Weekend Design Challenge 122520 - Hippo

Merry Christmas, 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. 

Designing for Johnny and Jenny

This article is the second of my three-part article series about designing for the Magic player psychographics. Check out the one about Timmy and Tammy, as well!

Weekend Design Challenge 121820 - Foretelling Foretell

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.

Weekend Design Challenge 121120 - Vitu-Ghazi

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.

Designing for Timmy and Tammy: Reloaded

A couple years ago (gross, I can't believe it was a couple years ago) I wrote an article about designing for the player psychographic Timmy/Tammy. I decided to get around to writing the other two psychographic articles, but I'm a bit unhappy with the previous article because I felt like I made some points for the sake of being contrarian. This is the redo of that article.

Weekend Design Challenge 120420 - Randomizer v2

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.

Weekend Design Challenge 112720 - Mind Rot Variant

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.

Signpost Uncommons: A Critique

Besides New World Order, the largest structural change to Magic sets in the last 10 years is the introduction of "signpost uncommons," two-colored uncommons that mark the particular archetype those two colors are associated with. This comes alongside a larger shift in set design from looser draft archetypes to tighter two-color pair strategies (which I will call "the signpost uncommon system".) This has become so ubiquitous that Limited Resources begins every set evaluation by looking at the signpost uncommon cycle. My issue isn't with this structure on its own, but its use in every set, which unnecessarily constrains Magic sets and limits their potential to be great formats.

Weekend Design Challenge 112020 - Mechanic Entity

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 111720 – The Cooler Ludevic

Ludevic, Necro-Alchemist was kind of underwhelming so I made a couple top-down Ludevic designs.

 

Weekend Design Challenge 111320 - Themed Dual Land

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.

The Great Redesigner Search: Booster

Welcome to the final chapter of The Great Redesigner Search, a series where I redo all of my GDS3 entries. This week was the booster pack challenge, or as I like to think of it, a thinly-veiled version of the "design a bunch of commons" challenge. As always, you can read my original entries and judge commentary here.

Weekend Design Challenge 110620 - Partners

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.

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.

CCDD 102920 - Executioner's Choice

I have a soft spot for card designs that give my opponents tough decisions, like Fact or Fiction. Here's a relatively simple one.

The Great Redesigner Search: Art

 Welcome back to the Great Redesigner Search, a series where I redo all of my GDS3 entries. This week covers the challenge where we were given slush art and tasked to make hole-filling cards with it. As always, you can read my original entries and judge commentary here.

Weekend Design Challenge 102320 - Tome

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 102220 - Silent Frostwing

Here's another one to add to the Hushbringer family of designs. (I imagine the art for this as an owl.)

Weekend Design Challenge 101620 - Loam Dweller Knockoff

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 101520 - Predator's Roar

The idea behind this card was to make a combat trick that rewards you specifically for using it to win combats.

CCDD 101320 - Irrational Exuberance

File this in the One With Nothing drawer, please.

Memorizing MDFCs: Zendikar Rising Edition

Zendikar Rising was the first set to introduce modal double-faced cards (MDFCs), cards that had two sides where each could be cast from your hand. MDFCs offer a unique challenge to designers through the memory problems they naturally create, but also represent innovations in reinforcing player recall. This is the first article in a three-part series about how Magic R&D designed MDFCs to get around their inherent memory issues.

Weekend Design Challenge 100920 - Inscription

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 100620 - Relentless Brutality

This is a bad idea for a mechanic, but it's still kind of cool.

Weekend Design Challenge 100220 - Have You Seen This Goblin?

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 100120 - Inconspicuous Stalker

Invisible Stalker showed that hexproof and unblockable make for un-interactive gameplay, especially in combination. I went looking for ways to make them more interactive while still having a big impact on gameplay, and found an approach that works for both.

CCDD 093020 - Nepenthe

I found a cool graveyard-hate effect that wasn't worth a card in most cases, so here's a cantrip version.

The Great Redesigner Search: Mechanic

Welcome back to the Great Redesigner Search, a series where I redo all of my GDS3 entries. This week is a little bit different from the others, because I'm making all new cards as opposed to revising old ones. As always, you can read my original entries and judge commentary here.

Weekend Design Challenge 092520 - Randomizer

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 092420 - Phyrexian Control Center

This is a lot more powerful than most cards that make token armies-- Birthing Boughs, say-- but it comes with a critical (and flavorful) weakness.

Weekend Design Challenge 091820 - Strixhaven MDFCs

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 091820 - Over My Dead Body

Here's one for the "weird Spikey subgame" files (my favorite is still Zyym, Mesmeric Lord).

CCDD 091620 - Ajani, True Companion

There's no reason this had to be Ajani-- it's a very bottom-up design, inspired by cards like Serra Avatar and Touch of the Eternal-- but I think it fits his character. And it was easy to find art for, which is nice for planeswalker card renders.

The Three Immutable Laws of Magic Design

One of Magic's defining features is its mutability. Every format and every set brings with it new opportunities for players to redefine the game. Mark Rosewater calls this process of constant renewal and discovery "Crispy Hashbrown Theory" and posits that it's one of Magic's core strengths. While I generally agree with this, I have two objections. The first is that hashbrowns aren't the best example of a breakfast food you get sick of partway through and that it should be called "Pancake Theory" instead. The second is that while constant change is the lifeblood of the game, Magic has a set of qualities that should never be changed, no matter how weird or experimental you're getting. These are the three immutable laws of Magic design.

Weekend Design Challenge 091120 - Kaldheim MDFCs

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 090920 – Market Guardians

"In response, I call my stockbroker."

CCDD 090820 - Panpiper

There's nothing too innovative about today's design. I just happened to be looking at the tribute mechanic for some reason and wondered about putting more power into the modal part instead of the base creature.

CCDD 090320 - Lightning Berserker

It always bothered me a little that there wasn't much point in blocking Ball Lightning. Absorbing a few points of damage isn't normally worth losing an X/2 or X/3 creature, so the Lightning was basically just a burn spell that could be "countered" by first strike or instant-speed removal. Eventually I decided to make a version that didn't have that problem.

The Great Redesigner Search: Circus

Welcome back to the Great Redesigner Search, a series where I redo all of my GDS3 entries. This week I'll be going over everything from round 2, the top-down challenge set on the circus plane of Bigtopia. Though I placed in 2nd, there were a lot of misses and room for improvement. As always, you can read my original entries and judge commentary here.

Weekend Design Challenge 08282020 - No Judge Free-For-All

Happy Friday, Artisans! 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 082620 - Doomed Soulbinder

This is a Zombie tribal card-- kind of. My inspiration was roughly "Why is Zombie a creature type? It's just some other kind of creature that's been reanimated." That got me thinking about how to give non-Zombies some graveyard / Zombie synergies.

CCDD 082520 - Merfolk Dancer

Here's a Blind Phantasm modeling a weird idea for an ability word!

Weekend Art Design Challenge 20200821 - ZendikART Rising (2)

Happy Friday, Artisans! 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 08202020 - Krenko's Big Move

I had a long twitter conversation about the best Goblins last night, and that got me thinking about having a central Goblin villain in a story. Krenko is the closest existing contender, but we never get to see him do something truly despicable on screen. I came up with a story beat that might escalate him to villain status, and I came up with a story spotlight card for the set where it happens. 

The Great Redesigner Search: Tribal

Welcome back to The Great Redesigner Search, the series where I revise all of my GDS3 designs! This week was the challenge I did best on, so you'd think I don't have that much to change, but I turned in a few cards at the last minute and would like to rectify that. As before, you can see my original designs and judge feedback here. 

CCDD 081620 - Locked in Combat

Here's one of those card designs where the concept is clear and the challenge is how to make it appealing, because the concept just doesn't do that much. How often would you want this effect over Smite or Celestial Flare?

Weekend Art Design Challenge 20200807 - ZendikART Rising (1)

Happy Friday, Artisans! 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 080520 - Vault of the Dross

I designed a scry (and cascade, etc.) reward that works along the same lines as Bag of Holding. The Bag works more smoothly in a couple of ways, though. See what they are?

The Great Redesigner Search: The Design Test

About two years ago, I went on a reality show and my life changed forever.

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.