Weekend Art Challenge Review 092713—IACG

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 092713—IACG

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 ~ in your submissions.

CCDD 092613—Mangler

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/26/2013 - Mangler was probably inspired by the siren designs from the last Theros weekend art challenge. It should probably be blue-black, although it's 'siren' ability is different enough it could be put on a black rare without upsetting the color pie terribly. In any case, I liked the idea of a horror that draws people in, eats them and then grows to draw in more people.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: Get a Life

Many instructions for games begin with that magical phrase: "Object of the Game". Players need to learn the goal before the rest of the rules because that gives them a framework for understanding the available moves. In Magic, the goal is to reduce the opponent's life total to zero. 

Because the goal is to get in twenty points of damage before the opponent, it is convenient to think of the life totals as a "score" for the game. If you're up 20 to 10, you're winning by a lot. If you're down 12 to 14, you're losing, but not by much. This way of thinking is applicable to virtually every game with a numerical scoring system. (Blazers leading the Knicks 90 - 75? Good day in Portland.) 

It is also completely and utterly incorrect when it comes to Magic.

CCDD 092513—Flanking Raptor & Pack Hunter

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/25/2013 - Nothing too fancy today. Here's a pair of veloceraptors that play well together.

Suvnica Week 14 Review, Part 2: Peacemaker (Sorba Keywords)

Our last set of reviews covers the vigilante guild. There were a number of really cool keywords thrown out there for this one. Here's some of the ways we can protect those that can't protect themselves.

Suvnica Week 14 Review, Part 1: Living in the Future (Kismi Keywords)

Kismi proved to be one of the more challenging guilds to design keywords for. Because so much of their identity is tied up in predicting the future, and because translating that into game mechanics leads to either very cumbersome rules text or unfun methods of playing, it was tricky to find a keyword that hit that sweet spot of fun, grokable, flavorful, NWO-friendly rules. Still, we came up with a number of really strong efforts here. Let's see what everyone had to say about our fortune-tellers.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 092013—ChaoYuanXu

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 092013—ChaoYuanXu

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 ~ in your submissions.

CCDD 091913—Weapons Factory & Traveler's Guard

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/19/2013 - Neither of these cards innovate beyond what has already been suggested for Tesla, but rendering them out and putting them next to each other helps us to imagine how they might really play, or see issues we might have missed when just theorizing about them.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: Introduction

One of the crucial hurdles for novice game designers is understanding their target audience. It's easy to design games that you want to play; it's harder to design games that the rest of the world also wants to play.

Amateur Magic designers often face the problem that they are distinctly non-average as Magic players. They're likely to be experienced in many formats and styles of play, knowledgeable about the game and its history, and at least skilled enough to hold their own at FNM. By contrast, the target audience for Magic is the kitchen table crowd: players whose tournament experience consists of one prerelease every few years. Most of these players are pretty unskilled at the game. This fact has a great deal of importance for designers.

CCDD 091813—Singular Notion

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/18/2013 - There are two distinct applications for tutors. Using them as card slots 5-8 to ensure that you get that one card you really want reduces variance and makes games play out the same way more often, which is boring. Tutoring to get "silver bullet" one-ofs so that you can adapt to any situation actually does the opposite. Singular Notion is an attempt to make a tutor that can only be used for good, and never evil.*

Deconstructing Theros Overview

Now that we've looked at each of the major mechanics in Theros, let's take a brief moment to consider the bigger picture.

SPOILERS:

Weekend Art Challenge Review 091313—jonone

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 091313—jonone

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.

Suvnica Week 13 Review, Part 2: Colorblind (Guild Artifact Cycles)

Here's a secret - Ravnica's cycle of guild artifacts is directly responsible for Suvnica even being a thing. Most of them were pretty bad, but I still think that they were some of the funner designs to come out of a set practically overflowing with fun designs. There were a few different things that inspired me to pitch this project, but a WAC around the time of Dragon's Maze got my hopes up that they would revisit the cycle in DGM (they didn't). I kept struggling to make a Simic artifact, and while I kept coming up with good designs (I thought) none of them felt like they made sense in Simic creatively. This in turn got me thinking about guilds with different philosophical focuses, and now here we are 750 card designs later. More rambling later. For now, here's the designs you guys came up with for the Suvnican analogue to that cycle:

Suvnica Week 13 Review, Part 1: Thug Story (Radkar Keyword)

Terrorists, grifters, and thugs, the Radkar thrive at the intersection of Power and Chaos. Let's see what kind of keywords everyone came up with for them.

Deconstructing Theros: Devotion

Alternate title: Why Chroma was a bad mechanic, but Devotion will be good.

Chroma was pretty much a dud when it debuted in Eventide. It was certainly not as beloved as Persist/Wither, but probably more popular than the untap symbol. Still, a mechanic needs a stronger recommendation than "more popular than the untap symbol" to get a second shot. The success of individual cards like Primalcrux and Light from Within suggests that perhaps the problem wasn't with Chroma itself. Perhaps the execution was flawed. Devotion is an improvement on Chroma in three crucial aspects: flavor, consistency, and as-fan support.

CCDD 091213—Misthaven

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/12/2013 - This land cycle is primarily about exploring the use of scry as an alternative to traditional cycling. I also added three words to the ETB clause, that make a colored ETB tapped land slightly more functional, apparently to distract from the primary idea. [shrug]

CCDD 091113—Akroan Horse

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/11/2013 - Here's a bit of a departure from CCDD's tried-and-true formula. Today, the Cool Card Design is an actual card, Theros' Akroan Horse. Yesterday, it was revealed and I was impressed.

Today, I'll explain why I like it so much and compare with my attempts to design to this trope.

SPOILER:

CCDD 091013—Blink

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/10/2013 - Blink is another attempt at a new blue-centric keyword. It includes a mana cost parameter, which no evergreen keywords do, but that doesn't stop it from being used in an expert block every few years. It's a combat ability, but not in the traditional sense.

Deconstructing Theros: Bestow

Let's examine bestow, the new creature/aura mechanic in Theros.

Spoilers Ahead:

Suvnica Week 12 Review, Part 2: The Last Horizons I Can See Are Now Resigned to Memory (Rimid Keywords)

The Rimid are vampires that feed off of memories instead of blood. You all came up with some cool ways of representing that through keyword mechanics. Here are some potential guild keywords for the Rimid.

Suvnica Week 12 Review, Part 1: And the Champion Is... (Sahleen Keywords)

I've fallen pretty behind on reviewing cards, and I'm sorry for that. The Sahleen/Rimid challenge ran several weeks ago already. I'm going to try to catch up on my backlog over the course of this week. First up are the Sahleen, which inspired a pretty cool collection of keywords.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 090613—Theros Monsters

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 090613—Theros Monsters

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.

Why the Scry Lands are Rare

As soon as the scry lands were revealed in this week's Latest Developments, there was a massive outcry that these cards had the wrong rarity. After all, look at Kazandu Refuge, Gruul Guildgate, Savage Lands, and Highland Weald. Don't they establish that a dual land which enters the battlefield tapped with some minor benefit is common or uncommon?

Well, maybe. But there's a much more important convention which takes precedence over that one:

CCDD 090513—Attuned

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/05/2013 - Attuned is another keyword I'm exploring for blue. Because blue understands magic better than the other colors, it makes sense that some of its creatures would too.

CCDD 090413—Sneaky

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/4/2013 - Blue needs more creature keywords to give designers more flexibility when creating creature cycles. Sneaky is an evasion ability that feels blue enough that it could be primary there (and it could be secondary in black or even green).

Designing Suvnica, Week 14: Present Tense

Here we are -- the last week of keyword design challenges. I'll probably be taking a week or two off after this to figure out where we're going next with Suvnica (and to catch up on card reviews -- I know I'm a few weeks behind). Let's wrap up this stage and dive into Kismi and Sorba.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 083013—Theros Speculation

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

CCDD 090313—True Potential

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/3/2013 - I did some travelling yesterday that afforded me the chance to catch up on some Drive to Work podcasts (Hey, I just found someone's been transcribing them. Nice!) The most inspiring one was he discussion of blue, which led to several designs I'll share soon. Today's card plays into blue's belief that, with time and dedication, anyone can become anything.

Deconstructing Theros: Heroic

Theros is focused on three major groups from classical mythology: gods, monsters, and heroes. We've already discussed enchantment creatures and Monstrosity; today, I'd like to talk about Heroic. All cards in this post have been officially previewed by Wizards.

Suvnica Guild Profile: The Sorba

(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.)

{R}{W} The Sorba

The Sorba have spent the better part of the life of the guildpact kicking themselves for having ever agreed to it in the first place. The initial founders were a group that honestly believed that, as a theoretically neutral governing instrument, it would be a force of great social justice. After the compact was made, the Sorba quickly came to realize that the same factions that attempted to take advantage of the disenfranchised and weak would continue to do so, regardless of the pact.

Suvnica Guild Profile: The Kismi

(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.)

{G}{U} The Kismi

Fate has a very prominent role on Suvnica, and no group is more immersed in tapping into the signals fate broadcasts and interpreting them than the Kismi.