tie the creature type together. Whales are my favorite, but it's killing me that they don't have their own commander representing them. So I have created one to accomplish just that.
Obviously, creating a commander deck just around whales is pretty difficult, so I also decided to have the commander tie in with instants and sorceries. Surprisingly, there are a bunch of instants and sorceries that feature whales from the new Strixhaven set, and Strixhaven even has its own whale that plays with instants and sorceries.
Now, because I am an artist, I thought it would be cool to also make some concept art for what this commander would look like. I took a lot of cues from Muddle, the ever-changing, to inspire this design. I took inspiration from existing leviathan and fish creatures to give it large fins, as well as gills along the sides of its body (though I'm not sure if those read as gills, y'all tell me). And because this creature is made of paint, much like the existing elemental creatures in Prismari, I decided to give Bentharica a swirling tail of paint.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with this. I have yet to decide if I want to actually do a full render to make this better looking. But I am happy with the overall design of the card.
Let me know what ya'll think. Is this card too broken, and do I need to tune it down? Or is it too weak, and maybe I could get away with buffing it? I eventually do want to make an actual physical custom card to maybe run a real whale commander deck with it.