Weekend Design Challenge 073120 - Vehicles

Hey Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

CCDD 073020 - Feather, Watch-Angel

This card started out as a "bottom-up" design. I wanted to see what a build-around card for mechanics like replicate or strive would look like, since those mechanics don't fit well in traditional spellslinger decks. I quickly realized that it needed a fairly minor reward to be balanced, and then it wouldn't be as exciting, so I went looking for ways to make it spicier. Things got out of hand from there...

CCDD 072820 - Dovin's Prerogative

Most high-profile "hate cards" target specific broken strategies: Relic of Progenitus for graveyards, Stony Silence for artifacts, Damping Sphere for storm, and so forth. A while back I thought about turning this around. If I could define what was "unreasonable" in a game of Magic, and target that, then maybe I could create the One Hate Card To Rule Them All. Here's what I came up with.

CCDD 072620 - Confront the Sorcerer

This semi-top-down design was a real pain to template. It ended up as an interesting variant on the "modal spell, but opponent chooses" idea.

CCDD 072220 - Flamekin Scout

There's nothing too groundbreaking about this design since we already have things like Generator Servant and Neheb, the Eternal, but I liked the idea of a creature that could act as a Pyretic Ritual via a saboteur ability. It's a common, so it doesn't need to do anything too fancy anyway.

Impact Tremors

My defining guideline for game design is impact. Broadly speaking, impact is how much a game sticks with you: How much you remember a game after you played it ("that was a good game" versus "I blew up an alien spaceship with my kicks"), how excited it makes you, and how much you want to tell the stories of the game to your friends. Well-designed games don't necessarily need impact, but a good game without impact is dry, inaccessible, and hard to pitch to your gaming group. I make sure that every game I design is as impactful as possible.

Until now, my writing on impact has focused on general/"hobby" games because my game company's blog is aimed at a general audience who might not know that much about Magic. This article views impact through the lens of Magic design: What makes individual cards, and Magic as a whole, impactful, and defining guidelines for creating more impactful cards.

Note: Impact is a subjective topic, so your experience with what cards you find memorable may differ from mine. I hope this article provides you with something even if you disagree with the examples.

Weekend Design Challenge 071720 - Color Words

Happy Friday Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

CCDD 071620 - Assassin Training

Auras are card disadvantage, which limits their design space in some ways but expands it in others. For example, powerful activated abilities can often go on an aura that costs less than a creature with the ability would. There are lots of examples-- Power of Fire, Presence of Gond-- and I was curious to see how far I could push this.

CCDD 071420 - Continuous Looting

This design went through a bunch of iterations, if I remember correctly. I knew I wanted a card selection effect that gave players the option or maybe the obligation to stop at some point. As usual, the best way to do that turned out to be the simplest too.

Weekend Design Challenge 071020 - Jumpstarted Legends

Hey Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

CCDD 070920 - Frontline Anthem

Here's a weird keyword ability. It goes on any permanent, but preferably non-creatures to avoid timing issues. It's partly upside but mostly downside. It's trying to capture the flavor of borders, conquests, and lines of battle. It's... defensive!

CCDD 070720 - Robo-Brawler

This is a classic example of a pure Mel design. Given the concept, the text box has basically zero flexibility, so the only available "knobs" are the power/toughness and mana cost.

Weekend Design Challenge 070320 - Blue Autumn

Happy Friday, Artisans, and Happy 4th to those in the US! Click through to see this weekend's design parameters. With those as your guidelines, design a custom magic card. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs, and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. If I have time over the course of next week, I will try to offer some of my own feedback.

CCDD 070220 - Jor Kadeen, the Resister

Here's another take on "encourage interaction through combat by doing broken things if opponents don't interact." It's the flip side of the previous CCDD in it's framed positively-- your own creatures are the ones being encouraged (okay, required) to attack. The payoff is that blocking is pretty much the only way your opponents can interact profitably.