The Great Redesigner Search: The Design Test

About two years ago, I went on a reality show and my life changed forever.

Weekend Design Challenge 073120 - Vehicles

Hey Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

CCDD 073020 - Feather, Watch-Angel

This card started out as a "bottom-up" design. I wanted to see what a build-around card for mechanics like replicate or strive would look like, since those mechanics don't fit well in traditional spellslinger decks. I quickly realized that it needed a fairly minor reward to be balanced, and then it wouldn't be as exciting, so I went looking for ways to make it spicier. Things got out of hand from there...

CCDD 072820 - Dovin's Prerogative

Most high-profile "hate cards" target specific broken strategies: Relic of Progenitus for graveyards, Stony Silence for artifacts, Damping Sphere for storm, and so forth. A while back I thought about turning this around. If I could define what was "unreasonable" in a game of Magic, and target that, then maybe I could create the One Hate Card To Rule Them All. Here's what I came up with.

CCDD 072620 - Confront the Sorcerer

This semi-top-down design was a real pain to template. It ended up as an interesting variant on the "modal spell, but opponent chooses" idea.

CCDD 072220 - Flamekin Scout

There's nothing too groundbreaking about this design since we already have things like Generator Servant and Neheb, the Eternal, but I liked the idea of a creature that could act as a Pyretic Ritual via a saboteur ability. It's a common, so it doesn't need to do anything too fancy anyway.

Impact Tremors

My defining guideline for game design is impact. Broadly speaking, impact is how much a game sticks with you: How much you remember a game after you played it ("that was a good game" versus "I blew up an alien spaceship with my kicks"), how excited it makes you, and how much you want to tell the stories of the game to your friends. Well-designed games don't necessarily need impact, but a good game without impact is dry, inaccessible, and hard to pitch to your gaming group. I make sure that every game I design is as impactful as possible.

Until now, my writing on impact has focused on general/"hobby" games because my game company's blog is aimed at a general audience who might not know that much about Magic. This article views impact through the lens of Magic design: What makes individual cards, and Magic as a whole, impactful, and defining guidelines for creating more impactful cards.

Note: Impact is a subjective topic, so your experience with what cards you find memorable may differ from mine. I hope this article provides you with something even if you disagree with the examples.