Weekend Art Challenge Review 092515—ironshod

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design an uncommon enchantment or sorcery card for this illustration. Bonus points for expressing 'punk' and/or 'kinship' (not the keyword). 
 

CCDD 092915—Determined Challenger

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/29/2015 - Determined Challenger will hit one of your creatures. Do you want to choose or shall I?

CCDD 092815—Fell Usurper

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/28/2015 - Fell Usurper takes the ambition of Abyssal Persecutor a bit further, and throws in a dash of Karn Liberated shenanigans.

Weekend Art Challenge 092515—ironshod

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.

CCDD 092415—Traveling Companion

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/24/2015 - Traveling Companion is a bit like Hamlet Captain or Wild Beastmaster, boosting another attacker for free, but risking itself in the process. A much simpler Druid's Familiar; less powerful but more attractively costed. A more daring Kithkin Daggerdare.

CCDD 092315—Gut Reaction

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/23/2015 - Gut Reaction is a red counterspell in the same style as Driven Ransacking. Okay, so it never counters a spell, but it is purely reactionary. It's more about exploring red's response to other wizards' magic. Red doesn't know how to undo what they've done, but it can react quickly: Sometimes cleverly and otherwise violently.

Tesla: Our Refinery

Hello again, everybody! Last time, we began the task of finding the candidate mechanics for Tesla, using the expectations of Kaladesh to narrow our search. Now our goal is to both refine these mechanics further, and begin generating commons for the mechanics that we can use for playtesting, which will be coming soon!

Without further ado, here's our list of candidate mechanics:

CCDD 092215—Hire/Hidden Informant

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/22/2015 - Hidden Informant was an experiment in top-down design that showed negative results. That's not a failed experiment, though, because that data led to something positive.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 091815—NightsongWS

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card for this illustration. Bonus points for telling a story.

Remember that you can click to see an image at full-size, and shift-click to open it in a new window.

Weekend Art Challenge 091815—NightsongWS

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.

CCDD 091715—Gorgoid Howler

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/17/2015 - This design came from the art. It does raise an interesting question of how much we can mess with races. I would balk to see an elf beast, but perhaps we can define gorgonism in Magic (or even just on one plane) as a condition that can affect more than just humanoid or sentient beings. And in that model, deathtouch needn't be a foregone conclusion. The end result is expanding a minor tribe, and in new directions. But does it go too far?

CCDD 091615—Relentless Seach & Driven Ransacking

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/16/2015 - Two attempts at red tutors.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 091115—Wen Juinn Png

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card for one or both of these illustrations, or two cards with each. If your submission includes multiple text boxes, they must be identical except for numbers and up to one word.

Remember that you can click to see an image at full-size, and shift-click to open it in a new window.

CCDD 091415—Whispers of Treachery

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/14/2015 - A Mind Control variant that's black in theme, though not particularly black mechanically.

Weekend Art Challenge 091115—Wen Juinn Png

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.

Tesla: Value of Expectation

This article is WotC safe.

Last week, we introduced everyone to the plane of Tesla, Kaladesh, a new plane which debuted in Magic Origins. We also discussed the topic of expectations and the roles they fill in designing a set, and began brainstorming what Kaladesh brings to mind.

This week, we're going to discuss what these expectations of Kaladesh can do for us, and how we can use them to our advantage to give us a guideline for the set's structure and mechanics.

CCDD 091015—Scourge of Peatwood

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/10/2015 - A rare wolf.

Weekend Design Challenge Review 090415—Nostalgia

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Choose a card you submitted to any previous Weekend Art Challenge and design a card for a new set that references it. Include a link to the art for your new card and to the rendering of your old card. If you've never designed for WAC before, choose any card that was.

CCDD 090815—Dragonflame

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/8/2015 - I hope to have the WAC Review tomorrow. Today's card could definitely only be printed with a silver border, and even then it's questionable. Imagine that you're losing a game and hoping for a miracle. Or that you're going to lose this turn and peel the top card of your deck out of turn to indicate your concession.

Weekend Design Challenge 090415—Nostalgia

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.

CCDD 090315—Nizyid the Ravenous & Friends

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/3/2015 - Here are some demons I designed after reading the latest MaRo article about black in the color pie.

Tesla: Welcome to Kaladesh - Great Expectations

This article is WotC safe.

Last week and the week before, we discussed possibly having Tesla set on Kaladesh, a new plane which debuted in Magic Origins. The discussion began with some great debate on both sides, but over the course of the last week, it seems there was an overall shift towards supporting Kaladesh. The setting seems full of rich inspiration for design even with the sparse details Origins gave us, and the conversations and proposals being thrown around in the comments were promising. For these reasons, it's time I've made my executive decision as the project lead of Tesla. So, without further ado, welcome to the plane of Tesla: Kaladesh!

This week, let's continue going through the final stages of exploratory design, onto one of the big topics I've been planning to discuss, and that our arrival at Kaladesh serves as a great segue to: expectations.

CCDD 090215—Servitors

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/2/2015 - If Magic did go to Kaladesh, would it continue the Thopter token theme from Magic Origins? We've talked about how neat it is that the Kaladesh cards in Origins have an artifact theme almost entirely without artifact cards. My guess is that a Kaladesh set would include Thopter tokens, but could also include one or two other artifact creature tokens.

CCDD 090115—Goblin Meditator

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/1/2015 - Theory: Everyone who sees this card will have a very strong guess what it does.