Friday, April 8, 2011

CCDD 040811—Serra, Planeswalker

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/8/2011 - Yesterday, one of my favorite Magic Twitter folk, Andrea Shubert, suggested a fun exercise of creating a planeswalker card for Serra, creator of the realm of Serra, Serra Angel, and indeed, many more angels and forces of light. We are not the first ones to mine this space, I know, because searching for images for the card brought up a few existing designs.

One thing I instantly felt Serra had to be able to do was creating Angels; that's what she's most famous for. Beyond that, anything particularly protective, militaristic or anti-evil seems like fair game.


This is the simple version. Planeswalkers have been leaning more toward exciting and unique than simple lately, but I'm of the opinion that a card with three printed abilities (on top of the sometimes confusing intrinsic rules) is already pushing things and can benefit from a little simpleness. Better, simple doesn't mean uninteresting or unsplashy: Personally I think a 5cc spell that can make four 3/3 fliers over four turns or Day of Judgement right out of the gate is pretty interesting. For those that disagree, I offer you the fancy version:


The middle text is kind of hard to read there: "Put a white Angel creature token with flying OTB. It has power and toughness each equal to ~'s loyalty." Come to think of it, I think that wording sets it in stone whereas I meant for it to constantly update so all your angels were always as "big" as Serra.

3 comments:

  1. I definitely like the first one. For something tied to close to old school magic, simpler just seems better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I like the flavor of the second one's ultimate, where angels are protectors.

    The proactive protection ability seems weak for a 5cc planeswalker, though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The +1 ability needs a tweak, since if there aren't any creatures, you can't charge her. (The only other pw with a "target creature" in the +1 is Elspeth, Knight Errant, and she also has the +1: make a dude.)

    Maybe the first ability needs to be +1: Brave the Elements? Seems really powerful though :/

    ReplyDelete