CCDD 043015—Reborn Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/30/2015 - Modern sets are full of strange exceptions to the normal color pie which have been grandfathered in for mechanical balance or exceptional flavor.

Those are worthwhile tradeoffs, but in order to keep players from thinking everything is fair game we should make them feel as in-color as possible. Red's not very big on recursion, so how might one tackle the Phoenix?

CCDD 042915—Spiteful Thug

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/29/2015 - Here's an example of a mechanic that's short and intuitive enough to be a keyword, but that doesn't have enough depth to make the quantity of cards that would justify an actual keyword. It would be better to leave vengeful unnamed on the tiny handful of cards that use it.

Tesla: Promising Mechanics

In the time we've already spent designing Tesla we have come up with a truly stupendous number of mechanics to play with our progress theme and artifact focus.

This post is intended to serve as a repository of mechanics we're considering for the set. There are far too many to list, so instead similar mechanics have been collapsed down to a single exemplar: the implementation in that space that I find most promising.

Zeffrikar Exploratory Design Part 1: Past as Prologue

This is the first part of my Design Vision Document for the set, what is going to be the rough equivalent of R&D's Exploratory Design. Obviously nothing is set in stone (Zendikar jokes), and I'll probably change direction more than a few times over the life of this project, but at least at the outset, here are the ideas I’m going to be keeping in mind before setting up a skeleton and doing a first pass at the commons.

CCDD 042815—Kindle Passion

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/28/2015 - Spells that give your opponent a choice are only effective when both options are worth the cost of your card, and most interesting when the choice is close and changes throughout the game. Here's one.

Why Magic is Fun: Tempo vs. Card Advantage

A few days ago, Jay Treat asked the following question on twitter:

What would happen if you took all the spells from, say, 8th Edition and made them cantrip?
— Jay Treat (@WizardsFamiliar) April 22, 2015

In the ensuing conversation, I claimed:

@WizardsFamiliar The tension between card advantage and tempo advantage is the very heart of why Magic works as a game.
— HavelockV (@MagicSonnets) April 22, 2015

Jay asked me to elaborate on this point in an article, so here we are!

CCDD 042715—Impede

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/27/2015 - Spells that give your opponent a choice are only effective when both options are worth the cost of your card, and most interesting when the choice is close and changes throughout the game. Here's one.

Introducing... BfZ?

I am not one of the people who was super-pumped when Wizards announced Battle for Zendikar a little while ago. When it came out, Zendikar was kind of a flop for me, more so than any set since Prophecy. I fully realize that I'm in the minority here, and that Zendikar was pretty successful as far as Magic sets go, but I found the overall design of the set boring. R&D were still finding their feet with NWO, and as a result a lot of the design space they mined for the commons felt very repetitive. There just wasn't a whole lot going on in most packs to pique my Johnny-mind.

Weekend Design Challenge 042415—cycle patching

Weekend Design 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 042315—Solo Trail // Taint Soul

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/23/2015 - I keep coming back to this idea.

CCDD 042215—Explosive Reagent

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/22/2015 - I found an old design that was a Shock that triggered a Flame Jab whenever another spell is cast while it's on the stack. That's a bit broader than anti-countermagic since you can combo with it yourself, but referencing the stack is to be avoided wherever possible, and this ability didn't come close to warranting it. Which made me curious if I could find a similar effect without using the word 'stack.'

Weekend Art Challenge Review 041715—Jason Engle

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

CCDD 042015-Blood Wolf

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/20/2015 - I was messing around with a design that wanted a death trigger a few weeks back but thematically, it didn't want to be just any death trigger. That's how I stumbled upon the phrase "dies in combat" which has a few small mechanical ramifications but does a lot thematically and in communicating to the player how to use the card.

Weekend Art Challenge 041715—Jason Engle

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 041615—Spell Torrent

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/16/2015 - Spell Torrent is similar to Commune with Lava, but arguably more red because it's not about setting up future turns, and it feels more like gambling.

Tesla Horizons: Look to the Future

In all of our time doing exploratory design for Tesla we've left one major area unaddressed. That's my fault because it's a high level consideration that I should have drawn focus to, but simply didn't notice. Thankfully, Inanimate caught my mistake.

Exploring mechanical space to hit our progress theme we've considered a truly staggering number of ways for things to improve, but never mentioned the other half of the emotional response we ought to be producing. Progress isn't just about getting better, it's about the apparently limitless potential that improvement represents. How can we make games of Magic feel like being on the cusp of something great? How can we evoke anticipation?

CCDD 041515—Scholar of Aether, Silent Mist, Suspension of Disbelief

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/15/2015 - These cards aren't better than those submitted for the last Weekend Art Challenge, they just show a few more possibilities for interacting with bounce effects.

Feel free to pull them apart.

Weekend Art Design Challenge Review—m_a_t_h_e_s | poibuts | chryssalis

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

CCDD 041315—Caught in the Current

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/13/2015 - What if Crippling Chill could only target a creature that's already attacking?

Weekend Art Design Challenge—m_a_t_h_e_s | poibuts | chryssalis

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 040915—Ambush Squad

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/9/2015 - I punked out. I wanted to pair a unique cost to this cycling variant, something that fit the twist mechanically, or that gave the keyword a sense of flavor (something cycling desperately lacks), or at least some cost that we've not seen on cycling. Take a look and we'll talk options.

CCDD 040815—Amphin Leaper

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/8/2015 - I stumbled upon the file for my first Magic set in the archives of my computer this week. This thing is 20 years old and it shows. In addition to being based off of antiquated Magic rules, templates and design standards, it also achingly demonstrates every possible mistake a new designer could make. I considered lampooning it card-by-card for you all, but it was about 700 cards, 99% of them trash, and at best 5% with any kernel of interesting design.

One remotely interesting idea I found I have reconstituted for you today:

Tesla Horizons: Missing Piece

We've been in exploratory design for Tesla for quite a while now, and in that time we've considered a truly staggering number of mechanical realizations of our progress theme and the trappings of a steampunk setting.

Soon we'll be moving into design proper, but once we have a card file every tangent means we then have to reacquaint ourselves with said file. For that reason, we want to do as much of our exploration as possible now.

Before the shift I'm going to compile a comprehensive list of all of the mechanics we've ever discussed for this project that I think could really carry the design. This is not to preclude the creation of new mechanics or revisiting other old ones, but rather is a means by which to ensure we have an accessible reference point to discuss our tools going forward.

To those ends I want to put out a couple of last calls:

• What do you still want to explore before beginning design?
• Which mechanics should we keep in mind during design?

Weekend Art Challenge Review 040315—JB Casacop

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

CCDD 040615—Dark Riddle

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/6/2015 - Dark Riddle has two downsides compared to Diabolic Tutor. First, your opponent gets to know what card you got, which trades mystery for suspense, if you're lucky. Secondly, it gives your opponent a very real chance to counter the spell entirely by guessing which card you're searching up.

Weekend Art Challenge 040315—JB Casacop

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 040215—Improvise

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/2/2015 - Cromulent? Useable outside of Storm? What if it were an instant?

Tesla Horizons: What's it Gonna' Cost?

As we've continued exploratory design for Tesla we've been looking at each of our options for mechanically representing Tesla's progress theme (as discussed here). Each piece examines 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.

The second post investigated using lands and mana to track how far you've progressed.

The third post considered how we could track progress using the graveyard rather than the battlefield.

Finally, today we'll take a look at the last area we identified for tracking progress: the cost of our cards.

CCDD 040115—Primal Dissolution

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/1/2015 - I'm not a fan of pranks, so I'll tell you right now I'm not serious about this keyword. Take a look and we'll discuss.