21 Ways to Design a Card Part 5: The "Random Card" Button

A while ago, on one of WotC's forums called You Make the Card, there was a thread where people posted card designs based on mashing together two cards that you got from the Gatherer's random card button.

If you're ever stuck, combining two things is a good way to get an idea, as finding the link between two seemingly unrelated things lets you look at something in a new way.

When you make the mash-up card, you don't have to reference the original cards in their entirety. You could extract just one aspect of each card. You could take the top-down flavor concept of a card and combine it with the mechanic of another card. Or you could just borrow a cost, a size, or a set keyword from each card.

I'd like to try that here, with three different pairs of cards.

I hit the random button twice, and the first two cards I got were Sulfur Vent and Butcher Orgg. My first response upon seeing this combination was: "..."

What the heck do these abilities have to do with each other? I almost wanted to skip this one, and cherry pick my random cards. But I wanted to show that this process can inspire cards. So here's what I made:

» Click to Reveal «

I thought the Orgg's ability could be represented by any kind of damage dealing to the opponent and damage dealing to opponents' creatures, and that the mana abilities of Sulfur Vent could just be represented by those mana symbols appear on the card. This is what I came up with:

It becomes unblockable and hits while it's pumped up. Then it can deal that much damage to each creature.

I wasn't happy with this one. It might be ok if the set's theme was about playing one main color heavily along with two splash colors. But even so, it looks like a clutter of abilities and doesn't have a clear identity.

I thought "what the heck," and cut the blue part. I made a couple of versions, trying to combine the red and black abilities meaningfully, and in a way more reminiscent of the Butcher Orgg.

This one is like a shade and a pinger in one, but maybe it's too "chessy" (makes combat choices too complicated and stressful).

I then made a revision of Sulferic Shade A. The red ability of version A was weird because you can't pump it with black mana to save it. I meant for it to be like a sacrifice ability, but I realized players would be confused. That gave me the idea for Sulferic Shade C:

This one's a Pyrohemia on a stick, where you want to have both Black and Red mana for it to survive. At least the abilities make sense together, but it's probably too powerful. It might also be too swingy, becoming a repeatable Day of Judgement that also bashes depending on what land you draw.

I tried adding a restriction to it, which probably wasn't much of a restriction:

I also came up with a version that looked somewhat familiar to me, and sure enough, I looked it up in the Gatherer and saw that it's been printed as Cinder Shade.

These might be sub-par designs, but I'm writing out these various versions because for me, designing a card is often a process of doodling some card text on Magic Set Editor, staring at it, and thinking what could this become? Then modify it and stare at it again. I've often wound up with cards that I like a lot by making many small changes until it became something different.

Sometimes when I'm in a design contest on one of the Magic forums, I feel I have to come up with something awesome right away. Then I often forget about this process and try to pull awesome designs out of thin air. And then suddenly, I experience designer's block. Idea generation is a process where the lenient, open-minded part of your brain and the critical part have to work in tandem, in a delicate balance. But when there's pressure, sometimes the critical part takes full control, resulting in what feels like a drought of ideas.

At first, I couldn't come up with a satisfactory marriage of Sulfur Vent and Butcher Orgg. But I decided to leave it for a while and went on with the next two random cards. They were:

Moonglove Changeling and Island

I saw this and groaned. A basic Land? But here's what I did:

» Click to Reveal «

Looking at the changeling mechanic, I thought about a land that counts as all land types.

Hmm... none of the text parts are new, but I like how it would enable some crazy 5-color Changeling deck - such as a Changeling & Lords deck or a Changelings and Kamigawa Ogres & Demons deck.

Then I thought about copying lands, but that had already been done. I came up with these variants of changing lands:

Maybe this is a good place to use Legendary?

I like how it "virtually" enters the battlefield tapped, not that it's a big plus to a card's appeal.

The second one is almost the same as Unstable Frontier, but it could also be used to enable landwalkers or Serpents in Limited.

A few days after I made this post, I was able to come up with this card, inspired by Jay Treat's Changeling Island, so I'm editing it in:

The last two random cards are:

Charmed Pendant and Necrosavant.

I like these — I like using printed info on cards in a new way, as well as using cards from other zones to affect the outcome of an ability. (Although I know they're not necessarily good for designing simple, clean Magic cards.)

Here's what I did:

» Click to Reveal «

It's a little wordy, but I think this card could be interesting in a heavy Hybrid set like Shadowmoor.

So, those were my initial cards. But once I started writing this post some new ideas came to me for the first pair of random cards:

» Click to Reveal «

Butcher Orgg's ability is an awesome and grokkable way of breaking the basic rules of the game, but the text was long and it didn't leave much room for a bunch of mana abilities. The Orgg also looked so huge and game-ending that it would look silly if I put Sulfur Vent's mana abilities on it.

Well, my card didn't have to be a finisher. I used a smaller version of the Butcher ability, and then a mana accel ability didn't look so much out of place on it.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

I'm glad that this works like a mana ritual on a stick, a ritual card that doesn't feel bad to play.

I thought of another variant of the Butcher Orgg ability.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

I've always liked trample designs that encourage the opponent to actually block the trampler before it threatens to deal lethal. It feels great to squish a small creature and deal damage to the opponent.

I put the second ability there because I always thought there should be a mechanic to allow building tribal decks with high-cost creature types like Dragons and Demons.

The abilities made the text cramped, but I was able to shorten it like this:

(Click on image to enlarge.)

And finally! I was able to design a card that marries Sulfur Vent and Butcher Orgg.