Weekend Art Challenge 073115—zimzibar

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 073015—Assemble Notions

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/30/2015 - A card inspired by MaRo's latest article on blue in the color pie. A mill card that doesn't do nothing on its own.

CCDD 072915—Parliament of Swords

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/29/2015 - This is one of the cards I designed while reading MaRo's latest article about white in the color pie. I think it speaks for itself?

Weekend Art Challenge Review 072415—ninjatic

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Pair off with a partner. Design two cards with your partner that complement each other. They needn't be the same type, rarity, or color, but they do get printed in the same set, and neither would be quite as special if the other didn't exist. Improve your partner's design.

Tesla Design Challenge 072715 — Player Progress

Last week, we discussed possible mechanics for Tesla that represented the player's growth, giving you upgrades and improved abilities as the game goes on. While the idea of 'player progress' greatly excited many of you, the mechanics presented were still quite rough. Though plenty of critique was offered, not a lot of alternatives were presented because of this. This week, let's change that! Your challenge is to design a mechanic that represents the player's progress.

CCDD 072715—Card Grab

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/27/2015 - Here's a high-variance red rare for players to love and hate. (And a rare example of me not even trying to flavor a bottom-up design.)

Weekend Art Challenge 072415—ninjatic

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 072315—Improve

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/23/2015 - Today's mechanic is an iteration (appropriately enough) on yesterday's. At face-value, reverberate is comparable to rebound, but when you can fill your graveyard with reverberate cards without casting them, then getting their 'flashback' for free becomes broken.

Improve looks to tighten up that loophole by requiring a payment to 'flashback' and limiting the trigger so that it augments only copies of itself.

CCDD 072215—Reverberate

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/22/2015 - Reverberate is a cross between flashback and rebound that rewards an unusual angle in deck-building.

CCDD 072115—Break Through

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/21/2015 - A riff on breakthrough. Just exploring whether we can accomplish a similar task-reward cycle without counters.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 071715—Grafik

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card for this art. For additional challenge, choose a specific card that is or was recently dominating Standard, and make your card a good sideboard answer to it.

Tesla: Self-Improvement

Hello again, everyone! As we've been looking at the mechanics that Tesla can use to represent its themes of progress, one big idea keeps coming up: players themselves progressing and improving over the course of the game. This week, let's reflect on some 'self-improvement' mechanics you all have designed, try to improve them further, and perhaps design some more mechanics capturing the same themes as well.

Weekend Art Challenge 071715—Grafik

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 071615—Primeval Force & Ancient Force

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/16/2015 - I designed Primeval Force to join the ranks of cards that are reminiscent of Force of Nature, but strictly or generally better. Specifically, I wanted to include an upkeep payment that felt more like an upside than a downside.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 071015—Jon Hodgson

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a card for this art. If you require further parameters, make a mono-black common whose name falls alphabetically between Nefarious Criminal and Opulence.

Zeffrikommons, Part 1: Common Red Creatures

Here on GA, we tend to put a lot of focus on designing individual cards and mechanics. This is great for the feedback we provide and encourage, and I think that it's a great set of development tools for all of us, especially those of us planning on competing in the next GDS. In fact, the types of designs we spend most of our time on here pushes the skills MaRo & Co. were looking at when selecting the finalists for GDS2. After the essays and the test, we had to design 10 cards that would be used to showcase a set during the course of a preview week. The emphasis was on designing one card to fill one slot that appealed to a particular type of player/reader.

CCDD 071315—Goblins Opportunist, Stormtrooper, Sniper & Huntsman

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/10/2015 - I think there's a small but useful vein of design space in Illusory Angel's "only if you've cast another spell this turn" mechanic, and I think red is the place to use it (because red is where lots-of-cheap-spells and storm intersect).

Tesla: Battle-Forging Ahead

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I asked everyone to nominate promising mechanics that we had discussed the week before, and one mechanic clearly came out on top: Battle-Forged. Battle-Forged began long ago as 'Tune-Up', but over time, developed into the form we'll be talking about today. This week, let's strike while the iron is hot, and focus our discussion on this promising mechanic. Specifically, I'd like to hammer out the kinks with Battle-Forged, and in addition, stoke up a discussion about what the role of Battle-Forged in Tesla will be. Now, without further ado, let's begin!

CCDD 071115—Bioconduction & Improvise

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/11/2015 - Retroactive bonus Saturday post. 'Bonus' because these are just renders of ideas we've already discussed for Tesla recently.

Weekend Art Challenge 071015—Jon Hodgson

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 071015—Legendary Phoenixes

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/10/2015 - Today's WAC is coming, but first I wanted to share some phoenixes I designed too late for Remaking Magic's legendary phoenix design challenge.

CCDD 070915—Hellsong Reaver

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/9/2015 - A demon. I love this ability for allowing the demon to benefit from your misery without actual being a drawback mechanic.

Variance and Entropy

One of the most compelling qualities of Magic is its tremendous replay value. If you sit down two players with two sealed decks to play ten games, every one of those games will be different. Why? Because of the randomness that drives Magic.

However, the way we talk about randomness in games is often imprecise or even misleading. When we say that a card is "unpredictable", we usually conflate two similar but distinct concepts. I'd like to define and separate these ideas, so that we can say what we mean to say. (And maybe even design what we mean to design!)

CCDD 070815—Regal Diner

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/8/2015 - Regal Diner regenerates when it kills a creature. Except in a way that works with the game's timing rules.

Tesla: Go Interaction

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I gave everyone the challenge to design progress mechanics that encouraged or facilitated interaction - but, because I like to be tricky, I didn't take any efforts to define exactly what counts as interaction. In your designs, many of you explored different forms of interaction in gameplay - and in the comments, there was some great discussion about what is interaction, and what isn't.

This week, I'm going to try to go over a few of the more frequent forms of interaction, using mechanics submitted or brought up last week as examples.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 070115—shutupandwhisper & markmolchan

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Design a vanilla-matters card ala Muraganda Petroglyphs.

Weekend Art Challenge 070115—shutupandwhisper & markmolchan

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 070215—Massive Flashback

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/2/2015 - Runic Repetition fetches things from exile, which is arguably verboten. Here's a card that achieves a similar result in a more palatable way. And bigger.

CCDD 070115—Think Dark Thoughts

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/1/2015 - If black were to borrow filtering...