Tesla: Gearing Up

We've been looking for a way for Tesla to let players build their own machines. At the end of our last discussion Tommy Occhipinti proposed a tweak to the Artifactfall model where the machine does more every time you add a piece.

This latest take requires a few more words, but actually simplifies the base concept. Instead of a machine with a bunch of moving parts which double up when we add a new component, we get a machine that turns on every time we improve it.

CCDD 123014—Flailing Baspekt

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/30/2014 - When I found this design in my drafts folder, the ability was keyworded ('flailing'). I can see a handful of cards with this ability over as many years, but it's clearly not worth its own vocabulary.

I imagine it be to primary in green and secondary in black, maybe white. Thematically it could be red, but there just aren't many red creatures that would actually benefit from it.

Weekend Art Design Challenge Review 122614—Gilberto March

Weekend Art Challenge Review
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Weekend Art Challenge Review 121914—Syst-eeem

Weekend Art Challenge Review
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Weekend Art Design Challenge 122614—Gilberto March

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

A Train of Thought—Prowess & Creature-Spells

You are embarking a Magic Design train of thought. Destination: Unknown.

CCDD 122214—Gilded Archfriar

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/22/2014 - Gilded Archfriar lets you transmute cards from your hand into cards in your sideboard, effectively widening your repertoire by up to 15 spells.

Weekend Art Challenge 121914—Syst-eeem

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 121814—Whisper of the Woods

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/18/2014 - The Fog variants from the last WAC made me realize there's been no simple Fog cantrip. For the most part, skilled drafters ignore Fog except as a sideboard response to cards like Overrun or Flying Crane Technique. Making it a cantrip should make it more main-deckable…

The trouble is that an efficient Fog cantrip would likely be just too good for Turbo-Fog, a deck that we're happy can exist, but is non-interactive enough that we don't want to ever be The Best Deck in any format.

Drafting Lands in Khans of Tarkir

This will look like a strategy article at first blush, but the strategy is one everyone who's drafted Khans of Tarkir more than a few times should already know, and that I assume has already been written about a dozen times; this post is more about the design that led to the strategy.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 121214—PE Travers

Weekend Art Challenge Review
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CCDD 121514—Gold Dragons 2

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/15/2014 - Last week I posted four R-D dragons and Evan made an important observation: "The white, blue, and black ones all feel like they could be monocolored examples of those colors' respective iconics." And he was dead-on. The white one could easily be a mono-white angel; the blue one would make an odd sphinx, but is monoblue; and the black one would be an unusal demon but is monoblack. Clearly, these dragons have to feel as red as they do their second color, and they have to feel more like dragons than not.

Here's another go:

Weekend Art Challenge 121214—PE Travers

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

Tesla: Momma Didn't Raise No Rube

A couple weeks back our Tesla discussion turned towards ways for players to build their own machines. We got a few ideas there and started by exploring sharing abilities directly.

But I don't think that's our best approach. Let's take a look at what I believe to be some more promising directions.

CCDD 121114—Gold Dragons

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/11/2014 - I happened upon a Question Mark or similar about how we see red's iconic creature in every color, which is obviously an odd thing to do with a color's iconic and something we see almost none of with the other color's iconics. The answer, of course, is that dragons are everyone's favorite creature type in Fantasy and pretty much everywhere else.

To that end, I propose a cycle of dragons for each color that are also red, so that each color can have their dragon-y fun without robbing red of its iconic creature.

CCDD 121014—Recanter of Realities & Inevitable Revival

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/10/2014 - These would currently be silver-bordered. I'm not saying they should be black-bordered, but I do think the question is worth examining.

CCDD 120914—Oaknock Expert

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/9/2014 - Mike's submission got me thinking about champion.

Why do champions exile a creature of their own kind? You could say they're protecting those creatures, shielding them from all possible harm as long as they last, but then why would having a creature be a requirement?

Here's another way to express similar flavor.

Weekend Design Challenge Review 120214—Unfulfilled Promise

Weekend Design Challenge Review
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Weekend Design Challenge 120214—Unfulfilled Promise

Weekend Design Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's challenge 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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 120414—Miner of Secrets

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/4/2014 - Inspired by Tommy's Helpful Familiar, here's a red Stealer of Secrets.

CCDD 120314—Searing Armory

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/3/2014 - Inspired by Czynski's Flame Aurora, Searing Armory looks for more ways to remove the card disadvantage of Crushing Pain. Turns out, affecting multiple creatures does the trick nicely.

CCDD 120214—Volcanic Musing

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/2/2014 - Explosive Revelation meets Act on Impulse. Inspired by Reuben's Flare of Inspiration.

Sometimes you get one spell and sometimes you get a land as well. My favorite thing is that the less damage the revealed spell causes, the more likely you are to afford to cast it.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 112814—MaliciaRoseNoire

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

Weekend Art Challenge 112814—MaliciaRoseNoire

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

Tesla: File Sharing

Tesla seems like a prime location to capture the feeling of building your own machine. Looking at last week's discussion, a pretty common approach was directly grafting additional abilities onto artifacts from one another.

I want to pin down just how plausible an idea that is.

CCDD 112514—Aura of Leadership

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/00/2014 - I've been getting déjà vu on a lot of my designs for a while. I expect some of that is because I'm inevitably returning to certain compelling ideas, and some of it is just a paranoid byproduct of having shared as many designs as I have over nearly 7 years. (!)

I couldn't find this in the archives, but if you can, let me know. This is the closest I could find.

CCDD 112514—Kemral's Vengeance

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/25/2014 - It's been a while since I've designed a card from the art down, but my repository is waning and I found this piece and had to do something with it. I imagine it supports a story moment in which a red character named Kemral repays a betrayal from a black-aligned ally, but that's all fluff.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 112114—TheFirstAngel

Weekend Art Challenge Review
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Weekend Art Challenge 112114—TheFirstAngel

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 112014—Ridealong Bandito

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/20/2014 - I made several terrible iterations on this mechanic before settling on this one. I'd say it's neither great nor awful: usable, perhaps with some tweaking.

CCDD 111914—Smoke the Whole Box

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/19/2014 - Here's a reactive Johnny card. Can you see any uses for it?

CCDD 111814—Dream Trap, Dungeon Shackles & Aspen Blessing

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/18/2014 - Here's a partial cycle of auras that upgrade from simple+small effects to bigger effects when you can afford it.

Tesla: Integrated Circuit

I was recently looking back through some of the work we've compiled for Tesla seeking out common threads. Clearly our ideas influence one another, but if an idea keeps coming up it means one of two things: either it's a Melvin-y design challenge, or it hits on something endemic to human nature that we're anxious to experience.

I think combining artifacts with one another is the latter.

CCDD 111714—Infect?

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/17/2014 - I discovered last night that the Weekend Art Challenge I had scheduled never went live. Sorry about that, artisans. Mid-week challenges have done poorly in the past, so I'll save it for this weekend. Instead, I'll be sure to post more CCDDs to discuss this week.

First up, I was listening to MaRo's Lessons Learned podcast about Scars of Mirrodin and it occurred to me to wonder if the set had to have -1/-1 counters. Consider this:

CCDD 111314—The Natural

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/13/2014 - This creature is simply meant to get double the size from +1/+1 counters. How would you word it?

CCDD 111214—Raise the Unknown & Indiscriminate Necromancy

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/12/2014 - It occurred to me that a 2/2 colorless creature is an awful lot like a zombie (particularly a Null from Innistrad or Returned from Theros).

Weekend Art Challenge Review 110714—Code Geass

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

Weekend Art Challenge 110714—Code Geass

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 110414—Sliver Breeders

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/4/2014 - Here's a novel way to do slivers. Given how mechanically different it is from existing slivers, it likely makes more sense to use breed on another type of creature, but thematically it's perfect for slivers, so that's how I'll present it for now:

Weekend Art Design Challenge Review 103114—Halloween

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

Weekend Art Design Challenge 103114—Halloween

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 103014—War Recruiter

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/30/2014 - Just a reusable Zealous Conscripts. "Just."

War Recruiter is restricted to hitting untapped creatures, which limits its power a bit, and encourages players to attack with their creatures, which was the real inspiration for the card: "You're guys will attack for you, or they'll attack for me, but no sitting on their asses."

Weekend Art Challenge Review 102414—Steve Prescott (Un-set)

Weekend Art Challenge Review
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Tesla: Version 2.0

We're intending to give Tesla a theme of progress, and that focus is tied up with the trappings of Steam Punk and artifacts. Thus far we've come up with a multitude of ways to convey progress, and a number more to interact with artifacts, but we haven't addressed their main overlap.

How can we weave in the concept of technological advance?

Weekend Art Challenge 102414—Steve Prescott (Un-set)

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.

CCDD 102314—Dragonslayer

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/23/2014 - We've hit this trope so many times, but I found a new solution last night.

Tesla: Rise to Power

Next up on our list of proposed Tesla mechanics to investigate is an adaptation of Charged as originally proposed by fading shadows of a memory beloved: Ben Nassau's Power-Up.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 101714—Frank Hong

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

CCDD 102014—Forced Retirement

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/20/2014 - It's awkward that Oblivion Ring and Banishing Light are targeted removal enchantments like Pacifism, but aren't auras, and you don't name your target until after the spell resolves. Here I take a stab at a couple alternate templates for an updated Journey to Nowhere.

Weekend Art Challenge 101714—Frank Hong

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 someone volunteers to render the cards.