The Midnight Hour is Close At Hand: Designing Around Amass

War of the Spark’s Limited format is strangely built, even accounting for the various deviations non-core sets take away from the “normal” Limited experience. Part of it, and the most visible part, is the huge number of planeswalkers, which requires planeswalker removal to be printed at common and makes Stealth Missioninto a kill spell. But a larger part of the puzzle is how Amass warped the environment into making a go-tall strategy reliant on a single token a decent value proposition every time.

Eternal Analysis 017—Shift

Shift is Eternal's suspend mechanic, simplified in some ways and… weird in others. Introduced in the sixth full set, Dark Frontier, along with Onslaught, and Twist.

Robin & BYO Draft

Whenever I go to reference this post, I have trouble finding it on GA… because that's not where it was. It was on CoolStuffInc. So I'm reposting this 8 year old article here. With the author credit returned. And edited for modern pronouns.

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.