Saturday, July 17, 2021

Weekend Design Challenge 071721 - Seal

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.

I went to the Random Card button for this week's challenge and it gave me Seal of Primordium. I like the Seals a lot as designs and have tried my hand at designing new ones once or twice, but their design space is not very large or subtle. So instead, why don't we design a creature with creature type Seal? (Magic doesn't have any of those yet-- the closest I could find were the Kelpies and Selkies of Shadowmoor.) For bonus points, make it a common.

Good luck and have fun!

14 comments:

  1. Bristling Walrus
    Creature - Seal
    2/2

    Posted from elsewhere where we were discussing what blue creature would first break through the "blue grizzly bear" wall. I really liked my suggestion here :)

    I think magic really lacks some more sea mammals :)

    At someone else's suggestion I decided magic would use "seal" for all pinnipeds (seals, sealions, walruses, etc) which may be colloquially used in some languages and may be used in some English dialects (?) even though it isn't by default.

    Let's see if I can get away with a vanilla entry to a challenge :)

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    1. Oh no, I forgot the most important part of the card. Thank you. I meant 1U like the other grizzly bears variants.

      I know that's not been allowed in blue *yet* but I expected it would be sooner or later. I think UU would be in line with the power curve earlier, maybe already, but just not feel right, like ok that card is weaker, but why is UU better at creatures than something else and U? :)

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    2. I agree. 1U is a totally fine cost. I like everything about this design, including the extra thought put into which animals would be typed as Seals.

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    3. Thank you! I'm not always the best at design but I can always think through obscure edge cases that don't really matter to the question at hand :)

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    4. Not much to say about this except that I agree with the reasoning in the comments. Also, I look forward to the bear vs vampire vs zombie vs walrus vs philosopher face-off.

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  2. Not a common, but probably a fun Uncommon.

    Trained Seal 3U
    Creature - Seal 3/2
    Balancing Act - When Trained Seal enters the battlefield, exile a card from your hand face down. When you do, Trained Seal gains "When Trained Seal dies, turn the exiled card face up. You may play that card for as long as it remains exiled. If it's a spell card, it costs 1U less to cast."

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    1. I just realized I can take two bites of the "flavor words" apple.

      Trained Seal 3U
      Creature - Seal 3/2
      Balancing Act — When Trained Seal enters the battlefield, exile the top card of your library face down.
      Wave Goodbye — When Trained Seal leaves the battlefield, turn a card exiled with it face up. You may play that card for as long as it remains exiled. If it has a mana cost, it costs 1U less to cast.

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    2. I like it! I know it's a pun but I just like the effect anyway without that :) I think I prefer the first version unless there's a good reason why a lot of cards have wave goodbye on them.

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    3. I may be missing some flavor that ties the ability words to the mechanics, but other than that this seems like a nice design. I like the change to exiling the top card. With that change, this a bit like Watcher for Tomorrow with the mana discount making up for the less efficient body.

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  3. Seal Scout 2W
    Creature - Seal Scout
    Discard a card: Seal Scout phases out. When it phases back in, create a food token.
    3/3

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    1. Phasing is a cool and useful effect and I'm excited to see if Magic can make it work as an evergreen mechanic. The food feels a little like trinket-text but it's very cute and adds a lot to the card. Not sure if white can get a 3/3 for 3 with so much upside but that's easy to adjust.

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  4. Seals?
    This sounds interesting. I don’t think I’ve tried to design “just kinda, a normal-ish animal” as a card yet.
    The fact that seals and related animals are quite fatty, made me think of some sort of “protection against temperature”. But it has to be common, and not like, “magical temperature protection”. Just kind of a chonky boye.

    So, here’s what came up in my mind:

    Sleet ice Walrus || {3} {U}
    Creature - seal (common)
    Ward from red and blue {3}
    3/4

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    1. "Hexproof from X" and "Ward Y" have both grown on me, so this seems like a natural thing to try, and I love how you've tied it into the card concept. My only concern is that "Ward Y from X" is now kind of information-heavy and exception-intensive, which could make it hard to keep track of.

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