At What Price Variance?

Unpopular opinion: Mana screw is bad.

The number of non-games that Magic’s core system regularly produces would seem to indicate that most players would get frustrated with the game and leave. Yet, Magic has one of the highest player retention rates of any game invented in the past 50 years. Why is that?

CCDD 050719 - Avatar of Order

I was thinking about oozes, like you do, and how about they fit nicely into almost every color. Blue plays up their fluidity and ooziness, black and green represent their relentless hungry nature and mindless predator theme, and red plays up their chaotic nature. But white doesn't really make sense for an ooze. White is the color of order, of structure, something antithetical to being an ooze.

Unless you're a gelatinous cube.

CCDD 050619 - Reclaiming Namespace (Blaze of Glory)

A pet project of many amateur (and professional) designers is to ruminate on what Alpha would look like if it were being designed today for the first time. It's definitely a fun exercise, but honestly, if you look at the cards in Alpha, so many of them are just so near perfect. They legitimately set the game up to last over 25 years, and the quality shows.

Announcement: Mermay 2019

Just wanted to put out here that, similar to my annual Goblin Game, I'm running a month long MerMay Merfolk Game over on Twitter during May. Here's where you can find it:

https://twitter.com/zefferal/status/1123616242999484416

That's it. CCDDs return tomorrow.

CCDD 043019 - Llanowar and Storm Fleet Spellbooks

So back when I was doing by birthday cards, Juliet challenged me to make a spellbook equipment. This is what I came up with:

Weekend Design Challenge 042619 - Black Spring

Hello hello Artisans! After something of a hiatus, I think we're ready to start doing weekend design challenges again. Click through to see this weekend's design parameters. With those as your guidelines, design one (1) custom magic card. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs, and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. If I have time over the course of next week, I will try to offer some of my own feedback.

CCDD 042519 - Charismatic and Vengeful Leaders

So a project I've been working on (off and on) is an X-Men/Kaladesh fanfic mashup non-set. Currently, I'm trying to crank out a handful of mechanics and keywords to give some better focus to my commons, and one of the ones I'm tinkering with is this.