GDS3 Reflections: Jeremy Geist, Challenge #2: CLOWNS!!!!

Jeremy's back with some more reflections on how he approached the second GDS3 challenge. Click here to review his designs, here to see the judge feedback, and click through to see what he had to say about the challenge. 

I was excited when I saw this challenge. Top-down design is one of my strongest skills, and this was a challenge that was explicitly about creating appealing top-down designs.

After doing some groundwork and carefully reading over the assignment, I noticed that, although it looked a lot less restrictive than Challenge 1 (you weren’t locked into six different card types and your cards didn’t need to mechanically care about anything), there were several unspoken requirements hidden within the list of card titles. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I thought it was very clever.

Secret challenge A: Color imbalance. There are maybe two names on the entire list that feel as if they belong to a black card, which severely constricts your options. Several people went with Knife Thrower and/or Tightrope; Chris Mooney’s Sawdin Half was a really clever way of going about it.

Secret challenge B: Two mythics. A mythic Magician was a pretty easy choice (everyone except Ryan Siegel-Stechler made one) but there aren’t a lot of circus items that feel big and splashy. I was considering making a Ringmaster planeswalker, but I eventually decided against it for several reasons. Planeswalkers have a ton of moving parts, which makes it difficult to express something top-down with them, but they also take much more time to design and balance. Making a planeswalker within the time constraints felt like making side dishes on Cutthroat Kitchen.

Secret challenge C: Separating the wheat from the chaff. Some of the items on the list lent themselves a lot better to cool cards than others, and you have to be able to separate them. This, of course, differs a little bit between designers; I dismissed Circus Peanuts out of hand as being uncardable, but Scott Wilson’s take on it was the best card in the challenge.

I gambled a little by not paying much attention to the “set feel” requirement: Making good cards was difficult enough that I didn’t want to make it even harder on myself by trying to create coherent mechanical archetypes in five colors with only two commons. Instead, I tried to aim my cards to capture the “feel” of going to the circus: The exaggerated theatrics, the excitement, and the surprise.

Finally, I just want to say that Barnum is an underrated musical. It’s corny, but the message is sweet and the songs are catchy.

1. Trapeze Artist

Mark Rosewater was confused about why Trapeze Artist doesn’t itself have flying. The concept was that the trapeze artist can launch off the trapeze, or they can throw another creature off the trapeze while still clinging to it.

A lot of my submissions at higher rarities this round were messy, so Trapeze Artist and maybe Knife Thrower are the cards I’m happiest with here.

2. Traveling Circus

Making a discounted card from Homelands and submitting it for the approval of Aaron Forsythe and Mark Rosewater is truly my finest moment.

I never made a cantrip again after this.

3. Knife Thrower

Knife Thrower went through a number of iterations. The first idea was a Thermo-Alchemist style red “untap pinger”, because those are really fun, but I couldn’t think of anything that would untap it that would be innovative enough for GDS. The core concept of a knife thrower, as translated to Magic, is someone who does repeated tiny attacks, so the Triskelion Lite ™ card I settled on came from that.

Making Knife Thrower a vampire wasn’t originally a reference to this – I just thought there were too many humans – but as Maro says, never deny cool things.

4. Feats of Strength

I wanted to do a Feats of Strength card from the start, because it’s a really evocative name, but it was hard to find the correct execution of it. I must have gone through ten different iterations before I settled on a discount based on your highest-power creature.

This card ended up adding +1/+1 counters because it’s surprisingly hard to find an expensive spell effect in green. I probably should’ve ended up going with a powerful punch effect like Clear Shot. Regardless, the flavor of the card went over well with the judges so it could’ve been worse.

5. Three Rings

In my defense, Mirri’s Guile is from Tempest, hardly ever played, and worded in a way that I could have never found it on Scryfall if I were looking for similar cards to Three Rings. I fully accept the criticism that keeping your draws open information leads to worse gameplay; my goal was a black-border Split Screen but that card didn’t play super well either.

6. Clown Car

I didn’t make Clown Car a Vehicle because I was afraid that it would be counted as essentially being a creature. I think it would have been a better design that way. I also tried making it a R/B creature but Knife Thrower was just much better than the design I had for that.

7. Redundo The Magician
Redundo is named after The Incomparable Redundo, an NPC from a superhero-themed Savage Worlds campaign I ran in college. I don’t want to clog up this article with the full story, so I’ll talk about him in the comments.

It was pretty easy to find effects I wanted for a stage magician, but it was hard to find a package that was both a good top-down execution and innovative. The one I settled on was pretty late in the weekend and definitely could have benefited from more playtesting and fixing.

8. Human Cannonball

Human Cannonball almost certainly would have been better as a turbo-Char instead of this weird enchantment. I probably focused a little too hard on the top-down flavor, when it was already incredibly funny and impactful, when I could have kept it simple.

The card originally dealt damage equal to your life total, but after double-checking, I found that red is a color that really wants you to be at a low life total, if it cares at all. Although it worked flavor-wise, a Human Cannonball like that would encourage you to play a slow, conrolling game, which is pretty much the opposite of red’s philosophy.

All in all, Human Cannonball is a card with a great concept marred by my recurring tendency to require the player to jump through too many hoops.