Bad Cards For Life

Why do bad cards happen to good people?

Legends of Runeterra

Riot just released the beta for the League of Legends CCG, Legends of Runeterra. I thought I'd share my reactions:

Eternal Analysis 017—Shift

Shift is Eternal's suspend mechanic, simplified in some ways and… weird in others. Introduced in the sixth full set, Dark Frontier, along with Onslaught, and Twist.

Eternal Analysis 016—Spark

Spark is Eternal's bloodthirst/spectacle mechanic, opened up to do anything when your opponent has taken damage. What it does most often is suck.

Eternal Analysis 015—Endurance & Stun

Endurance is Eternal's vigilance, and stun is its super-tap, but their implementation and relationship are worth talking about.

Eternal Analysis 014—Ambush and fast spells

Eternal avoided making Magic's mistake of taxonomically dividing sorceries and instants: They're all spells, but some are fast and some aren't. Then they dropped the ball.

Designing Suvnica, Week One: Leaving Town

We all know that you can take the cards out of the city, but can you take the city out of the cards? Much of what defines the established guilds’ identities is a natural extension of Ravnica’s conceit of a city-plane. The guilds' goals and means were crafted to fill roles in a city setting — government and police, churches and entertainment, economy and civil engineers, etc. Once the city was established as a hook in designing the set, the guilds’ identities naturally gravitated to filling the civic roles the setting demanded.

21 Ways to Design a Card: Part 7 — Read R&D Articles

In this series so far, I've often discussed ways to get random stimulus that sparks off free association of some kind. But once you get that stimulus, the direction in which you take that design is often guided by your understanding of what you think is good in a card.

Oftentimes, I'll look at the initial stimulus and see something that connects to a design question I've been thinking about (such as "how do I make mill spells interactive and strategic?"), or a category of fun that I want to cater to, and that guides me to the final design.

When designing cards, it's important to have this sort of perspective on what you think cards should be like.

Chah's Musings - A Minor Point in Token Templating

During the Great Designer Search 2, Aaron Forsythe mentioned that the introduction of the Tribal type was not a great choice:

I can tell from your templates that you're thinking of using the Tribal type in the set, but I'd rather you didn't if at all possible. That mechanic, while conceived with the best intentions, is generally considered a bit of a failed experiment, and bringing it back on a couple cards in Rise of the Eldrazi probably wasn't a wise choice.

21 Ways to Design a Card: Part 3 - Find a Rule to Break

The Magic rulebook states that Magic is full of cards that change how the rules work. Haste breaks the rule that a creature summoned this turn can't attack. Vigilance breaks the rule that a creature attacking must tap.

Finding a rule to break (and an interesting way to break them) is a great source of ideas for cards. 

21 Ways to Design a Card: Part 2c - Tomb Raider and Tome Raider

I've designed some cards for each zone in the game, and once again it was a good source of inspiration.

21 Ways to Design a Card: Part 2a - Cards Inspired by Magic Jargon

I'm going to continue with my series of cards that draw inspiration from Magic glossaries - namely, cards based on things that players say during a game.

Here's some card ideas based on the phrases "In response to that..." and "At the end of your turn...."