Friday, August 30, 2013

Weekend Art Challenge 083013—Theros Speculation

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday 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 ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Deconstructing Theros: Monstrosity

PAX Prime is about to commence, and with it a deluge of information regarding the upcoming fall set will be presented at WotC's various PAX presentations and parties. Of course, quite a bit has already been revealed through official sources, and even more has filtered through everyone's favorite rumormongers. Jay has begun the process of taking a critical eye towards the design of Theros with his piece on Enchantment Creatures, and I'm going to continue things by taking an in-depth look at the aptly-named keyword-thing Monstrosity. To those concerned with being spoiled about content coming from unofficial sources, my analysis will be focused on the known monsters — Polukranos, World Eater; Shipbreaker Kraken; and Ember Swallower — with reference to other revealed cards (like Ordeal of Purphoros.

So let's get into it.

Suvnica Week 11 Review: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Guilds are great and all, but even multicolor sets need some monocolor love. Let's see what guild-neutral cycles you guys came up with.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Deconstructing Theros: Enchantment Creatures


Let's take a brief look at the new mechanics coming up in Theros. Today, enchantment creatures.

Spoilers Ahead:

Designing Suvnica, Week 13: Gangster's Paradise

Theros previews are right around the corner. I'm hoping to wrap up this stage of Suvnica design right around the time that the RtR block starts fading into the background. With that in mind, this week we're rolling right along with another guild keyword, as well as another cycle challenge.

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

CCDD 082813—Electric Reaction

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/28/2013 - I wanted to capture the jolt of electrocution that shocks its victims, causing them to jerk away. Below are two very similar damage/bounce effects that play quite differently.

Suvnica Guild Profile: The Radkar

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)


{B}{R} The Radkar

The Radkar take the perspective that if a power vacuum exists, someone is going to fill it, and that someone might as well be them. They are shameless opportunists, with little guiding philosophy beyond making sure that the guildpact works for them and not the other way around.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

CCDD 082713—Dark Path

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/27/2013 - Dark Path looks like a Sylvan Scrying that you can upgrade to a Diabolic Tutor. But really, it's a Diabolic Tutor that you can cast for less when all you want is some land. The difference? Intention. (Which is worth nothing in a printed product, because most or all of your audience will never hear your intention.)

Friday, August 23, 2013

Weekend [Art] Design Challenge 082313—Enchantments Matter

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday 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 ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

CCDD 082213—Truefire

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/22/2013 - Not sure how the idea of being able to cast multicolored red spells as if they were monocolored  got into my head. Not sure how I settled on red as the color to do it, either; I'm certainly not married to that choice.

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

CCDD 082113—Yavimaya Mulchcaster

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/21/2013 - This design's well over a year old. It's pretty clearly uncommon both in complexity and card advantage. Comparisons to Eternal Witness are inevitable; the point was to make something worse, but not strictly worse.

Monday, August 19, 2013

Designing Suvnica, Week 12: Bottom Feeders and the Ascended

Alright guys. We're halfway done with our first round of mechanics solicitations. This week we'll be throwing two more guilds into the ring. In the meantime, because last week's challenge went up late, I'll leave it open a few more days before reviewing the non-guild cycles.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Tesla: 5 Ways to Position the Mecha Mechanic


We are still trying to figure out how to position the Mecha mechanic for our Tesla set. (To see what the Mecha mechanic is, click here.)

Should building a Mecha be risky? Should it be safe? Should it happen very often, or should it be a rare occurence? Should it be merely strong, or game-endingly powerful? Should Mecha Parts be abundant in the set, or should they only be a small portion of the set?

Some combinations of answers will not make sense; for example, if Mechas are a small portion of the set, they probably can't join up very often. (Although it's interesting to think, "What if they could? How would it work?")

Here are some configurations that can make sense.
  • The All-in Aura Style
  • The Totem Armor Style
  • The Banding Style
  • The Crown of Empires Style
  • The Scavenge Style

Friday, August 16, 2013

Designing Suvnica, Week 11: Five-Card Cycle

Getting a late start this week. Sorry about that. We'll skip the keywords and do two more on Monday. For the weekend, let's think about non-guild alligned rare cycles.

Weekend Art Challenge 080813—IgorKieryluk

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday 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 ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

CCDD 081513—Goblin Enthusiast

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/15/2013 - Another one drop. Does outclassing Raging Goblin mean Goblin Enthusiast can't be common?

Suvnica Week 10 Review, Part 3: Breaking Black (YMTC Submissions)

Not too many submitted designs for the bonus challenge this week, so this one will be quick.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Announcement of Tesla Playtest #2

We will have a playtest of Tesla on Saturday, August 17, starting 4:00 PM EST/1:00 PM PST/9.00 PM BST.

We'll play online using a free tool called LackeyCCG, available on both Mac and Windows. The main test should take about an hour. You can stay and play out more matches if you have time. Otherwise, you can shout out on Twitter to have a match with the other playtesters whenever you have time over the next few days.

Lessons from Tesla Playtest #1

We test-drafted our Tesla set on Tuesday, August 6.

We used a mockup set consisting of core set-like cards as well as Infect cards to provide a counterpoint to the Mecha faction.

Click here to see what Mechas are.

Here's the list of cards we used.

» Click to open «

Suvnica Week 10 Review, Part 2: There's No Place Like Home (Grohm Keyword)

Moving right along, the Grohm prevented an interesting challenge. Maro has already discussed the difficulty in designing for this particular color pairing. This is exacerbated for the Grohm since, unlike the Gruul, their Red connection is more about freedom than agression, and their Green is more about connecting with nature than of being the biggest baddest dude in the field.

CCDD 081413—Souldregger

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/14/2013 - A decent method to make one-drops relevant in the late game is to give them an ability that scales, but you have to be careful with abilities that scale with the the number of turns, like Stromkirk Noble (who works because his ability is conditional on a successful attack). For triggered abilities, you can make it an ETB trigger like Goblin Bushwhacker, a dying trigger like Doomed Traveler, or an attack trigger like Legion Loyalist.

Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Suvnica Week 10 Review, Part 1: Power of Equality (Suiroza Keyword)

Well, we have a whole mess of new keywords to consider. Let's dive in. First up, we'll consider submissions for the Suiroza.

CCDD 081313—Blastwand .33

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/13/2013 - This is the card I made based on Taresivon's Pazblade Retributor. While it half wants to live in Tesla and half in Frontier, the effect is reasonably simple, turning anything into an Ashmouth Hound or Somberwald Vigilante* (hence the discount for using red mana). *That can also defend.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Friday, August 9, 2013

Report of Tesla Playtest #1 — Changes in the Mechas

On Tuesday, I managed to test-draft with James Bartolotti, hubatish, Jules, and myself. This isn't the first playtest for Tesla, but for convenience I would like to call it playtest #1.

Thank you for your Mecha design ideas. Your input was helpful in creating the test draft set. I could not incorporate all of the different ideas, especially since I only had time to finish the Commons. But any of the ideas are potentially seeds for future ideas. I would like to discuss them in the next few posts.

For this post, I would like to show the Mecha designs I adopted for the test. (The names have been slightly edited since the test and I've added art as well.)

Weekend Art Challenge 080913—Neon Knights

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday 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 ~ and don't use the {} symbol images in your submissions.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

CCDD 080813—Essence Reflection

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/8/2013 - Enchantment/Aura copying/token-making is generally avoided because there haven't been any good ways to mark what's what and avoid memory issues so far. I'm honestly not sure how you could do that as a multi-card mechanic. Essence Reflection is a shot at doing it on a single rare.
 

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

CCDD 080713—Tales of Wandering

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/7/2013 - Timmy doesn't care for deck-thinning effects, and Johnny may not be interested in a one-time effect like this. Spike, on the other hand, is always looking for incremental advantage and improving the consistency of his draws is on his list.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

CCDD 080613—Bad Dream

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/6/2013 - Bad Dream is a discard spell with a built-in mini-game.

Designing Suvnica, Week 10: Back in Black

And we're back! I've been itching to dive back into this. I didn't have the time to finish out the remaining guild profiles while I was studying, and that's hopefully something I'll be able to do over the course of this week. In the meantime, for this week's challenge, we'll be coming up with keywords for two more guilds this week, plus a bonus design challenge.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Suvnica Guild Profile: The Suiroza

(This is part of a series of documents that are meant to provide snapshots of each of the guilds. These documents will probably be updated with some regularity. They are meant to provide a starting reference point when developing new cards and ideas for the guilds.)


{W}{U} The Suiroza

The Suiroza are driven by the idea that it is the environment in which an individual is fostered that is the sole factor in determining that individuals potential and limits. They have a very controversial practice within the guild of removing children from their parents immediately after birth and raising them in guild-run schools and academies.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Filling Out the Tesla Draft Test Packs

In a few days, we will be testing our Mecha mechanic for Tesla by drafting with a mockup set. The details of the test draft are here. The main purpose of this test is to find out the approximate numbers and color scheme necessary for Mechas decks to be reliably draft-able.

I will compile the mockup set since it may take too long to do it through discussions and votes on each step. But I will be using this post as a working space so that you can make comments and suggestions on what reprints and/or original cards should go into this test set.

You don't need to read the card lists below if you just want to follow what's happening with Tesla. It's more like a series of notes rather than an article. Also, feel free to suggest reprints etc. that would fit in the test without reading the lists below.

Friday, August 2, 2013

Tesla Draft Test Announcement

We will have a test draft of Tesla on Tuesday, August 6 starting 16:00 PST/19:00 EST.

We'll draft online using a free online tool called LackeyCCG, available on both Mac and PC. The drafting should take about an hour. Then you can stay and play out the matches if you have time. Otherwise, you can shout out on Twitter to have a match with the other drafters whenever you have time over the next few days.

Anyone who is interested in card design is welcome. You'll need to download and set up the necessary tool in advance. If you're interested, please contact me for details at goblinartisanchah@gmail.com.