Friday, August 28, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 082815—Jungshan

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, August 27, 2015

CCDD 082715—Captolux Kalakara, The Floating City & Weekend Getaway

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/27/2015 - Here are three top-down designs featuring some indian/far eastern steampunk art I could find. None of these designs is particularly great, nor remotely evocative of Kaladesh's likely mechanics, but it's a spark.

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

CCDD 082615—Attenuate

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/26/2015 - How about half a Negate?

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge Review 082115—Claudia Sutton

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card for this art.

Tesla: Last Call for Kaladesh

Last week, we discussed possibly having Tesla set on Kaladesh, a new plane which debuted in Magic Origins. Though a majority of people seemed to be in agreement that Kaladesh was a good fit for Tesla, it wasn't near universal, and I'd like more people to chime in with their thoughts. In addition, there were some compelling counterarguments which I felt deserved more responses. For these reasons, I've decided to extend the discussion to this week as well, to give more time for more of the Artisans community to share their thoughts with us, and to gather more responses to the arguments already presented.

Note that I've disabled comments for this week's article - I'd like us to continue the discussion in the comments of last week's article, so we can keep everything in one place, and directly address people's points.

Monday, August 24, 2015

CCDD 082415—Uproot Memory

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/24/2015 - A white-blue common mill card.

The inspiration was the realization that mill decks care more about life gain than most other decks.

Friday, August 21, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 082115—Claudia Sutton

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.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

CCDD 081915—Sword Captain

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/19/2015 - Still behind. Here's an attempt at a common Crusader of Odric.

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

CCDD 081815—Sphere of Seeing

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/18/2015 - Busy now. WAC Review will have to wait a day or so. In the meantime, here's a simple design I like.

Monday, August 17, 2015

Tesla: The Dish on Kaladesh

Lately, we've been focusing on designing mechanics and finding themes for Tesla, building up a toolbox and refining our vision for when we move from exploratory design to individual card design. This week, I'd like to zoom out from mechanics, and look at an even bigger picture than Tesla's themes - this week, let's look at the setting of Tesla.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 081415—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, August 13, 2015

CCDD 081315—Arms of Justice

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/13/2015 - Arms of Justice looks to reprise Gaze of Justice without flashback. It still expresses the idea that multiple creatures are working together to bring a wanted criminal to justice, but in a slightly different way that will sometimes be better and sometimes worse.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Tesla: Do-It-Yourself Progress

A while back, we all tried to make mechanics for Tesla that captured the themes of player progress. I think we made some pretty great mechanics last time, and this week, I'd like to highlight a few of them and discuss what ideas they bring to the table that we could perhaps explore further.

CCDD 081115—Cano Hornet

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/11/2015 - A simple Memnite / Ornithopter hybrid for a block set on Kaladesh.

Monday, August 10, 2015

CCDD 081015—Earthen Retainer

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/10/2015 - Here you go, Melvin. Now be nice and share with Johnny.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Weekend Art Challenge 080715—Unused Origins Art

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, August 6, 2015

Zeffrikommons, Part 3: Cyclical Behavior

In the Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogues I attend, during Rosh Hashanah prayers, someone stands next to the person leading the prayers and, at specific times during the services, sounds a shofar. A shofar is a hollowed-out ram's horn akin to a single-note trumpet. It is used briefly at various points during the primary services on Rosh Hashanah, but at the end of the services, a long series of note-patterns is sounded, roughly equal in length to all the other times the shofar was sounded earlier in the services.

CCDD 080515—Splice

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/5/2015 - If splice returns, it'll be splice onto sorcery/instant. But getting away from the arcane subtype wasn't the only problem with splice. Another deal-breaker is that adding an effect to a card (as opposed to simply triggering the effect) serves no purpose despite bearing a high cost to complexity. So for splice to return, the cards that use it will have to make the fact that we're adding this text to that spell relevant. Evermind is the only existing splice spell that does this. Here are all the other angles of attack I thought of.

Wednesday, August 5, 2015

CCDD 080515—Master

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/5/2015 - What if there were a set of spells that you learned from, that let you experiment with different combinations of spell effects, like a scientist?

Master is splice-onto-instants/sorceries from graveyard instead of hand (minus the meaningless text grafting). A modular form of improve. Each of these cards in your gy becomes an optional kicker effect for new spells you cast.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Zeffrikomons, Part 2: White Creatures and Spells

Hi Artisans. I'm still doing a bunch of Zeffrikar work behind the scenes, and I'm hoping to have the final list of skeleton commons ready to go before Battle for Zendikar spoiler season really starts. I haven't had a lot of time to write up much as far as the development goes, but I have most of my common pool completed, except for a few segments I wanted to write about separately. This week I'll be starting to piece together the skeleton for the white commons. Today I'm posting the white cards I have so far, and I'll follow up with some other materials and exercises I want to consider before the design skeleton starts in earnest.

CCDD 080315—Irrefutable Request

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/3/2015 - Using Miming Slime tech to differentiate black's kill-and-reanimate from blue's Mind Control. Also making an expensive piece of removal that will still excite players, at least in Limited.