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. (I know the feedback has been slow lately-- sorry! But I do get to it eventually.)
Last week's challenge was a Dungeon, so this week's is the obligatory Dragon to go with it. Design one for me-- non-legendary please, and multicolor, and rare.
What, you need more restrictions? Okay, then: for bonus points, give your Dragon a four-color identity, since those are the only color combinations we've never seen a Dragon in.
Good luck and have fun!
All right, let's try this then:
ReplyDeletePlague-Carrier Hellkite
{U}{B}{R}{G}
Creature - Dragon Skeleton
Haste, flying, trample
At the beginning of your upkeep, choose any number of permanents. Put a -1/-1 counter on each chosen creature, then remove a counter from each chosen noncreature permanent.
4/4
Very exciting Phyrexian-ish design with shades of Jund and Grixis. With such an aggressive set of keywords I was expecting the triggered ability to be on attack or on damage rather than on upkeep, but I might be biased by Silumgar, the Drifting Death. Also, I'm not sure the noncreature half of the ability is pulling its weight. Is it designed to remove charge counters? How does it tie into the plague flavor?
DeleteShout out to D&D
ReplyDeleteChromatic Dragon {U}{B}{R}{G}
Creature - Dragon
Flying
Cascade
Dragon spells you cast have cascade.
8/8
Oh I meant 4UBRG
DeleteThe First Sliver but for Dragons? Seems solid. Not knowing D&D I don't know if this has any particular flavor connection to chromatic dragons. For some reason I'm thinking its colors should be WURG rather that UBRG. Good call on the 8-mana cost since this definitely wants to cascade into another Dragon.
Deletea four color dragon? sure! ive actually been working on making four color cards easier for myself, by practicing with making a super cycle of 4 color legendary cards.
ReplyDeleteWhen designing 4 color cards, wizards have done it in one of two ways until now. the first one was what i would dub "design by redaction", where they looked at what color was missing, and designed the card to be the antithesis of that color. (Breya is the opposite of green(nature), dubbed "artifice". Saskia and dune brood nephilim is the opposite of blue(thoughtfulness), dubbed "aggression". Ydris is the opposite of White(order), dubbed "chaos")
the other one thus far has been the classic Chinese menu style. mixing something from each color. (e.g. omnath, locus of creation. he is a green, a blue, a red, and a white effect stapled together.)
What wizards havent really done yet is what one owuld call "same interest" cards, where all the colors on the card have a similar interest. magic R&D haven't really done this yet, (i think i saw an articla saying its hard to find good common ground between 4 colors or something like that.) but i believe there is a lot more room in 4 color than just that. as an example, i would like to bring up the following: https://imgur.com/a/LltmL
The above link is to an album of Custom cards where someone made 4 color cards based on having two different guilds make a card together. this results in a variant of the "Chinese menu" style of design, which is to not see every single color present, but things like their guilds. this gives a lot more room to explore more nuanced options when designing 4 color cards, like "what would a Jeskai + Black card look as opposed to a Grixis + White card?" and so on.
wait, this is a *Card*-design blog, not an essayist column.
a card:
Steelwind Dragon || {W}{U}{UB}{B}{R}
Creature - Dragon
Flying, Haste
Whenever a creature you control with flying attacks, tap target creature without flying, it gets -1/-1 until end of turn and you gain 1 life.
After all that talking, i ended up on a bit of a "non-green" design here with something that hates on non-flyers.
Interesting discussion! I like how the mana cost here suggests that the dragon is centered in UB with WR coming in as allies. That's reflected in the ability focusing on fliers-matter plus a form of "drain". I think 1 damage would be slightly more resonant than -1/-1 here but otherwise this is really cool and memorable-- a draining version of the "breath attack" abilities we've seen on, say, Thundermaw Hellkite or Forgestoker Dragon.
DeleteEtherium Revenant 2WUBR
ReplyDeleteCreature - Dragon
Flying
When Etherium Revenant enters the battlefield, deal three damage to any target and you gain three life.
Unearth - wubr
4/4
Cool! I'm not sold on the color identity here-- Lightning Helix is such an iconic RW effect that the unearth doesn't seem like sufficient justification for the UB part. I think it would help if this was an artifact, to make clearer that it was Grixis + Esper? Definitely a solid design mechanically, though. I like the simplicity and the Alara callbacks a lot.
Delete