Weekend Art Challenge 102513 Review—tamerr

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

Weekend Art Challenge 102513—tamerr

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 102413—Identity Thief

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/24/2013 - Identity Thief is just a Mind Control that's countered by Essence Scatter instead of Negate. And is an awesome shapeshifter, that also copies its target's ETB and LTB effects. And when you Doom Blade it, you get your creature back.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: Subtle Rightness

One tendency of LSPs that I find particularly surprising and unintuitive is that they don't read cards.

Oh, they'll glance at them and get a feeling for what the card does. But they won't internalize the rules text; instead, they'll form a vague mental impression of the card's effect ("big dragon", "mana elf", or "lightning bolt") and only call to mind the actual text when it becomes relevant. In short, they evaluate cards by feeling as well as mechanics. This tendency is shared by many HSPs as well, but it shows up far more at lower skill levels.

CCDD 102313—Unwanted

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/23/2013 - These cards are silver-bordered not because they're silly, but because they're not printable for tournament Magic. They utilize your opponent's sideboard, which is not public information in a tournament, and isn't even a defined game term outside of tournament rules and Jester's Sombrero. Take a look.

CCDD 102213—Sudden Monstrosity

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/22/2013 - I debated whether to make this an X spell that put any number of counters on a creature or just cost {G}{G} and only ever give one. Ultimately, the non-counter portion of it makes it weird enough to be uncommon and X (which all but requires uncommon rarity) gives the card three substantially different uses.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 101813—batatalion

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.
My only direction was "Discover an ancient world."

CCDD - Bundle of Joy

As a general rule, if you have to model your rules text off of Dance of the Dead's oracle text, you're doing something wrong.

Designing Suvnica, Week 16(b): An Offer You Can't Refuse

While the designs for Illustrate are coming in, being evaluated, and put into a test deck, we might as well get the ball rolling on giving the Suiroza a test deck to fight against. There weren't nearly as many Radkar keyword submissions, so I think we'll try to narrow this list down to just three final keywords to test.

Weekend Art Challenge 101813—batatalion

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.

Designing Suvnica, Week 16: Teaching By Example

After looking over all the feedback in the thread, I've settled on the final four mechanics that we're going to be initially designing for in Suiroza. The first we're going to be designing for is Exemplification.

CCDD 101713—Blind Ambition & Big Dreams

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/17/2013 - Blind Ambition is a alternate-win condition for black. Black wants to show off its dominance and just having bigger toys is good enough for the color.

CCDD 101613—Avant Savant

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/16/2013 - Some cards are great in multiples (particularly cheap threats), but many cards become redundant. Even those cheap threats might become dead draws late in the game. Avant Savant aims to alleviate these problems for you with a free (but conditional) card selection effect.

CCDD 101513—Hired Thark

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/15/2013 - What the world needs now is mercenaries. Sweet mercenaries.

And Orcs. What I wanted to accomplish with this card (apart from the Vorthos agenda of reintroducing Orcs to Magic…as a black type) was a mercenary that required payment in order to be worthwhile.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: Please Hammer, Don't Hurt 'Em

Here's an obvious fact about human psychology: Losing feels bad, whereas winning feels good. 

Here's a less obvious fact about human psychology: Losing feels significantly worse than winning feels good. This phenomenon is called "loss aversion", and it explains why consumers would rather avoid a $5 surcharge than get a $5 discount, even though they amount to exactly the same thing. Our brains place a heavier weight on keeping things we already have than on acquiring new things of equal value. From the perspective of classical economics, this is utterly irrational. But it's how people work, and designing against human nature is a losing battle.

Weekend [Art] Challenge 101113—Color Chain

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 101013—Vedalken Grappler

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/10/2013 - I'm not proposing that numerous cards should use this grappling mechanic, but as a sort of cross between Dungeon Geists and… Kashi-Tribe Warrior, I like the flavor. I don't expect it's NWO-friendly, particularly given that Wizards seems to have made a conscious choice not to put Frost Breath-touch on any modern creatures.

CCDD 100913—Unkillable Karl

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/9/2013 - Absorb 1 proved too powerful to use as a common keyword. Absorb X-1 is clearly absurd, so let's put it on a rare. And just in case that's not scary enough, we'll throw trample on too. 'Cause that's how rares roll nowadays.

CCDD 100813—Plague Caller

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/8/2013 - Plague Caller is directly inspired by Pasteur's Killer Queen. I wanted to capitalize on the bugs-killing-you story by making it clear that it's a swarm and they're eating you and your protein grows the swarm.

Weekend [Art] Challenge 100413—Interaction Chain

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 100313—Fortune's Favor

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/3/2013 - I was scanning my old CCDD folder for designs that seemed less boring than the ones in my new folder. I found several, but this one from May 2012 stuck out to me because of the art, which reminds me of Theros. I'm not claiming any kind of prescience; I just think it's neat how this could work in Theros almost as-is.

Designing Suvnica, Week 15: More Equal than Others

Time for us to start narrowing down the final mechanics we'll be playtesting with. I was originally going to host this part of the proceedings over on the guild's profile page, but I think I'll just throw the final candidates for playtesting there and have the conversation and arguments on a separate page instead.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: The Best of All Possible Worlds

Gottfried Leibniz may have been a brilliant philosopher and mathematician, but he just couldn't catch a break. Not only did Newton's cronies unfairly accuse him of plagiarizing the calculus, but Voltaire viciously parodied him in Candide. Leibniz was caricatured as the naive Dr. Pangloss, who persistently asserted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. 

Little did Voltaire know that this ideal world, known to us as "Magical Christmas Land", would one day be populated by millions of low-skill players!

Mechanical Engineering: The Next Stages of Suvnica

A typical Fall-realease large expansion set has 249 cards. Excluding basic lands, the entirety of the Return to Ravnica block had 654 unique cards. Since we started Suvnica a few months ago, we have created (and in a few cases, pre-printed) 845 cards. Now that we've wrapped up the last of our guild keyword submissions, it's probably a good time to take a look at where we're at and where we'll be going.

Lessons from YMTC4

I was lucky enough to help with the initial selection of design submissions for You Make The Card 4. Now that the community's card is complete, I'd like to share some of my takeaways from that experience. I don't speak on behalf of Wizards in any way.