Friday, August 29, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge 082914—sc0pe

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if that happens.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Tesla: Scrapheap


A few weeks back we were looking at mechanical space to complement the starting points we already have for Tesla design. A lot of artisans were excited by the graveyard interactions hinted at by Mine/Scrounge and made a wide range of suggestions.

There were a multitude of strictly graveyard-centric mechanics, and we might well end up using any one of them if it fills the set’s needs, but at this point we’d be better served exploring what Tesla can do with the graveyard that Innistrad or Odyssey never could.

Experimental Limited Format — Swap

I’ve had this idea for a new Limited format for years now. It’s partially based on the trade mechanism from Andromeda and partially on a vague idea about how players could build a Limited deck in a way analogous to how starting players build Constructed decks: by opening a few packs and trading cards.

No card designs follow.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Friday, August 22, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge 082214—Aaron Miller

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if that happens.

Thursday, August 21, 2014

CCDD 082014—Wizen

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/20/2014 - Let's play with the new "base power and toughness" terminology. What's that? It's a great way to make a Weakness effect? Imagine that!

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Cost of Doing Business


Let’s start off with a disclaimer: there are no new card designs in this post. If you happen to be a Wizards of the Coast employee, read on!

We’ve been discussing design space that could complement the mechanics we’re currently exploring for Tesla. Iteration and some versions of Cogs care about Converted Mana Cost, a term Wizards doesn’t generally put on commons. Now we could certainly spend most of our complexity points for the set here and print them anyway, but this is actually a more general problem for Magic, so first let’s try to solve it. How can we make the concept of cost comparison available at common under New World Order?

CCDD 082014—Fanned Grek

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/20/2014 - Red shouldn't mind sharing its 'inferior' looting ability with other players, partly because other players will have a little less to gain from it on average. I wanted an ETB creature that did that.

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Friday, August 15, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge 081514—j0sh

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if that happens.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

CCDD 081414—Tao Keeper & Zephyr Duelist

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/14/2014 - I'm trying a couple things here. First, I want to show a bad-ass Fantasy character with a disability, representing that disability mechanically, but with a positive tone overall. Second, it occurs to me that the Charging Rhino ability can be expressed as a cost rather than a restriction, and that the Goblin War Drums ability is as good on small creatures as it is on big ones (for different reasons).

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

CCDD 081314—Eska, Dreamweaver

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/13/2014 - This is the other card with this art I felt was worth sharing.

I'm on the road to GenCon as you read this. If you're going and want to meet, your best bet to find me is at Games on Demand.

Tuesday, August 12, 2014

CCDD 081214—Mina, Dreamweaver

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/12/2014 - This design didn't fit the requirements of the Weekend Art Challenge, but I liked it well enough to share. Originally she just had the second ability, but the first ability was a nice fit, gives the card clear internal purpose, and doesn't increase the power level as much as it might seem.

Monday, August 11, 2014

Friday, August 8, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge 080814—jaimeibarra

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if that happens.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

CCDD 080714—Pentapod

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/7/2014 - Pentapod's ability is like a flagbearer for discard (see: Coalition Honor Guard). Like Dodecapod, it is meant to combat discard, but rather than punish your opponent for making you discard the spell you added because of her discard, it is meant to actually protect the card's you're so desperate not to discard.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Tesla: Open Season

Last week we voted on which mechanics to keep pursuing for Tesla. The results are in, here’s what’s staying:

(Note, we’ll be testing plenty of implementations for the mechanics, these particular ones are just intended to give you an idea of the space.)

CCDD 080614—Parade of Gnomes

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/6/2014 - Symmetrical effects are some of the most challenging designs because they tend to look unappealing and the line between too good and too bad is thinner; it can't be balanced by costs alone. There needs to be something about the effect that benefits its caster enough for her to spend the mana and the card to make it happen, but there needs to be a significant cost to abusing it thoroughly. Creatureless decks turn Day of Judgment into a one-sided effect, but playing no creatures means they need to find another way to win, and are vulnerable to decks that can't push through their removal. Anyhow.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Friday, August 1, 2014

Weekend Art Challenge 080114—samwyse

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. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times.