Weekend Art Challenge 062918 — Artur Sadlos

Click through to see the requirements for your design challenge, due by Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I encourage you all to revise your designs at least once in response to feedback. I will review the most recent submission from each designer, or whichever submission you specify you wish to have reviewed.

CCDD 062818 — Hype!

When Battlebond was first announced, I was actually expecting a mechanic we never got in the set: one to represent "style and flair", with "spells and spectacles" that "cause the crowd to go wild"! Since we didn't end up getting such a mechanic in the set, I've tried to design my own: hype!

CCDD 062718 - Circle Logic

For this past weekend's challenge, Jay Treat randomly ended up redesigning Circle of Protection: White. The idea of a circle of protection is a very resonant fantasy trope, but in Magic it has been saddled with some poor early choices in its history: Making a 5-card cycle out of it, making it overly strong as a hate card, and carrying a tremendous amount of complexity (plus a history of terrible art).

Weekend Design Challenge 062218 - Random Redesign Review

Good morning, Artisans. I hope everyone had a great weekend. This is the challenge we're reviewing today. Let's dive in.

CCDD 062518—Peark, Orcish Diplomat

Cool Card Design of the Day
Exploring how various fantasy cultures approach diplomacy is often fun. How do Orcs bring about peace?

Weekend Design Challenge 062218 - Random Redesign

Hey Artisans. Click through to see the requirements for this weekend's design challenge, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, so once you've got your great idea down, give some thoughtful critique to some of your peers. Revise your submission any number of times, and on Monday-ish, I'll review the most recent submission from each designer.

CCDD 062118—Cowardly Necromancer & Vengeful Ossomancer

Cool Card Design of the Day
I don't know what the story is behind this pair of designs, but they were clearly made in the same batch (despite telling rather different stories), and aim to depict necromancers.

CCDD 062018—Strictly Dual Land

Cool Card Design of the Day
In the vein of on-the-nose dual lands like Luxury Suite, here's a very strong dual land that can only be used in a two-color deck. (Which would support Ravnica's stated goal of being a two-color gold block, but not the Standard environment it actually facilitated.)

CCDD 061918—mana types

Cool Card Design of the Day
Way back when (circa GDS2) I explored the idea of new types of mana. It started with snow mana, flitted briefly through sacred mana, and ended badly at bird mana, lizard mana, beast mana, etc. It seemed like a dead-end.

Earlier this year, it occurred to me that the mistake wasn't caring about what produced the mana, but caring too specifically. First, the thing can't be parasitic, like snow or sacred were; it's got to be something Magic has a lot of. Second, it can't be so preposterously narrow as to carry about a specific sub-type. The reason being that we want to actually use our mechanic, and since we're inherently limiting ourselves to a set of mana producers much smaller than Any Land, we've got to keep the aperture open as wide as possible.

Magic has one card that's a model for this:

CCDD 061818—GDS3 Slick

Cool Card Design of the Day
For the mechanic challenge in GDS3, I built and tested a number of mechanics. Slick was the last of my top choices. Ryan was lamenting hexproof on Twitter today, so it's time to share this one.

Weekend Design Challenge 061518 - A Work of Art

Hey, Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge, submissions due Monday morning.

Interview Tonight with Alexis Janson!

Alexis Janson, winner of the first Great Designer Search, will interview me about GDS3 on her Twitch stream tonight at 6:30 Pacific / 9:30 Eastern. Come hear a few more stories and ask us any remaining questions!

EDIT: Here's the video.

CCDD 061318 - Planeswalker Aether Trails

I was thinking about yesterday's Planeswalking exercise and how PW-matters cards are very tricky to do at uncommon due to the inherent mythicness of the type. Hour of Devastation had an interesting take on the theme, with a direct-to-sideboard/jank box cycle that relied heavily on their thematic tie to the story to justify their existence.

CCDD 061218 - Planeswalk

Given the emphasis the past several years on PWs as main characters, it's still a little surprising that there isn't a card that just tries to capture the act of planeswalking. Let's address that.

CCDD 061118 - Characteristic Anthems

Back before the GDS Bullet Train left the station, I had started an exploration of Form of enchantments exploring what they might look like separated from Red's history with the template. While working on that, I gave a lot of thought to both the Iconic and Characteristic races in Magic, and how they are captured mechanically.

GDS3 Reflections: Ari Nieh, Finish Line

I'm writing this on Wednesday afternoon somewhere over Grand Forks, North Dakota, on a plane home from Renton. I won the third Great Designer Search yesterday.

Let me tell you a bit about what went down.

Weekend Design Challenge 060818 - No Judge Free For All

While Inanimate and I catch up with our backlog of play-along GDS challenges (we're getting there, I promise), we're taking a week off from judging. Got a cool idea for a card you want feedback from the Artisan community on? Drop it below in the comments, and then offer someone else some feedback. No one's doing a formal judging this week, but I might pop in on Sunday to offer some feedback.

Have fun, and enjoy the weekend.

Ari Nieh Wins the Great Designer Search 3!

Congratulations to Ari Nieh for winning the Great Designer Search 3!

Ari, from all of us Artisans, we're so happy for you. You made it from 7000+ applicants down to the very end for this amazing opportunity. Goblin Artisans has spent the last seven years being THE place to go to prepare for the GDS3 when it arrives, and I can't think of a better ending for the show than for one of GA's founders to take the prize.

Your victory is well earned, and we can't wait to see how Magic becomes an even more amazing game from your contributions.

CCDD 060718—GDS3 Jury-Rig

Cool Card Design of the Day
For the mechanic challenge in GDS3, I built and tested a number of mechanics. Jury-Rig was my next choice. You might recognize it from 2016. Originally, Jury-Rig had a variable cost; In testing I found that having two different costs for a bunch of cards made knowing how to play your hand far too much work. So I stole the best part of another mechanic (I'll tell that story another time) and simplified Jury-Rig to always cost {3}; That way you can evaluate your hand with the costs you see printed and just one more.

CCDD 060618—GDS3 Riding

Cool Card Design of the Day
For the mehanic challenge in GDS3, I built and tested a number of mechanics. Ride came the closest to making the final cut over bloodspill. I'm really excited about ride because it solves so many of the classic mount problems in a fairly elegant package. I didn't submit it because it's super risky to claim to have found the holy grail so many designers have been searching for, and because bloodspill created the most novel gameplay.

CCDD 060518—GDS3 Oozes

Cool Card Design of the Day
For the tribal challenge in GDS3, I built and tested five tribes. Oozes were my first choice, but Chris Mooney got there first. Shamans got a full day more development than Oozes (and that clearly wasn't enough), so these are very under-cooked, but I thought I'd share some of the more promising veins of design among the 83 cards I brainstormed.

The Late Game: Ari Nieh

Editor's Note: I sent follow up interview questions to the GDS Top 3 yesterday, mistakenly thinking the final day of the GDS was Thursday. It's today, and by now they have already started their tour of WotC. Ari responded last night, and apologies to Jeremy and Chris for sending these out too close to the Renton trip to give you time to answer. -Zeff

Weekend Design Challenge 060118 - Finding A Good Mechanic

Hey, Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge, submissions due Monday morning.