21 Ways to Design a Card: More Mashup Cards

I made some more mashup cards using the Gatherer's random card button.

Alright, here's the first two random cards:

While they don't have a lot in common, the key is to just focus on a few aspects from each cards. I combined the mana production of Borderpost with Ancestral Recall to get this:

A draw spell that helps you cast what you drew right away. If it were to go in a set, it would have to be a multicolor set featuring enemy colors.

This is quite weird, in a good way - it's a mono-blue spell that acts like a mana ritual, without breaking the color pie, because you have access to Green and Red anyways. It's like Shoreline Salvager.

Next, I focused on the land-bouncing cost of the Borderpost and I got this:

Then I interpreted Ancestrall Recall as being a member of the "3-point effect for one mana" cycle of Alpha that consisted of Giant Growth, Dark Ritual, Healing Salve, and Lightning Bolt.

From Dark Ritual and the land-bouncing cost of Firewild Borderpost, I got this:

I also thought it would be interesting to explore cards like Energizing Thought, where you can get an effect for another color in the color pie, by requiring some color-satisfying condition other than paying mana.

This could work in a Wedge-color set. (A three-color set like Shards of Alara, except you play one central color and its two enemy colors.) It grants flying even though it's a green card. I didn't explore this kind of safe color-crossing further at this time, but there could be many other ways of doing something like this.

The next two randomly selected cards were:

While counting losses to a player isn't practical in most cases, I interpreted Gus as being vindicative, and I made a Blisterstick Shaman that punishes the opponent for attacking you.

I'm glad I ended up with a clean, simple common since they are always hard to design.

The third pair of random cards are:

I looked at the lifegain ability of the Leyline and combined it with the mana taxing ability and the trigger conditions of Frost Titan to make this:

This would be quite a powerful and annoying Propaganda vaiant.

Then I made a variant based on the tapdown ability of the Titan. This one only gets the enchantment type from the Leyline side of its gene pool, but I think that's ok since the purpose is to generate ideas.

The last 2 random cards are:

I made a flyer like the Imp that protects other attackers like a Remedy spell, but I changed the damage prevention to toughness boosting to keep things simple:

I looked at it and thought, I want this to benefit from attacking in a team rather than just boosting others. The Remedy side can like be the Knight's shield, and the Daggerclaw side can be like the Knight's weapon.

It might be interesting to make its ability count the opponent's attacker during the opponent's attacks as well.

I looked at this and thought it would be great to have a variant of this card that makes you choose if it's going to be used for offense or defense. It reminded me of Jay Treat's Versatile mechanic during the Great Designer Search 2, where you can choose from two modes that a creature has. I also thought about this mechanic I posted on the GDS2 wiki, where cards contain both a dark side and a light side, and you can choose which side you align yourself with during the game. I also thought about how Devon Rule's set in the GDS2 really wanted a mechanic to convey a peaceful society converting its tools and resources for war.

I also thought of the Archangel of Strife card in the Commander product:

Archangel of Strife from Commander

Those things came together and I made this:

The idea is that there are many cards with a War mode and a Peace mode. The mode you chose applies to all cards with War or Peace. You can change your mode only when you cast another card with War or Peace.

I tried to imagine what a common card would look like that had this mechanic, and I came up with this:

I think this could be a good set mechanic. The cards have to have a feel-good "choose your boon" style instead of a "choose wrong, and you will prove that you suck" feel. But I think it has great game play.

So those are my cards this time. 

I found that the key doing this is to extract abstract aspects from each random card instead of trying to emulate both cards' mechanic exactly.

I hope you enjoyed these, and I hope you'll try the random card button whenever you feel stuck. See you next post!