Weekend Art Challenge 022715—mad_jojo

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 022615—Larval Mimic

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/26/2015 - Clone is powerful because it can copy anything, even Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Copying effects are fun and interesting, so it's unfortunate that we see them infrequently because of their power. (Complexity is an issue too, but it's not going anywhere.) Here's a thing.

CCDD 022515—Simian Pugilist

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/25/2015 - Simian Pugilist has a strange form of evasion. If you've got no cards or your opponent knows you have no instants somehow, then it does nothing, but most of the time it threatens to let you Giant Growth or Necrobite for free. What Pugilist threatens is limited only by your deck (and not by color). Of course, you can only play what's in your hand, but your opponent rarely knows that.

Tesla Horizons: Landing Gear

As we continue exploratory design for Tesla we'll be looking at all of our options for mechanically representing Tesla's progress theme (as discussed here). Each piece will examine what a few of the possible implementations might do to the surrounding set.

The first post looked at cards that improved themselves, tracking progress with the battlefield, and explicitly counting progress counters.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 022015—xkillz

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

CCDD 022315—Burnout Elemental

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/23/2015 - We often see cards like Cast Through Time and Pontiff of Blight which grant set mechanics to every applicable card. It's not so often that we get to see the same for nameless mechanics from Magic's past.

That train of thought turned me to Ball Lightning. How can a Ball Lightning share its abilities with your other creatures when it dies? If it works from the graveyard then it's both easy to forget and hard to interact with. But it can't very well stay on the battlefield. Can it?

Weekend Art Challenge 022015—xkillz

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 021915—Wizen

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/18/2015 - Here's another possible direction that Dragons of Tarkir might take for alternate-reality morph to play alongside manifest.

Tesla Horizons: Self-Contained, Board Tracking, and Explicit Progress Mechanics

We're moving forward with exploratory design for Tesla, and after looking at different ways to mechanically represent our progress theme last week it's time to examine what some of those implementations might do to the surrounding set.

We looked at too many options to examine in just one post, so for this week we're just going to look at the first couple.

CCDD 021815—Distraction

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/18/2015 - I want to share my initial reaction to Jules' decoy from Monday. Not because it's better, but it does continue in the conversation. In particular, I want to compare it to Ipaulsen's decoy, because they're so similar despite being designed without knowledge of the other.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 021315—Ben Wooten

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

CCDD 021615—Master Distractor & Afterimage

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/16/2015 - With the discussion surrounding whether or not Prowess could be the evergreen creature mechanic blue has been waiting for, I decided to design a few alternatives which fit better with the existing evergreen mechanics: no numbers, not augmenting how the cards play, but rather fundamentally changing it.

I haven't cracked the nut, per se, but I did get something pretty interesting out of it.

Weekend Art Challenge 021315—Ben Wooten

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 021215—Bloodmuzzle Ratkin

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/12/2015 - Deathtouch as evasion.

CCDD 021115—Warrior's Invocation

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/11/2015 - I fudged the keyword to make this work, but there's no place in the world for this design anyhow, so I'm not worrying about technicalities. It's just a cute combination of Fate Reforged abilities.

Tesla: MapQuest

[WotC Safe: No Original Designs in this Post]

We're still in exploratory design for Tesla, and as such we haven't nailed down many absolutes about where the eventual design is headed. Really all we know is that the set is going to involve artifacts and be themed around progress: change, improvement, and abandoning the old ways. That's all well and good, but thus far I've been leading you on a sort of haphazard perusal of design space.

Well not today. Exploratory design is supposed to map the territory, which means not just knowing what's out there, but where each fork in the road leads. We need an answer:

How does the way we represent our progress theme mechanically influence the rest of the design?

But it begs a more basic question:

What are our options for representing progress?

That's what I hope to answer today.

CCDD 021015—Goblin Socialite

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/10/2015 - The red version of Elvish Visionary. Or, if you prefer, a mono-red Burning-Tree Emissary for common.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 020615—TheHereticDivine

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

We've got a bunch of new designers today. Welcome!

I want to say something before we dive in. Critical feedback is crucial to improvement. Congratulations on taking the first step toward growing as a designer. Every designer twists up their own ego with the quality of their work, and it takes effort to escape that. The reason it's a problem is that we all make terrible cards (especially when we're just starting—but great designers still make bad cards) and that doesn't make us bad designers.

A good designer is just a bad designer who keeps designing.

Why do I mention this? I'm going to tell you your card isn't that great. This isn't a personal attack. Don't take it personally. Use it. Grow.

Weekend Art Challenge 020615—TheHereticDivine

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 Twitter Edition: The Goblin Game

Hey Artisans. Last week was Goblin Week (slightly NSFW), and in recognition of the holiday, I had a little design game going on on Twitter. The rules:

I'll post a pic every 20 minutes or so with a design restriction. Design a mtg card to match. #GobGame

Default rules unless otherwise stated:
1) 1 submission per player per pic
2) Must be a red goblin creature
3) include hashtag #GobGame

4) cost, rarity, other types, p/t, and rules text must fit in 1 tweet
5) abbreviations/shorthand ok as long as I can understand it

CCDD 020415: Hiro, Honored by All and Kiro the Collector

I did some art-based designs for today's challenge.

CCDD 020315: Doppelganger Nemesis

It's Doppelganger Week over on facebook, so I put up this uncanny resemblance for my profile picture. In any case, the international holiday of immense importance inspired today's design.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 013015—GuthrieArtwork

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

CCDD 020215: Undercity Hexcaster and Nudge Fate

As I discussed with Jaru, That Kills With Needles last week, Blue Black hybrid is a real problem area of design. And while I recognized counter manipulation is a pretty marginal ability, I thought it worthwhile to see if there are some reasonable commons to offset the mill and evasion commons that normally dominate Dimir hybrid commons.