Weekend Art Challenge 032814 Review—Red/Blue Mechanic

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

Weekend Art Challenge—Red/Blue Mechanic

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single 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 032714—Lazarus Vine

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/27/2014 - Morph triggers are way too tempting.

New Player Perspectives: Session 3

[New Player Perspectives is the ongoing story of my non-gamer girlfriend's introduction to Magic.]

Another month, another duel. As before, Freyja had a fairly clear recall of the rules despite not having thought about them in several weeks. This game was an epic struggle; I was up 29 -7 while she drew land after land, but eventually she stabilized and started sending in the flyers. My Axebane Stag was triple-blocked, Gravediggered, and finally Rebuked to squeak out a win from 2 life. If all my games were this exciting, I'd attend FNM a lot more often!

CCDD 032514—Punish Arrogance

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/25/2014

Weekend Art Challenge 032114 Review—Neverland

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

Weekend Art Challenge 032114—Neverland

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single 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 032014—Blind Levy

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/20/2014 - In some ways better and in some ways worse than Silence, Blind Levy exists because white has dabbled with cost-increase effects for a long time, but never at common. Ironically, this could easily prove broken below rare. At least it's simple.

CCDD 031914—Mnemonic Sorceress

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/19/2014 - I wanted to use devotion to blue to determine the quality of spell this card nets you.

New Player Perspectives: Session 2

[New Player Perspectives is the ongoing story of my non-gamer girlfriend's introduction to Magic.]

A month had passed since Freyja's first game. Not ideal, I know, but both of our careers require a ton of extra work around Christmas. (She's a choral conductor; I'm a baritone.) I offered to recap the rules, but she elected to jump right in and pick things up as she went along. We used the same decks as in the previous session. 

CCDD 031814—Bridge to Anywhere

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/18/2014 - Last June, I proposed a land called Bridge to Anywhere that would help alleviate land screw. Today I offer an updated version that eschews shuffling and is less powerful (which is good, because that makes it more usable at common—the place we want most of our fixing).

Weekend Art Challenge Review 031414—JordyLakiere

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

Weekend Art Challenge 031414—JordyLakiere

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single 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 031314—Sylvan Aqueduct & Tree City

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/13/2014 - Here are a couple of lands that try to fall in a new spot in the power level spectrum, iterating on past land mechanics.

New Player Perspectives: Session 1

[New Player Perspectives is the ongoing story of my non-gamer girlfriend's introduction to Magic.]

Freyja prefers to jump in and figure a game out for herself, so I only spent about ten minutes explaining before we started. (I suspect this is a common trait- few people are willing to spend the 25+ minutes it would take to thoroughly explain all the phases, card types, etc.) She chose the W/U deck. We played with hands revealed for the first game, and I did a fair bit of explanation of what spells she could cast and why. Happily, it turned out to be an extremely close and exciting game. She won from 2 life.

A Set in Four Cards: Milokraz

Theros & Born of the Gods Challenge—Review

Theros & Born of the Gods Challenge—Review
Today I review the mythic rare submissions for cards that might have been in Theros or Born of the Gods. Remember, I'm primarily focused on whether the card is a good addition to the block and how realistic the card is in terms of being printed in an actual Magic set.

Brimaz is certainly at exciting card, and I like how vigilance means you don't have to choose between making cats on offense or defense (even if that takes some of the fun of finding a way to give him vigilance or double strike or multiple attacks away from the player).

Obviously the card is dangerously undercosted (I'd cost this at {3}{W}{W} or maybe {1}{W}{W}{W} if we really want to push it), but that's a Dev issue. My biggest concern: I'm not sure the novelty of getting its tokens into combat immediately is worth breaking four lines of text up into seven. "Whenever CARDNAME attacks or blocks, put a 1/1 white Cat Soldier token OTB" is 90% functionally identical 90% of the time. Giving the tokens vigilance seems unnecessary, but if you were married to that, why not just give Brimaz "Cat creatures you control have vigilance"?

Weekend Art Challenge 030714 Review—Toru-meow

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

It's a wordy one, so get comfy.

Weekend Art Challenge 030714—Toru-meow

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single 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 030614—Seer's Sanctuary

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/6/2014 - Colorless smoothing land.
(Sack effect is worse than scry X in a couple ways.)

New Player Perspectives: Meet Freyja

Designers often have a specific idea of how their cards will be received by players. Naturally, the accuracy of these predictions is far from guaranteed.

Here at Goblin Artisans, we give and receive frequent feedback on designs. I suspect all of us are getting good at predicting how other designers will view our cards. However, I don't think this feedback is a valid substitute for the perspective of an inexperienced player. It's one thing to pontificate on how cleanly a card reads, how intuitive a mechanic feels, et cetera; it's quite another to actually hand a deck to somebody who's never played Magic before and see what they do with it. Sure, I've read Mark Rosewater's explanations of what new players do and don't understand, but I haven't experienced it firsthand since 1994.

CCDD 030514—Jaunt Through the Woods

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/5/2014 - This was the card I originally tried to use Satyr Wayfinder's text on, but it was too much text. So this uses the old search method to leave room for the keyword that can get you the spell for free.

CCDD 030414—Expedition

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/4/2014 - Satyr Wayfinder gets you land without breaking the game for a search-and-shuffle. I argue it's inevitable that we see a more direct Rampant Growth variant using that tech. One important difference is that a card that only does that shouldn't be able to fail (Wayfinder gets away with that because you always get at least the 1/1 body.)

Who's up for GDS3?

I have some questions for the Goblin Artisans community. How many of you are planning to enter the third Great Designer Search, when it comes around? Do you hope to be a finalist, or will you participate as a community contributor?

Would you participate in a practice GDS run by Goblin Artisans? How much time would you be willing to invest in such a contest, given that there'd be no internship prize?

Would a sample multiple-choice test be a valuable preparation tool?

What role does Magic design play in your life, on a scale from "It's a fun way to kill time" to "I'm gonna work in R&D someday, somehow"?

Weekend Art Challenge Review 022814—Tung Monster

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

This weekend, I gave explicit permission to bend or break the core rules of the challenge, because I determined it was a bad challenge. More on that in the wrap up.