CCDD 020519 - Distortion Sentinel and Eldrazi Design Principles

Good morning, Artisans. I was thinking about Eldrazi today, so I decided to come up with one. Unfortunately, I've internalized a number of Eldrazi design principles, some of which I extrapolated from Rise/Battle for/Oath/Eldritch, some of which I just made up, but they do make our friendly unfathomable extraplaner weirdos difficult to make.

CCDD 102918—Promise Safety

Cool Card Design of the Day
Fatal Blow / Crushing Pain effects are hard to do well, because they're removal spells that don't work on their own. Anything really worth casting a spell to kill that isn't already trumped by one of your creatures is probably killing the blocker you use to prime your spell, so you're often 2:1'ing yourself. If black-red had more 1/4s, that might help.

Anyhow, I found a really nice way to even out the card EV here.

CCDD 100918–Five-Aether Discount

Cool Card Design of the Day

A slight change of rules text changes a moderately useful build-around effect into a powerful removal spell.

CCDD 121217—All Hail the Gitrog

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/12/2017 - Top down card.

CCDD 061517—Disappear

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/15/2017 - A blue fog via moat tech. I claim this is simple and thematic enough to be a core set common.

CCDD 031617—Stream Forder

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/16/2017 - I was playing a Limited game online a while back and was struck by the distinct moment when my strategy switched from primarily aggressive to totally controlling. I observed that the benefits of racing as I had been were dropping slowly but that I wasn't far from establishing sufficient board control to reach inevitability.

What if there were a card that helped a player switch from aggro to control?

Tesla: Types of Archetypes

Hello again, everyone! We've been hard at work over at the Magic Multiverse, filling in and polishing up the various archetypes, including the ones we discussed last time. This week, we're going to look extensively not only at the philosophy behind archetypes, but at the different kinds of archetypes - and we're going to use these lessons to design better archetypes, and cards in those archetypes, for Tesla.

CCDD 120715—Engrave Guilt

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/7/2015 - This design's been sitting in my folder getting passed over dozens of times for being unworthy. I finally re-worked it.

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.

CCDD 042815—Kindle Passion

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/28/2015 - Spells that give your opponent a choice are only effective when both options are worth the cost of your card, and most interesting when the choice is close and changes throughout the game. Here's one.

CCDD 052714—Simple Hypnotism

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/27/2014 - This was my first pass at the art for the last Weekend Art Challenge, but it didn't fit the challenge requirements, so... here it is.

CCDD 102413—Identity Thief

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/24/2013 - Identity Thief is just a Mind Control that's countered by Essence Scatter instead of Negate. And is an awesome shapeshifter, that also copies its target's ETB and LTB effects. And when you Doom Blade it, you get your creature back.

CCDD 071911—Claim Soul

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/19/2011 - I like Enslave. It shows black paying the price (in this case, just lots of mana) for an effect that it really wants: a powerful effect. It also adds its own twist to Mind Control by adding Soul Bleed to the mix. That card is flavorful as well: The black mage isn't just controlling your creature's mind, he has completely dominated it and is using your previous bond to punish you further. So evil.

Even so, control effects aren't black's usual M.O. You're much more likely to see a black mage destroy something than steal it. It's also standard fair to zombify things. You see where I'm going with this, right?

CCDD 062111—Craniomancer & Persuasive Doppleganger

Cool Card Design of the Day

6/21/2011 - There are 19 variants of Seasinger and 14 variants of Spawnbroker, but there are no variants of Sower of Temptation. Granted, that's not terribly surprising since it's still relatively new to the game, but it's such a simple, straight-forward effect in a sea of wordy mind-controlling dudes that I feel like there should be more. First up is the gimme: Boiling down the execution to its simplest form.

CCDD 060311—Mass Subjugation & Subjugator Demon

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/3/2011 - Today's card was inspired by Chah's Lord Over Kings which gives you control of all equipped creatures. That's certainly a unique effect and immediately made me think of a similar effect for enchantments that seems perhaps more obvious. Naturally, we've already got our Volition Reins and our Corrupted Consciences but what if there were a control effect in the manner of Infiltrator's Magemark and friends?

CCDD 022211 — Replacement Body

Cool Card Design of the Day

Every day, I design a new card and discuss it briefly. Sometimes I will examine new possibilities for colors or mechanics, sometimes I'll re-examine existing executions and sometimes I'll just design something I think is neat.