CCDD 082812—Healing Path

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/28/2012 - I know from experience that many of you enjoy doing a bit of armchair Development. I know I do. So here's a little challenge. Your task is to find the perfect numbers for a Rampant Growth that also gains life.

CCDD 082712—Preempt

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/27/2012 - I'm confident this card has been designed in some form or another by several Magic designers across the Wondrous Old Web before, if not by some of our own regulars. I share it today not to claim credit or steal the limelight, but to explore the merits and flaws of the idea.

The Perfect Cycle

This is a guest post by Trevor Murdock.

The overwhelming reaction by most Magic players to Murder was “Finally! How is it possible that this card has never been printed before! This is Black’s new iconic spell.” 

That reaction, and the symmetry with Cancel, got me wondering what that iconic obvious spell would be at 1WW, 1GG, and 1RR — do these cards already exist? Is there an interesting design gap here? 

CCDD 082412—Lonely Goatherd

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/24/2012 - You know what I don't post enough of? Silly cards. This one was inspired by my draft group last night.

CCDD 082212—Electric Pulse

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/22/2012 - Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I was dealing with a lot of last-minute preparations for GenCon, the event itself, and the ordeal of getting home. (US Airways screwed me big time coming and going—It was brutal. But I'm tired of telling that story.)

For whatever reason I was thinking about the way that lords have become strictly good for their controller and how that trend has been migrating to other cards that would have been symmetrical years ago. It made me think about a one-sided Pyroclasm.

Where Did Avacyn Restored Go Wrong?

It's important to recognize when you succeed and determine what you did right so that you can do it again. Fortunately, that's usually pretty easy. People are happy to tell you the good things they've noticed and are attuned to the positive details because they remember thinking "wheee!" when they were experiencing them.

It is at least as important to recognize when you fail and determine what you did wrong, so that you can avoid the same mistakes next time. Unfortunately, that's rarely easy. While the internet is full of people happy to tell you what you did wrong, it's much harder to find useful critical feedback from that same crowd. Part of that is because some get a bigger rush from shouting profanities in a forum than from making coherent arguments, but the real difficulty is that it can often be very hard to pinpoint why precisely you don't like something.

Challenge #7: Results

Greetings, designers!  Apologies for the long delay in getting back to you.  As Jay mentioned, I've been quite occupied by non-magical concerns recently, but I tore myself away from work long enough to judge this design challenge.  Now that we're all eagerly awaiting the new guild keywords in Return to Ravnica, let's whet our appetites with some reader-submitted creations.

CCDD 080212—Desperate Pact

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/2/2012 - As much as designers love forging hot new tools to show how innovative we can be, it's also hugely gratifying to iterate endlessly upon old designs, trying to perfect our craft by pushing something that was good to be great, or even simply by finding something perfectly common that hasn't quite been done before. The result is—arguably—the lifeblood of Magic. We need brand-new things to sell sets, and the tried-and-true to ensure quality and keep established customers happy, but it's the unnoticed variations that allow the game to shift radically while staying the same.