CCDD 123113—Break the Ice

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/31/2013 - Happy New Year!

Weekend Art Challenge Review 122713—Sandara

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

Weekend Art Challenge 122713—Sandara

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.

Theros Review (Part 1—Multicolor)

The problem with reviewing a set when it first comes out is that all your opinions are speculation. No matter how talented or experienced you are at dissecting new sets and predicting card value, deck archetypes and how much fun it'll all be, you don't have the perspective born from playing with those actual cards in the actual environment and that will limit the value of your writing.

The flipside is that no one will care what you think if you write about it after everyone knows the environment. Unless you're not writing strategy tips, but instead analyzing the set for game design nuggets. Let's do that now, with a season of perspective under our belts.

Multicolor

Agent of Horizons and 9 more cards comprise a double cycle of common creatures with off-color activated abilities. These cards push players toward two-color combinations and help give direction in a draft without hurting a player's chance of casting her spells like gold cards do. For that reason, all five ally color pairs and all five enemy color pairs are represented—to keep the format interesting, we want at least those 10 decks to exist and have unique identities. Some of these cards are better than others (which is inevitable for a large cycle) and that might be an indication that Development thought the {B}{G} deck needed less help than the {U}{B} deck, for instance.

CCDD 122513—Astronomer's Journey

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/25/2013 - Merry Christmas!

CCDD 122413—Nature's Path

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/24/2013 - Nature's Path is Ranger's Path without the acceleration. Or Gaea's Bounty for a mono-green deck. Or a Divination but… you get the picture.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 122013—ChrisCold

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

Weekend Art Challenge 122013—ChrisCold

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 122013—Dutiful Knight

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/20/2013 - Another knight to show up when things are looking dark.

CCDD 121913—Valiant Defense

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/19/2013 - What if white (who occasionally gets flash—I'm not really sure why) got a Knight that could jump in to save the day at the last moment? And only then?

CCDD 121813—Escorting

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/18/2013 - How many times can I post about the same mechanic? As many as it takes. This is how design happens. Iteration. If an idea is worth pursuing—and I'm growing ever more certain this one is—than it deserves to be iterated on until its the best it can be.

We've been finding ways to improve this one pretty significantly and I'm having a blast. This latest iteration is based on jack's suggestion yesterday.

CCDD 121713—Escorted

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/17/2013 - Last week I looked at TehWERR's Escort mechanic. This week, I want to look at Bass's.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 121213—mariusbota

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

Weekend Art Challenge 121213—mariusbota

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 121213—Bronze Phylactery

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/12/2013 - I started this design just trying to make a mana sink, something to do with your spare one or two mana each turn. Something compelled me to add a commitment of existing life points, but that didn't fit the original idea, so I broke them out and they're completely different now.

CCDD 121113—Escort

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/11/2013 - In last weekend's art challenge, TehWERR proposed a new keyword named escort. I think is has considerable potential. Let's take a closer look. (I've switched the name up for flavor reasons.)

CCDD 121013—Share

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/10/2013 - A number of interesting mechanics came about from this weekend's art challenge. Today, I want to share with you some more cards with share, which lets other players copy your spell for free, but gives you a card if they do.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 120613—bpsola

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

Chanukah Wrap-Up

Chanukah finished a few days ago, but I wanted to put up some cards for the last two days. I have those posted down below, but before we get to them, I wanted to talk about the CPotD series a little bit.

Suvnica Week 17 Review: No Mercy (Ruthless Designs)

Today we'll be taking a look at the submissions for our second guild keyword challenge: Ruthless for the Radkar.

Weekend Art Challenge 120613—bpsola

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 for Low-Skill Players: a Postlude on Rules

There's one more LSP tendency that I didn't mention earlier. Unlike the others I discussed, it's not a question of preferences; rather, it's about knowledge of the game. LSPs rarely have a deep and detailed understanding of the rules of Magic.

This fact won't surprise anyone who has read the Comprehensive Rules. They are absurdly long and complicated. This is desirable, in one sense; Magic has a lot more space for complexity than many other games. But it also means that the average player has only a crude understanding of the game engine's inner workings.

CCDD 120513—Tireless Intruder

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/5/2013 - For this art, I wanted a spirit soldier that would never stop fighting for you. This is meant to be the aggressive half of a Reassembling Skeleton pair. I definitely want to limit it's ability to working on attacks, since an infinite chump-blocker has already been done.

CCDD 120413—No Such Thing as a Fair Fight

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/4/2013 - Unfortunately, this card can't use the fight action word, but it does offer green some nice flexibility: It can be used to gang up on one big opposing creature when necessary, or it can let you kill two birds with one enormous stone.

CCDD 120313—Advance Warning

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/3/2013 - This started life as a top-down design. It ended up being a weaker, whiter Remand. I'm not dissatisfied with that, but I am curious how you all would've executed a card about a scout detecting the early movements of an enormous threat.

Chanukah Present of the Day - Chanukah Bush Grove

Day 6:

Chanukah Present of the Day - Gelt and Dreidel Game

Days 4 and 5:

Weekend Art Challenge 112913 Review—Ninjatic

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

Chanukah Present of the Day - Gift Exchange

Day 3

Weekend Art Challenge 112913—Ninjatic

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.

Chanukah Present of the Day - Maccabee Brothers

Day 2:

Chanukah Present of the Day - Everlasting Oil

Happy (belated) first day of Chanukah! Also, happy Thanksgiving.

CCDD 112813—Cornucopia of Secrets

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/27/2013 - Accelerating the game is fun, especially when you can do it in two ways instead of just one.

CCDD 112713—Ouroboros Ritual

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/27/2013 - Today's card is a mana ritual that only accelerates you ahead one mana, but can be reused, which falls somewhere between red's one-time acceleration and green's permanent acceleration, hence the hybrid cost.

CCDD 112613—Spellbind

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/26/2013 - Almost two years ago, I explored spellbind and runeward, mechanics that would combat the risk of enchanting your own creatures. I recently found a better way to template the keyword.

Weekend [Art] Design Challenge Review 112213—New P/T

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

Weekend [Art] Design Challenge 112213—New P/T

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your final submission is due by Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is encouraged to provide as well. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. If and only if you provide a direct link to art for your submission, and the artist's name, will I mock it up and include it in a follow-up review.

CCDD 112113—Toxic Hunter

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/22/2013 - It's generally wise to avoid giving creatures abilities that don't do much: First strike on a 1/4 is pretty silly and regeneration is redundant on an indestructible creature.

Only one of Toxic Hunter's two abilities will ever be relevant at a time, but that's okay, because which one that is will vary from match to match. Every ability can be ignored in the right circumstances, but by having two abilities that work on different axes, Toxic Hunter will usually be more than just Scathe Zombies.

CCDD 112013—Ethereal Interceptor

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/20/2013 - "This creature can block creatures as if they had no abilities" is more than a little confusing. Here's a simpler way:

Designing Suvnica, Week 17: Alpha Dog Days

The test deck we'll be pairing off our Illustrate test deck against will showcase this mechanic:

Pick a Tribe

 Changelings

CCDD 111913—Brutal Demonstration

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/19/2013 - Intimidation Bolt is just begging for an adaptation using fight.