Spotlight Challenge 3—Devin E. Green

This fortnight, Devin is going to take lead on this challenge:

Design six cards that inject a clear flavor-identity into a returning mechanic—either by adding flavor where there is none (ala cycling), or by re-branding a returning mechanic (ala chroma and devotion). Include at least two commons, one uncommon, and one rare or mythic. Include at least two colors.

Weekend Art Challenge 012916—Colorless

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Anastase here, bringing another guest WAC. 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.

Based on the work of Ipaulsen during his spotlight challenge, I came to wonder about the differentiation between generic ({1}) and colorless ({C}) mana. Therefore this week I suggest we dig in that design space!

Goblin Game 2016!

OK Artisans. We're careening towards the end of Goblin Week 2016, and before it closes I wanted to do another round of last year's Goblin Game. Like last year, it will be run on twitter, starting shortly after this is posted. Come check it out and let's make an army of Goblins!

CCDD 012816—Tandem Betrayal

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/28/2016 - Yesterday, there was a complex rare that built off of a relatively simple variation on Act of Treason. Today, I'd like to strip off that added complexity so that we can enjoy the variation on its own.

CCDD 012716—Impress

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/27/2016 - Impress is the exact opposite of idea of Forget. It's potentially un-develop-able, but easily neat enough to warrant exploration.

Spotlight Challenge 2 Final Review—lpaulsen

Here's the challenge lpaulsen took lead on:

Come up with a new kind of mana cost or iterate on an existing one, and design 5 commons and 5 non-commons that demonstrate its value.

Here's the initial submission.

Let's take a look at the final submission.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 012216—Knights

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hello all! Anastase here. This week's challenge can be found here.

First of all I want to thank Jay for letting me run these. It does help you evaluate card design a lot and I have been enjoying them greatly. I love doing them and have more ready to go, but I would love to hear some input on the WAC format. I also guess that others might be interesting in doing them, as it is an interesting experience.

Now, some ramblings about the challenge. I was blown away by the participation and the research done. I really hoped for some discussion on what being a knight means, and seeing designs that are trying to represent what a knight of each color would consider important. Special cudos to Jay and Bradley for their analysis in the comments and on a whole blog post!

Iconic creatures deserve to have an in-depth analysis of what makes them tick, and I hope we get to discuss more about them in the future.

So without further ado, on to the cards:

Weekend Art Challenge 012216—Knights

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! This weekend we've got a guest reviewer: Anastase aka fadingshadowsofamemorybeloved created this challenge and will be judging it.

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.

CCDD 012016—Forget

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/20/2016 - Inanimate's prompt to think about non-creature mechanics led me down this path: I'm still inspired by the way surge rewards playing multiple cards together. I don't want to copy cards or recur them, because that creates repetitive gameplay. Can I somehow do the opposite of that?

Tesla: Design Challenge 012016 — Noncreature Mechanics

Howdy all. We're taking a break from our series on playtest design - so I can gather some more feedback from playtesting - and during this break I'd like to have a design challenge! One thing I noticed while gathering mechanics a while back, and especially while putting together the playtest, is that we could use a few more options for noncreature mechanics for Tesla.

And there's where you come in!

CCDD 011915—Jace, Dark Imaginer / Bottomless Tome

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/19/2016 - I wanted to explore the idea of a card that could let you cast a wide array of spells, if possible without being limited by your deck. A planeswalker seemed like a promising vehicle for that.

Spotlight Challenge 2 Initial Review—lpaulsen

Here's the challenge lpaulsen is taking lead on:

Come up with a new kind of mana cost or iterate on an existing one, and design 5 commons and 5 non-commons that demonstrate its value.

Let's take a look at the initial submission.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 011516—juliedillon

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hey all! Anastase here (a.k.a. Fading Shadows of a memory beloved), taking over the challenge for this week. Here is the challenge we are judging this week.

A thing I liked about the WAC from Jay was that it forced us to do top-down design to fit the image while usually also providing us with restrictions and/or bonus points. Unfortunately we would sometimes focus more on the restriction than on the art itself. I believe that to be a trap, since a large part of what makes magic what it is, is the attention it provides to both Melvin and Vorthos. Enough rambling however, let's see some cards:

Weekend Art Challenge 011516—juliedillon

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! This weekend we've got a guest reviewer: Anastase aka fadingshadowsofamemorybeloved created this challenge and will be judging it.

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.

CCDD 011416—Enhance

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/14/2016 - Completing this week's exploration…
Assist was much simpler than mentor, but still not relevant to Limited. Today, we look for something that works without opening one or two particular mythics in your booster pack.

CCDD 011316—Assist

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/13/2016 - Iterating on yesterday's planeswalker-fueled-spells idea. Mentor was too complex for common, and its design space was deeply constrained looking for scaling effects. Assist uses a threshold allowing us to customize a binary reward, both simplifying the card and opening up new possible designs. *Nothing mentioning planeswalkers should be common, so these are uncommon.

CCDD 011216—Mentor

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/12/2016 - Czynski mentioned using planeswalker (or player) loyalty to help cast spells and it got me thinking of ways that your planeswalkers could help you with your own magic. Today, I share my first pass exploring that idea. It's a bit too complex and narrower than one might first expect, which is why I've got a better pass coming tomorrow. Still, worth sharing.

Spotlight Challenge 1 Final Review—Zeno Rage

Here's the challenge Zeno Rage is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Here's the initial submission.

Let's take a look at the final submission.

Tesla: Playtest Engineering II: Designing Cards

Hello again, everybody! I'm back from my holiday vacation, and eager to jump once more into the fray! Last time, we began a series on designing an all commons playtest, from start to finish. In the first part, we talked about the overall structure of a playtest set, and how one can use concepts like as-fan to help quickly create such a structure, using our custom collaborative set Tesla as an example. This time, we're going to learn how to quickly fill in this structure with actual cards.

Spotlight Challenge 2—lpaulsen

This fortnight, lpaulsen is going to take lead on this challenge:

Come up with a new kind of mana cost or iterate on an existing one, and design 5 commons and 5 non-commons that demonstrate its value.

CCDD 010716—Augment

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/20/2016 - The new existence of {C} got me thinking about forged again. I started mocking up some cards and found the same problem kicker has: If you don't have the extra/right mana when you cast the spell, the best mode is forever lost. If only there were some way to attain the same flavor, but let players get the bonus whenever their colorless mana shows up. Monstrosity was that tech.

CCDD 010616—Mardu Downrider

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/6/2016 - Top-down. Went Mardu just because I needed a tribe name to proceed Downrider. That gave me good flavor text though.

Prodigal Pyromancer with risk. Ashmouth Hound++.

CCDD 10516—Battlefield Ruler & Conqueror King

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/5/2016 - Two top-down designs from the same art. One probably a bit too strong and the other a bit weak.

Auto-Link in Comments

You can now auto-link cards in the comments section. Blogger won't allow the <U> tag, which is what we use in the main content section, but you can use the <A> tag. Any <A> tag that doesn't have an HREF attribute will attempt to preview the card name it wraps. These will appear underlined.

Spotlight Challenge 1 Initial Review—Zeno Rage

Here's the challenge Zeno Rage is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Let's take a look at the initial submission.