Friday, October 30, 2020

Weekend Design Challenge 103020 - Halloween

Happy Halloween, 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.

This week's challenge is to design an instant or sorcery card that represents being scared or frightened somehow. For bonus points, use a color other than black.

Good luck and have fun!

9 comments:

  1. Predator's Dread 1GG
    Enchantment - Aura
    Enchant creature
    As long as enchanted creature is untapped, creatures with less power than it cannot attack, block or activate abilities.

    Would this be better as 1G enchanting an opponent's creature and doing a faith's feathers as long as you control a creature with higher power?

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    1. A green Pacifism variant with a power limitation? That's a really cool direction to take the challenge! I do think the 1G idea is better-- the original risks being oppressive.

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    2. Damn, it was instant or socery!
      Missed that.

      If I had to do it again I would go for:
      Fight or Flight response R
      UR
      Instant
      Choose one :
      Target blocked creature fights all creatures blocking it.
      Remove target creature from combat.

      I am unsure of the colors...

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    3. Oh, that's a fun one!

      Straight-up "remove from combat" has no real color identity yet. If anything it's in R thanks to nonsense like False Orders and Disharmony. (See also: Skophos Maze-Warden?!) So this could be mono-R, which seems appropriate to the flavor.

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  2. Boo! B
    Instant
    Remove target creature from combat. It's controller loses two life.

    This is probably too narrow, and not really in pie, and would need the combat rules to be streamlined again to make removing a blocker intuitive[1], but it was the one that had the best "scary" flavour.

    [1] I'm not sure if it works, but now that the assign-damage-order rules have been there for a while, it feels like you could remove the special meaning of "blocked", and just say "a creature is blocked if it is blocked by any creatures" and "when damage is finally assigned, the defending player or planeswalker is always last in the order, but is only assigned damage if there are no blocking creatures or the attacking creature has trample". It feels like the benefits would be similar to removing "combat damage on the stack" -- you can remove a blocking creature and have the effect you intuitively expect, but you can't block and then sac, you have to choose.

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    1. Boo! B
      Instant
      Remove target creature from combat. It's controller loses two life.
      Flashback 4B

      Oh, I forgot. It probably is too narrow as is, but a rider like flashback would make sense, having the scare happen once, then have it hanging over you.

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    2. I love "remove from combat" as a way to convey "startled", and the life loss makes it even better. Flashback is also a good choice as a way to make it worth a card. Nice work!

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  3. Scared to Death 2B
    Instant
    If you control a creature with menace, you may destroy target creature. Otherwise, create a 2/2 black Horror creature token with menace.

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    Replies
    1. I like this a lot! Clean design with a great synthesis of mechanical theme and flavor. It would be nice to have a bigger reward, but I don't see a good way to do that without compromising the card's identity.

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