Weekend Art Challenge Review 011516—juliedillon

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hey all! Anastase here (a.k.a. Fading Shadows of a memory beloved), taking over the challenge for this week. Here is the challenge we are judging this week.

A thing I liked about the WAC from Jay was that it forced us to do top-down design to fit the image while usually also providing us with restrictions and/or bonus points. Unfortunately we would sometimes focus more on the restriction than on the art itself. I believe that to be a trap, since a large part of what makes magic what it is, is the attention it provides to both Melvin and Vorthos. Enough rambling however, let's see some cards:

Czynski submitted this card that fits the flavor of the art quite well. The question is: is this good enough ramp for common? Or is this more of a graveyard filling card for only {G}? I find there is a narrow enough loop to jump through to justify the effect and am wondering if we could not scale it up. Interesting design space that warrants more exploration.

I was kind of intimidated to comment and judge on Jay’s cards. But comment I did, and we did get a very unique effect out of the second submission. This is the kind of pacifism effect blue tends to get these days and I am surprised we have not seen exactly this card printed before.

The skies are full is a very unique effect proposed by Ben Heaton. As AlexC notes in the comments:

"Best against a swarm of similar-sized fliers, since it will leave the single biggest flier alive, which means it doesn't really answer bomb fliers. All it really does is make the opponent choose not to cast their second 3/2 flier. But that's fine for an uncommon."

I have to concur. It is neat to have that double take of "wait, I can have his own creatures fight the new creatures! That way the opponent is limited in "big booty" fliers like azure drake or has to kill his weaker fliers when dropping an apex predator...

The name and interpretation of Zeno Rage’s card are good, but the card itself is slightly too powerful: you get to kill all attacking creatures 99% of the time (bearing first and double strike, indestructibility and pinging effects) and/or get a huge army of flying critters. Compare this with cobra trap and aetherize. The initial version costed {2}{G}{U} but Zeno updated his submission to a more appealing CMC of 5. That was a possible solution. Otherwise losing the death touch would fix this and give us an interesting card. However these are more development concerns than design ones. All in all, an interesting card.

Jenesis has an interesting take on the art: these are the heads of a hydra! As she points out we do not tend to get hydras at uncommon, but it could be possible in a world where they are more prevalent…

This is a good silver bullet that deals with a lot of little pesky fliers and you can attack through a big one due to the tapping. Could easily see it as an instant. Often we forget that the nuts and bolts of a set require cards like this, even in its sorcery implementation.

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This week challenge had a bit of an unusual art and all submissions had a neat interpretation of that art in their mechanics.

Some of the designs open up novel ground for more design and some seem like obvious effects that have just not been implemented yet.

On a side note, some of these cards had enough space for a bit of flavor text. What would be your opinion on allowing commenters to suggest flavor text for cards with less than 3 lines of text?

All in all these were very interesting cards. Good job everyone!