CCDD 091620 - Ajani, True Companion

There's no reason this had to be Ajani-- it's a very bottom-up design, inspired by cards like Serra Avatar and Touch of the Eternal-- but I think it fits his character. And it was easy to find art for, which is nice for planeswalker card renders.

Impact Tremors

My defining guideline for game design is impact. Broadly speaking, impact is how much a game sticks with you: How much you remember a game after you played it ("that was a good game" versus "I blew up an alien spaceship with my kicks"), how excited it makes you, and how much you want to tell the stories of the game to your friends. Well-designed games don't necessarily need impact, but a good game without impact is dry, inaccessible, and hard to pitch to your gaming group. I make sure that every game I design is as impactful as possible.

Until now, my writing on impact has focused on general/"hobby" games because my game company's blog is aimed at a general audience who might not know that much about Magic. This article views impact through the lens of Magic design: What makes individual cards, and Magic as a whole, impactful, and defining guidelines for creating more impactful cards.

Note: Impact is a subjective topic, so your experience with what cards you find memorable may differ from mine. I hope this article provides you with something even if you disagree with the examples.

CCDD 030320 - Great Wall

This design was inspired by Star Realms, which has a category of "Base" cards (think "planeswalkers without loyalty abilities") that have to be destroyed before you can be attacked. It's as if a planeswalker had the static ability "creatures can't attack you." But because of how combat works in Star Realms it's actually more than that-- damage to a base heals at end of turn. The easiest way to implement that in Magic was to make it a creature, even though it often acts more like an enchantment (Moat) or a planeswalker (Gideon Jura).

CCDD 012320—Garruk Wildspeaker

Cool Card Design of the Day
Found a note I made last year about another way to solve the when-planeswalkers-were-sagas-they-didn't-have-enough-agency problem.

Weekend Design Challenge - Flipwalkers

Good afternoon, Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design parameters. With those as your guidelines, design a custom magic card. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs, and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. If I have time over the course of next week, I will try to offer some of my own feedback.

CCDD 042319 - Some Planeswalkers of Assorted Rarities

Now that War previews are over, everyone has Planeswalkers on the brain. Here's a few random ones.

Can Planeswalkers Be Signposts?

Please enjoy this guest post from Larcent. —Jay Treat

War of the Spark is going to be bringing Magic players a flood of planeswalker cards, all at the same time. The final set in this latest trip to Ravnica will feature 36 planeswalkers, and each pack is guaranteed to have at least one.

There is going to be a lot to learn about planeswalker design after War of the Spark comes out and we see it all in action. The power levels are going to likely be lower, many of them designed to be rares or uncommons.

CCDD 061318 - Planeswalker Aether Trails

I was thinking about yesterday's Planeswalking exercise and how PW-matters cards are very tricky to do at uncommon due to the inherent mythicness of the type. Hour of Devastation had an interesting take on the theme, with a direct-to-sideboard/jank box cycle that relied heavily on their thematic tie to the story to justify their existence.

CCDD 061218 - Planeswalk

Given the emphasis the past several years on PWs as main characters, it's still a little surprising that there isn't a card that just tries to capture the act of planeswalking. Let's address that.

CCDD 030118 - Relentless Madness, Ral Zarek 2, and Planeswalkers in Vision/Set Design

Two more cards in my draft for the Design test today, plus a detailed discussion of how to figure out the numbers on a Planeswalker design.

CCDD 022818 - Naamet, the Enchantress and the Futility of Planeswalker Design

After three draft designs, I've cornered Selesnya into being either a Planeswalker or a Sorcery. I'm choosing Planeswalker for now simply to get it out of the way.

CCDD 100517—Planeswalkers' Getaway

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/5/2017 - In honor of yesterday's Magic Story, here's a spell about a gorgon and an amnesiac falling in love.

CCDD 021517—Chandra's Fire Reflex

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/15/2017 - There's a solution for making the legendary supertype meaningful in a positive way, it's just years too late to implement: Spells that reference your legend are improved while it's in play. Maybe they all cost a little less to cast, or they all have some kicker, or a wild variation of benefits.

We could today implement a new across-the-board rule that any spell with a legend's name in its own costs {1} less, but Wizards doesn't like to mess with cardnames-matters because of variations due to printing across languages. In theory, proper names should be consistent within a given language, but there are still a number of issues, probably including: Cardnames that share a word or word-part in common with a legend's name but were never intended to be related; cards that were meant to be related but do so by art or flavor text and not by name; cards with no generic mana in the cost.

Anyhow, here's a custom card based on the idea:

CCDD 022416 Late-Nite Edition -- Eldrazi-Bone Gurney

There was a lot going on in today's denoument-installment of the story formerly known as Uncharted Realms, but my brain wouldn't let go of the idea of Chandra using a piece of Ulamog as a chair while she recovered. I especially liked the idea of it paralleling Dragon Throne of Tarkir in some way.

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.

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.

CCDD 030515—Sarkhan, Dragonlord

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/5/2015 - I took this stab at a new Sarkhan before DTK previews began. That shows as early as the second word, because 'dragonlord' is the exact term DTK uses to refer to the five dragons who rule the clans instead of khans, so Sarkhan is clearly not a dragonlord. I'm also now thinking there's a good chance he'll be red-green.

CCDD 020415: Hiro, Honored by All and Kiro the Collector

I did some art-based designs for today's challenge.