Weekend Art Challenge 123116—jaggudada, aaron miller, yuchenghong & lucastorquato27

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 122816—Strength of Character

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/30/2016 - Rounding out the week of white combat tricks with the most simple and obvious. Not yet printed.

CCDD 122916—Call to Stand

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/29/2016 - Divine Favor as a combat trick.

CCDD 122816—Join the Fray

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/28/2016 - Here's a very simple combination of Raise the Alarm and white P/T boosting.

CCDD 122716—Sword Prayer

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/27/2016 - As a sorcery, this isn't a combat trick, but it can turn a losing race in your favor.

Weekend Art Challenge 122316—Chriscold, Mac-tire & ebonita

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 122216—Aerial Assault

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/22/2016 - This doesn't need to by hybrid, much-less twobrid: any combination of white and/or blue would work.

Live Booster Draft

Love drafting? Love playing Magic? Ever wish you could do both at the same time, rather than one after the other? I have. For ten years. I got a game published trying to make it happen. (Here's a diary of how that led somewhere else fruitful.) Last month, the idea struck me again, this time actually for Magic:

A draft format in which the first seven picks form your starting hand, and each following pick happens when you would draw a card mid-game.

— Jay Treat (@WizardsFamiliar) November 12, 2016

I don't hype my own stuff much. Today is different. This is the good stuff. You want to try Live Draft. Really.

CCDD 122016—Racing Whipmaster

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/20/2016 - A delayed-gratification Fiend Binder for a less aggressive formmat.

Weekend Art Challenge 1216161—wiggers123

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 121516—Hold for Questioning

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/15/2016 - It's rough when you have to spend four mana to Sleep Paralysis a two-drop. Hold for Questioning tries to make you feel better about that by repaying you the mana over time.

CCDD 121416—Hammer Prodigy

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/14/2016 - Here's an artifacts-matter white rare for Kaladesh.

CCDD 121316—Deathstroke

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/13/2016 - Here's a vertical cycle of cards featuring deathstroke, a sort of undying or automatically triggered unearth.

Weekend Art Challenge 120916—clover teapot

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 120816—Voidmage Acolyte & Demolitions Expert

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/8/2016 - How do you make players happier to play a card that's been nerfed for being unfun?

The cards already exist, so we can't change them. We can either make the environment around them sufficiently weaker—which would cause a riot—or we can create cards that make them better…

CCDD 120716—Army Trumpet, Balloon & Prison

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/7/2016 - A vertical cycle to reward the white mage for going wide.

CCDD 120616—Family

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/6/2016 - Doubling Season for nontoken creatures… that you have to pay mana for… and ignores counters. So it's nothing like Doubling Season. But hey, free clones!

CCDD 120516—Rooting Spriggans

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/5/2016 - Here's my any-tribal entry for the weekend's design challenge.

Weekend Design Challenge 120216

Click through to see the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 120116—Psy-Clone

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/1/2016 - A single-turn clone.

CCDD 113016—Tigra's Guidance

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/30/2016 - A couple of mana-fixing-until-you-don't-need-it commons.

Three-Headed In-Fighting

Here's the best way I know to play Magic with three players, a format I improvised over a decade ago during a Summer when my draft club was just three people and we were desperate.

Midweek Art Challenge 112816—kafine

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Wednesday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Thursday (possibly in the comments below, we'll see).

CCDD 112516—Dark Confidence

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/25/2016 - Retroactively posting this sorcery tribute to Dark Confidant.

CCDD 112416—Seprimus

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/24/2016 - One cornucopia of cards coming up. Happy Thanksgiving!

CCDD 112316—In Darkness, Opportunity

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/23/2016 - What if we could use extra mana to help protect our spells?

Spoiler: It's easy to fall into a trap sometimes.

CCDD 112216—Logic Gate

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/22/2016 - Logic Gate is preemptive countermagic like Lunar Force but with more control and less information. You decide when to counter a spell, but you don't know what spell it is until you've decided.

Weekend Art Challenge 111816—cobaltplasma

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 111716—Bestial Call

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/17/2016 - Here are five variations on the same basic idea—rewarding vanilla creatures without increasing their stats—across three rarities.

Safety Techniques

Tabletop RPGs and LARPs have developed a number of safety techniques to help keep players safe during games. Some of them will adapt to tabletop games like Magic better than others, but they're all worth examination:

Welcoming Women into Magic

Women play Magic. That may not be your experience, but there's a reason for that. And we can do something about it. We must.

Weekend Art Challenge 111116—Apofiss

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 111016—Briartooth & Sea Lionicorn

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/10/2016 - Most of the evoke creatures in Lorwyn were very strong and Briarhorn was no exception. It was a Giant Growth that gave you a 3/3 body for {3} mana more. On defense, you could boost a defender and make one, killing a small and a medium/large creature at no loss. You can even play it on it's own to kill an attacking 5/5. In Dark Ascension, we got Briarpack Alpha, which gave a reduced bonus and couldn't be alternately casted. Still good. Briartooth is an attempt to nerf this concept another way:

CCDD 110816—Dormant Dominator

Cool Card Design of the Day
111/8/2016 - Working on a big post I care a lot about, but today's just not the day. Instead, more easy readin'. Top-down from the art, this card borrows tech from vehicles we can use for cards like Glint Hawk Idol and Gruul War Plow.

CCDD 110716—Tempest Caller

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/7/2016 - Haste lord.

CCDD 110416—Pack Chase

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/4/2016 - Retroactive post. In the past, variations of this spell have been red. Proposing for green, ala Rabid Bite.

CCDD 110316—Multiwrench and Forgetting Desk

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/3/2016 - Here is a common utility artifact and a rare one.

Two Interesting Things I Noticed About Kaladesh Design

The first, most readily apparent thing I noticed about Kaladesh is the greatly increased power level of common creatures. The creatures in Eldritch Moon were notably more powerful too, but I chalked that up to small-set-power-upgrade (in which small sets get a bump to power level to help keep sales from dropping as interest in the block levels off). But here's a brand new, and very shiny block, raising the bar for common creatures.

CCDD 110116—Scrytastic Dual Land

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/1/2016 - Was thinking about costs small enough to fill the role of letting a land ETB untapped, and came up with this half-scry-half-etbt idea supporting two-color decks.

Weekend Art Challenge 102816—James Zapata

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

Bouillon Cubes

a guest post by Wobbles

Mark Rosewater has been slowly introducing a new word into the Magic design lexicon - Soup-y. Four color commanders are soupy and cubes can be soupy too.

CCDD 102716—Hand Axe

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/27/2016 - Lava Axe meets Fall of the Hammer.

CCDD 102616—Forbidden Reading

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/26/2016 - I'm congested, and so have nothing profound to say about this design.

A Set in Three Mechanics

The pendulum swings, but make no mistake, its resting state is not the center.

Every set needs to introduce new mechanics to entice players, even if it offers a new gameplay experience by remixing existing mechanics; that's [one of] the biggest reason[s] the core sets were so unpopular for so long. But how many new mechanics does a set need? 1? 3? 5+?

Kaladesh's success demonstrates 3 is one ideal.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 102216—vlda

Design a card for Kaladesh or Aether Revolt with this art. Bonus points for each of Johnny, Tammy, and Spike to whom it appeals strongly.

CCDD 102416—Attune with the Hive

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/24/2016 - Here's a +1/+1-counters-matter card with an insect theme.

Weekend Art Challenge 102216—vlda

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single card submission, due Tuesday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

You Make the Wube

a guest post by Wobbles

With the finalist of Wizard's You Make the Cube announced, I'm hoping to share a few of the ideas on cube design even though mine didn't make the cut.