Weekend Art Challenge 042916—sandara

Hello Artisans,
Anastase here. Last week's challenge was slightly too perplexing.
This week all constraints are off.

CCDD 042816—Hydra Grub

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/28/2016 - Hydra Grub will occasionally be stranded in your hand in Limited. Other times, it will win you the game. In Constructed, it should be a big deal quite often. Take a look.

CCDD 042716—Brave Fool

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/27/2016 - I wanted to figure out a mechanic for this art that would encourage your tiny human to tangle with a real monster. It needed a chance to defeat that creature. But it's clearly white, and white doesn't do random like red does, which is why looking at the CMC of the top card felt wrong. If only there were a class of cards that could boost a creature…

CCDD 042616—Violent Resurrection

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/26/2016 - The trick to fixing the awkward templating of old cards like Animate Dead is not to try to duplicate them precisely. If you preserve what made them cool to begin with, but forget about the rest, modern technology can serve up a clean homage that's interesting in its own right.

CCDD 042516—Goldnight Betrayer

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/25/2016 - I'm not entirely sold on Goldnight Castigator. It suffers double damage, but its toughness was doubled, so that ability doesn't matter. If it were red-white, the combination would be cute, but red doesn't do giant toughness, so it's just a poorly delivered joke.

I played it this weekend and against it, and Castigator cost its caster the game every time. Not surprising, since if you boil it down, it's a 4/4 haste flyer for four with a huge downside—a downside that red is least equipped to mitigate. It certainly compares poorly to Thundermaw Hellkite, for a mythic.

None of that is to say that the design goal or the flavor are bad… I love them both. Which is why I wanted to find an execution that does them more justice.

Weekend Art Challenge 042216—Perplexed

Hello artisans! Anastase here.This week we are doing something different:

I really enjoy Sean Uy's work over on perplexing chimera and gatheringmagic.com. He makes interesting puzzles which I love solving, and I tend to then wonder how slight modifications in card wordings could make the challenge impossible or easier.

CCDD 042116—Dig Up

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/21/2016 - A few takes on the same basic idea.

CCDD 042016—Bitterness

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/20/2016 - I wanted to explore a mechanic like madness but without being an "A-B mechanic"—something that's only relevant when actively supported by another mechanic not already common to the game.

CCDD 041916—investigating clues

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/19/2016 - Here are the other designs I baked up in response to last weekend's art challenge.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 041516—Clueless!

Hello Artisans! Anastase here. This week's challenge was all about investigation of clues.

Investigate is a very well supported ability in SOI and I have had fun drafting the UG investigation deck. Let us proceed to the designs submitted:

Tesla: Kick into Gear

Hello again, everyone! Since last time, there's been some great progress on the Tesla set skeleton over at the Multiverse, kick-started by the Filling in the Skeleton challenge and Skeleton Key article. We've been on a 'big picture' kick lately, so this week, I thought I'd zoom in a bit and examine a single mechanic - Research - in more detail.

Weekend Art Challenge 041516—Clueless!

Hello Artisans! Anastase here. I hope you have been enjoying SOI. It is one of my favorite expansions in quite a while.

Investigate is basically a delayed scry with an artifact body. It is a cool mechanic that I do not think will be evergreen, but I expect to see more of in the future.

This week I would like you to design cards that either investigate, reward investigation or play well with clues.

AI Design Assistant

Adam Summerville:

I'm a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz looking at using AI as an intelligent design tool. I've created an AI design assistant using techniques similar to (but extended from) @RoboRosewater.

I'm hoping to recruit some designers to try my tool and provide feedback.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 040816—tribal

Hello Artisans, Anastase here. On the brink of time before the next WAC I present you with its review!

A big "Thank you" to Jenesis for doing the renders, this week has been hectic for me.

This is the challenge we are reviewing.

The evolution of tribal is not an easy task to tackle, so let us examine what we crafted:

Spotlight Challenge 5 Final Review—Zefferal

Here's the challenge Zefferal took lead on:

Design 8 'big' commons that will help break stalemates. Design at least one for each color. They needn't relate to each other, or even belong to the same set.

Here's his initial submission.

Let's take a look at the final submission.

CCDD 041316—Protein Hydra

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/13/2016 - This art begged to have Protean Hydra's head-regeneration effect but I couldn't differentiate the card enough, so I found another execution.

Two-Player Draft Formats

I've been doing a good bit of two-player Limited over lunch the last few weeks, and I thought I'd share the formats we've done and considered, and a new one I'm eager to try. All but the last two work with 3 or 4p too.

CCDD 041116—Alpha Designation

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/11/2016 - Join me as I iterate a design from a goal toward a keyword mechanic. My goal was to find new ways to meaningfully move an aura around.

Weekend Art Challenge 040816—tribal

Weekend Art Challenge
Hello Artisans, Anastase here.
Latest Developments' Sam Stoddard and Jay have recently talked about an evolution in how lords are designed.

Choose one of the following illustrations and design a tribal mechanic around the card.

CCDD 040716—Flagstones of Krosa & Ancient Volcano

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/7/2016 - Another way to achieve "sacrifice this land for a card later in the game" is to make cards that eat each other when you play duplicates. It so happens the current legend rule handles this kind of interaction, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I made a common Flagstones of Trokair.

Spotlight Challenge 5 Initial Review—Zefferal

Here's the challenge Zefferal is taking lead on:

Design 8 'big' commons that will help break stalemates. Design at least one for each color. They needn't relate to each other, or even belong to the same set.

CCDD 040616—Goblin Elder

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/6/2016 - Here's a creature card based on the cycle-from-play land from yesterday. Another way to make one-drops playable.

CCDD 040516—Ruins of Yongxia

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/5/2016 - The concept here is simple: A mono-colored land that you can sacrifice to draw a card. AKA cycle-from-play. Like Horizon Canopy.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 040116—Drake-Elf-Demon Synergy

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hello Artisans,
Anastase here, ready to review our synergy chain design challenge.

Let us get to the cards!

Weekend Art Challenge 040116—Drake-Elf-Demon Synergy

Weekend Art Challenge
Hello Artisans! Anastase here. Remember this challenge?

Well we are going to do something similar this week, only trying the opposite:

You will have to design a card that synergizes if played alongside the previous card an Artisan suggested.

Each submission will use the next image in the queue, in order to generate a cycle of cards that each synergizes with the previous one: the drake synergies with the elf, the demon synergies with the drake, the elf synergies with the demon, the drake synergies with the elf...