CCDD 112117—Gem token

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/15/2017 - Sometimes treasure tokens let us cast a spell a turn or two early and that's fun and powerful. Powerful enough that access to treasure is limited at low mana costs, especially at common. Which limits how often treasure tokens are used to make up for missed land drops or to fix your colors when you'd otherwise be color-screwed. And that's a shame, because Magic often lacks that kind of smoothing.

If treasure didn't accelerate your mana, it could be much cheaper, and more common. Let's explore that.

CCDD 101217—Lucky Gambler

Scry's move to evergreen a few years ago was excellent for the game. It's a flavorful ability that is perfect as an evergreen. My one complaint is that it's a flavor fail for red, which is arguably the color that would benefit the most from it.

CCDD 092617—treasure hunt

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/26/2017 - Ixalan's primary smoothing mechanic is explore, which can draw you a much-needed land or allow you to scry. Treasure can help fix your colors but not until mid- to late-game because it's hard to get on anything cheap. I'm musing about a cycling-for-treasure mechanic.

CCDD 050917—Ditch

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/9/2017 - Ditch is a smoothing mechanic. It's free, conditional cycling. Could go on anything (except planeswalkers… and it would be awkward on sorceries/instants since they're not the same type), but is ideal on land.

Weekend Art Challenge 111116—Apofiss

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 081716—Dire

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/25/2016 - Dire is (my name for) Wobbles' idea in response to motivated. It was too interesting not to mess around with. And I want to discuss it more.

CCDD 040716—Flagstones of Krosa & Ancient Volcano

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/7/2016 - Another way to achieve "sacrifice this land for a card later in the game" is to make cards that eat each other when you play duplicates. It so happens the current legend rule handles this kind of interaction, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I made a common Flagstones of Trokair.

CCDD 040516—Ruins of Yongxia

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/5/2016 - The concept here is simple: A mono-colored land that you can sacrifice to draw a card. AKA cycle-from-play. Like Horizon Canopy.

CCDD 020216—Seek

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/2/2016 - I sure do love smoothing mechanics. Almost like I think the game is just a bit too random without one.

Seek is a bit like dig, but less powerful and more versatile, trading card advantage for card selection.

CCDD 112515—Runed…

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/25/2015 - A very inexpensive way to add smoothing to your deck is through symmetric effects like Ruined Servitor. We want to give players smoothing, and giving both players smoothing with a single card that the first player won't feel bad playing could do a lot to improve games.

CCDD 050715—Deplete

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/7/2015 - Why not make the cycles-from-play mechanic MaRo hinted at so many years ago a formal keyword?

CCDD 040915—Ambush Squad

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/9/2015 - I punked out. I wanted to pair a unique cost to this cycling variant, something that fit the twist mechanically, or that gave the keyword a sense of flavor (something cycling desperately lacks), or at least some cost that we've not seen on cycling. Take a look and we'll talk options.

CCDD 030614—Seer's Sanctuary

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/6/2014 - Colorless smoothing land.
(Sack effect is worse than scry X in a couple ways.)

CCDD 022614—Distant Land & Crowded Bazaar

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/26/2014 - Here are two more ideas that trickled out a bit too late to contend for my WAC submission.

Weekend Art Challenge 022114 Review—Nightsong

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today. Note that blogger had some technical difficulties, partially inhibiting our usual back-and-forth.

Weekend Art Challenge 022114—Nightsong

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday Tuesday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ in your submissions.

CCDD 041213—Eartheater & Sylvan Planter

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/12/2013 - It's been a while since we've talked about dig, and while there's not a whole lot to add, Chah's excellent recent articles about Frontier and gold as well as my own recent post about free cycling require me to share this thought: The reason that cycling usually has to cost mana doesn't apply to dig because dig can't get you spells, it can only undo mana screw (or help you turn spells into lands to help you cast more important spells).