Designing Suvnica, Week 4: Lessons Learned

You guys are seriously prolific designers. Week 3 doubled the size of the Suvnica card file, moving from 70 to 144 cards. 74 cards is a lot to process and review. I'm in the middle of writing up the card reviews, but it may be a little while longer before they're ready. In the meantime, I wanted to get this week's challenge posted so we can try to double the size of the card file again. Exponential growth FTW!

Weekend Art Challenge Review 051713—StormOwlArt

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 051713—StormOwlArt

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

CCDD 051613—Sliver President

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/16/2013 - What if the newly enlightened slivers, with their humanoid shapes and their new-fangled adoption of local hives instead of one universal hive evolved one step further and started electing presidents or allowing non-slivers to join their ranks?

CCDD 051513—Focus

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/15/2013 - Yesterday I introduced Twin, which is a neat card-sink mechanic, but it is limited in scope because it only doubles effects, and not everything can be doubled. Today, I share Focus, which is basically the same idea but with a more flexible execution. That costs us some consistency (and thus identity) as well as some elegance, but I suspect it's worth it.

Take a look:

The New Sliver Art is Better...

... or at least, it's better at doing what Magic art should do.

Like most of you, I was horrified when I saw the art for the new slivers. The originals felt so deliciously alien and menacing; how could they replace them with these goofy dreadlocked humanoids? But when I sat down and actually compared the art straight across, I realized that the new style made the creatures' abilities clearer. Much clearer.

Designing Suvnica, Week 3: Birth, School, Work, Death

(5/16 Update: Something went kahblewy when I tried to check in on the blog from my phone this evening, and this page reverted to a very old draft. I'm reconstructing it from my RSS feed, and I'm hoping that the comments and the post stayed intact. If you see that your comment was lost, please repost.)
Alright. Four guilds down, six to go. Before we talk this week's guilds though, I wanted to start discussing something that came up in last week's design challenge.

So far, everyone has been pretty good about designing across different rarities. Out of the 70 cards sitting in the Suvnica file on my computer so far, we have about 25 commons, another 25 uncommons, 16 rares and 4 mythics. While a few of the submitted commons should probably be bumped up to uncommon, by and large everyone has been doing a phenomenal job with them.