Friday, January 30, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 013015—GuthrieArtwork

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, January 29, 2015

CCDD 012915: Fyrnh, All-Consuming and Woll, Caller of Seasons

Today I'm wrapping up discussion of the nephilim. Click through to see the final two cards in the cycle.

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Tesla: Moore's Law

Today we continue our look at how Tesla can mechanically convey its progress theme. Talking about Iteration got a few balls in the air and after discussing Experience last week I wanted to take a look at the other side of the coin: Nich Grayson's Engineer.

CCDD 012815: Ashtol, the Lingering Hate

Welcome back to Nephilim Week, artisans. Today's four-colored horror brings back one of my favorite keywords.

Monday, January 26, 2015

CCDD 012615 - Thief of the Never-Was

Good morning, Artisans. Today's CCDD is the first in a cycle that I'll be posting/discussing this week.

Friday, January 23, 2015

Weekend Design Challenge 012315—Dragons of Tarkir mechanic

Weekend Design Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's challenge and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, January 22, 2015

CCDD 012215—Vengeance Howler

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/22/2015 - Vengeance Howler is mostly a top-down design, meant to express red's rage and grief at the loss of its comrades. While it fits naturally into an aggro deck, it can also be used to dissuade an opponent from storming in when you've got a lot of little dudes on defense.

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Tesla: Experience the Magic

We've been looking at mechanical space Tesla can use to hit its progress theme. The key points being:

  • Fun to play with and against
  • Printable on multiple commons under NWO
  • Improvement over time
  • Continued progression through a number of states
  • Encourages new playstyles and decks

Last week Jay proposed we look at another bit of the Chroma design space for Experience.

CCDD 012115—Titanic Impact

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/21/2015 - Bam!

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

CCDD 012015—Skilled Madcap

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/20/2015 - Red needs more evasion? It's got a pretty nice piece of very on-color evasion that we just don't use very often. We should use it more often.

Friday, January 16, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 011615—Ciameth (Griffons)

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Remaking Magic: A Magic Design Podcast

Anyone interested in listening to a podcast dedicated to Magic Design
needs to check out Reuben Covington and Dan Felder's Remaking Magic.

Here's their latest episode.

Here's their first.

CCDD 011515—Double & Poly Spider

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/15/2015 - Double Spider is tall.
Poly Spider is just big.

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Tesla: Iteration Again

In our last few looks at Tesla we've been considering ways for players to construct new artifacts. But that question is just one piece of our larger goal of building a set around the theme of progress.

Back in our last playtest we were considering another mechanical expression of progress dubbed, well, Progress 2.0. Today I want to take another look at that and discuss some of its high points and pitfalls.

CCDD 011415—Loan

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/14/2015 - I'm not sure loan has a ton of design space. Probably a bit less than phyrexian mana (since we'll probably only put it in a few colors) and less than delve (since the life loss can add up and we just don't want too many out there), but as a down-payment mechanic like morph and echo, I think it has at least one set's potential.

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Monday, January 12, 2015

CCDD 011215—Spy

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/12/2015 - How has their not been a cross between Divination and Curiosity?

Friday, January 9, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 010915—Fate Reforged

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

CCDD 010815—Phyrexian Grappler

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/8/2015 - Phyrexian Grappler doesn't have to be an artifact, or green, necessarily, but something about this effect just felt Phyrexian to me and this is how it came out.

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

CCDD 010715—Unquenchable Spark

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/7/2015 - I was reading Latest Developments and Sam was talking about giving red more resilient threats to help it support an archetype other than aggro-burn. The phoenix is an awesome creature and I hope they continue to make a couple every year, but it's a problem that red's two most iconic creatures both always have flying.

Is there anywhere else red could justify resilience/recursion?

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

CCDD 010615—Corelink

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/6/2015 - Like auras, and with good reason, equipment doesn't tap. Players tend to tap and untap everything attached to a creature with that creature and so tracking the actual tapped state of equipment independently of the equipped creature is awkward and could cause misplays.

But I really wanted to see if I could make a geared equipment, so I gave the creature vigilance, which means it won't be tapping at all (unless it has a tap ability, but you'll soon see you want to be attacking with it.)

Monday, January 5, 2015

Friday, January 2, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 010215—Dragon

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.