Weekend Design Challenge 111321 - Faction Mechanic

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 110621 - Cleave

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 102921 - Crimson Vow Teaser

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 102321 - Randomizer v3

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 101621 - Blood Lust

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.

MOXTOBER - Thirteen: Luck and Solitaire Games

#wotcsafe

It’s #MTGMoxtober! A month of design prompts for the Magic creatively inclined. Today is October Thirteenth, which means fittingly that the prompt for today is 13.

For today’s prompt, I’ve created a solo puzzle game based on Triskaidekaphobia. The goal is to lose to Triskaidekaphobia while using a 13 card deck before losing to damage or running out of cards. Sounds easy enough! You can use the solo play mode on manastack to give it a try here: https://manastack.com/deck/triskai-deck

Or you can build the deck using this list:

1 Swamp

1 Godless Shrine

1 Orzhov Basilica

1 Scoured Barrens

1 Dross Harvester

1 Cloistered Youth

1 Tavern Swindler

1 Death Grasp

1 Sign in Blood

1 Renewed Faith

1 Fountain of Youth

1 Mana Crypt

1 Triskaidekaphobia

 

I was a big fan of Maro’s Magic the Puzzling book back in the day, so this is an attempt to combine that with the recent trend of Button Shy’s solo microgames. With only 13 cards to work with, the goal is to create enough variance where a player still has agency to make interesting decisions, while not becoming deterministic or too easy. More play testing is needed to see if this particular build strikes the right balance. Will the use of coin flip cards and mana variance be fun or do they leave players feeling unsatisfied and unlucky when they lose to a coin flip? Give it a playtest and let me know how it goes! Do you have any custom designs that would be a good fit? Any luck with other solo Magic variants?

 You can find me on Twitter @wobbles 

Or in the Beacon of Creation discord https://t.co/WXoiKIC1qf?amp=1

Or on my Tumblr where I post other small and cheap game design ideas: brokeboardgames.tumblr.com

Honk! Honk!

MOXTOBER - Bones: A Google Sheet Template for Set Skeletons!

#wotcsafe

It’s #MTGMoxtober! A month of design prompts for the Magic creatively inclined. Today is October Twelfth, which means the prompt for today is Bones

What do people think about when they think of Bones? Skeletons! And what is the scariest kind of Skeleton? Set Skeletons! 

Today, instead of designing a new Skeleton card, I’ve created a new tool for looking at and designing your own set skeletons in a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1G5E_Klct4tyHn2eKvgU_5zoCfzWpyaNWpCkkq_cSRKE/

The previous top link for “Set Skeleton Google Sheet” pointed at this template from Flying__Penguin, which this is based on. It’s really useful! However, that template was made 6 years ago for 150 card sets. The updated version reflects the feedback from Maro’s Nuts and Bolts article from last year and the larger size of modern sets, which is far more detailed that the previous version. You can copy this template to use for your own sets

I’ve also included at additional tab that uses Cube April’s brilliant Scryfall google sheets plug in to (more or less) automatically populate a set skeleton that you can view along side the skeleton template provided in the article. This helps you to see where recent sets have deviated from the skeleton in creative ways! 

This document is certainly a work in process, so please let me know how else I can improve the design or how you’re tweaking it to be more useful!

You can find me on Twitter @wobbles

or in the Beacon of Creation discord https://t.co/WXoiKIC1qf?amp=1

Or on my Tumblr where I post other small and cheap game design ideas: brokeboardgames.tumblr.com

Honk! Honk!

Weekend Design Challenge 100921 - Night // Day

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.

Five Design Challenges for GDS4

Starting November 1st, I'm joining Wizards of the Coast as a designer. As a parting gift to the wonderful Goblin Artisans community, I'm leaving five design practice challenges to help you develop your skills on GDS4.

MOXTOBER - Plot: Uncovering Caverns

It’s #MTGMoxtober! A month of design prompts for the Magic creatively inclined. Today is October Sixth, which means the prompt for today is Plot

For a long time, Steamflogger Boss was the go to example of a White Whale of Magic design. A bit of trinket text that was alluring because it was so impossible. But Joke Problems require Joke Solutions, and Unstable provided a way to solve the issue while avoiding any rules unpleasantness. While this was an elegant solution, it had the unfortunate side effect of resolving the most tantalizing design hooks that WotC had provided casual designers. So it was quite nice of them to include a new one when they released Mystery Boosters 

Now, plot boosters still need to answer the same questions that Ari posed about Contraptions:

1. Does it create fun gameplay?
2. Does it work within the rules?
3. Is it comprehensible and intuitive?
4. Does it have sufficient design space, especially at common?
5. Does it mesh well with the other themes of the set?
6. Does it have resonance with the world's flavor?
7. Does it appeal to many different kinds of players?
8. Can it be templated with a sufficiently small word count?
9. Is it novel?

Fortunately, the Mechanics at the disposal of both WotC and casual designers look a lot different than they did back in 2013. Plot boosters don’t need to show up in a standard legal, black bordered set. They can be their own product, they could be in Universes Beyond, they could be digital. Even if they were to show up in a standard legal set, they could involve sideboards or external components to an extent that that sets 10 years ago weren’t really trying. The wording of the card is most reminiscent of opening story packs in games like Risk Legacy or Gloomhaven. Trying to figure out how to make a card like Planequake work in a game mode like that is too ambitious for me right now, so instead my take will focus on a Jumpstart like setting where a player might have a deck with Planequake and an included Uncovered Cavern plot booster included. 

My mechanic would work like this:

When you open a Plot Booster, remove the first card and shuffle the rest face down. Perform the actions of the first card, then uncover the next card and perform its ability. Then you may either empty your mana pool and retreat, or uncover the next card and activate its ability. You may only activate plot abilities and mana abilities during the resolution of the plot.

This steals a tried and true push your luck mechanic from games like Incan Gold or Mark Rosewater’s own game of scantily clad miners Gold Digger. Here’s what I’m picturing for the first card of Uncovered Canyon

From there, exploration of the pack is random. That means that while you could use a sealed pack for the mechanic, you could also replay it using those cards because the order would be different. For this implementation, the packs would be the start card, 4 commons, two uncommons and a rare. A common could look like:

The common effects would provide effects for off color costs or 2 generic. The design of Planequake ensures that you’re probably not entering the cavern with a bunch of extra mana, so these plot cards can force hard choices about where to spend the initial mana you get from the first card

Uncommons might look like this:

Higher risk!

A rare could be:

Big impact, high price, high cost of failure. If this is the first card you flip, it’s a big upside, but if not, you’ll need to withhold a lot of potential payouts to dig deep to find it.

This doesn’t seem like an implementation that would work easily in a standard legal set, but in a dedicated supplemental like Jumpstart that could include a sealed pack of these it seems like a lot of fun!

So that’s my pitch for Plot Boosters. What are your thoughts? Will we see an actual implementation of Plot Boosters? What other themes could be interesting for Plots or cards that launch them? Let me know!

You can find me on Twitter @wobbles

or in the Beacon of Creation discord https://t.co/WXoiKIC1qf?amp=1

Or on my Tumblr where I post other small and cheap game design ideas: brokeboardgames.tumblr.com

Honk! Honk!

MOXTOBER - Pawn: Changing Game Pieces

It’s #MTGMoxtober! A month of design prompts for the Magic creatively inclined. Today is October Third, which means the prompt for today is Pawn .

Nich designed around the idea of pawning as in Rishadan Pawnshop, but I was thinking more along the lines of Pawns as game components in Chess:

Lots of tiny text there: 

If there 0 or 1 pawns on the board, place a pawn on each colored square when a player becomes the Monarch.

The Monarch may move any Pawn diagonally at the end of their turn.

When you move a Pawn to an occupied square, remove a pawn there and claim the reward.

And the rewards are:

• Create three 1/1 white soldier tokens
• Draw two cards
• Destroy a creature
• Fetch a basic land
• Deal 4 damage to each opponent

The idea is that for the right environment, you could use Monarch Chess as an alternative for the typical monarch rules. Homebrew rules are an easy way to spice up casual game play without needing to design new cards for your casual format. And, as recent Magic sets have relied on more and more external cards like Contraptions, Dungeons, or Lessons, the easier its become to create alternatives to what those rules mean. 

For example, what if for your next AFR draft, every time you’d venture into the dungeon you set in motion a random Scheme instead? 

Maybe you build a Strixhaven Cube with the alternate rule that every time you’d learn a lesson, you get to Booster Tutor from your Vintage Cube instead? 

In my Un-set battle box, we use a Steamflogger Boss as a monarch token that replaces the card draw with assembling a contraption. 

These rule tweaks can be a fun way to change up an existing play experience or significantly shift a format as play continues. Who knows, a fun homebrew rules tweak might even become a standard part of the game! That was the case for Commander and, in keeping with today’s theme, the invention of en passant captures for Pawns in chess.

Do you have fun homebrew rules variants that you use in casual games? Let us know in the comments!

You can find me on Twitter @wobbles

or in the Beacon of Creation discord https://t.co/WXoiKIC1qf?amp=1

Or on my Tumblr where I post other small and cheap game design ideas: brokeboardgames.tumblr.com

Honk! Honk!

Weekend Design Challenge 100221 - Green Curse

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.

Amonkhet, Rebirth and Desert Cubes

 

#wotcsafe

It’s #MTGMoxtober! A month of design prompts for the Magic creatively inclined. I love a good design prompt, and this first one “Rebirth” has me excited for the upcoming return to Kamigawa. I love when media properties return to existing worlds and show how they’ve changed and developed over time. 

One setting that I’m also excited to eventually revisit is Amonkhet. The initial outing was so Bolas centered that the Egyptian Mythology aspects really got sidelined or just generally poorly served by the sets themselves. Plus, the plot clearly sets us up for a sequel of Hazoret and the survivors surviving in the desert, searching for information about the pre-Bolas and looking for a new home. A little bit Raiders of the Lost Ark, a little Ten Commandments, and a lot of Geraldine Pinch’s Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt? Let’s go!

On the mechanical side is where it gets really interesting, because a Rebirth of Amonkhet could finally be an excuse for WotC to try and design a Desert Cube in a standard legal set. Desert Cubes are a fascinating design challenge with the premise being that players only use the lands they draft. There isn’t a land station where you can grab more basics, but basic lands do appear in packs. Given my interest in low component cubes, desert cubes are definitely in my wheelhouse and a lot of the considerations around unbalancing the colors or providing extreme curve considerations are on display in the many examples on cube cobra: https://cubecobra.com/search/Desert%20cube/0?order=date. Update! The current top result of the search is even an Amonkhet themed Desert Cube by @GoblinGathering. Give him a follow!

The recent re-return to Zendikar has also been a huge boon to Desert Cube design, with mdfc lands basically redefining the architecture of these cubes and providing a lot more “slots” for land in the cube. Ixalan, Innistrad and Castmire have dabbled with the transforming land space as well, which could have interesting potential to represent Amonkhet survivors making discoveries under the sands. But none of these sets has done away with “free basics” entirely.

An alternative to just removing free lands all together would be to try replacing them with some other lands that you can get for free. This came up after Alexis Janson asked for the worst Magic formats you could get Magic players to try: 

This is actually a direction I hoped they would go when they announced Ravnican Gates would be replacing basics in packs of Dragon’s Maze and I still think it would have been an interesting way to change up that draft environment. Hour of Devastation’s pain deserts are almost certainly too good to give players unlimited copies. Especially spikey Ramunap Ruins in a world where everyone is taking lots of pain damage from their mana. What about a return to Amonkhet with free Ash Barrens but only the basics you draft? Cube Cobra actually allows you to replace or add cards to the basic lands menu when players test your cube, so those options are open to cube builders. I’d love examples of cubes that use alternate basics in the comments if you have them! 

Finally, “Is this card better than another basic land?” is an interesting way to look at Ari’s 6th Question. Basic Lands being free means that they’re typically the “floor” of a limited deck. Changing where that floor is opens up design assumptions that are rarely questioned in Magic sets, but could be in the right environment. It’s a Gold Mine of potential design space! 

 What could be scarier than a cube where your only lands are Gold Mines?

You can find me on Twitter @wobbles (check out the #MTGMoxtober hashtag for more designs from this year or last year. It’s more popular than ever thanks to TikTok(!?!))

or in the Beacon of Creation discord https://t.co/WXoiKIC1qf?amp=1

Or on my Tumblr where I post other small and cheap game design ideas: brokeboardgames.tumblr.com

Honk! Honk!

Weekend Design Challenge 092421 - Disturb

Hello again Artisans! We're back from hiatus with a fresh weekend 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.

Questions I Can't Answer

I considered several possibilities for what to write about here- what words of wisdom I could bring back to the design community that gave me the skills to work in R&D. Ultimately, I decided the most interesting thing I can offer is not any advice (19 Ways To Get Your Commons In Shape For Set Design Handoff- #6 Will *Shock* You!) but questions. Hard questions. Questions that I don't know the answer to.

Cubelets - Mini Cubes!

#wotcsafeFive years ago (!), I wrote a few articles about my experiments with… unorthodox cubes in response to the You Make the Cube contest produced by Wizards. The contest was an open solicitation of designs for Cube, which WotC has continued in various forms over the last two years through its Cube Spotlight Series.  This has helped highlight quirky Cube designs during MTGO off seasons, although nothing has really threatened to dethrone the Vintage and Legacy cubes from their staple positions because of their high powered game play, nostalgia hits, and continual updating. Particularly over the past two years of High Power sets, these cubes have provided a great place to highlight the fun new art treatments and expensive cards that are otherwise inaccessible for most Magic players. However, I’m never going to be able to afford to build such a cube, drafting is very difficult to do via web cam and even post-pandemic the prospects of organizing a full, 8 person draft seem slim. 

Weekend Design Challenge 090421 - Average Card

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 20210902 - Harmonic Hydra

 Another custom card for Experiment Kraj deck. My development of it led it too far away from the deck's theme to actually use it in the deck, but originally it had a Chameleon Colossus ability as well. As it stands, it could be interesting in a madness deck (and wouldn't be a stretch in BG)

CCDD 20210901 - Simic Mutagen

 This is a card I was tinkering with for this past weekend's design challenge before I put it up. It's designed for my Experiment Kraj deck.

Weekend Design Challenge 08272021 - Built for Commander and also Power Level Analysis

Happy Friday Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Once you've gone and made your own card for submission, go ahead and offer some feedback on your fellow Artisans' cards. Throughout next week I'll try to offer some feedback of my own (no promises).

Weekend Design Challenge 081421 - Multicolor X Spell

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 080721 - One-Color Planeswalker

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 073021 - Online Mechanics

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 072321 - Tribal God

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 - Gremlin Pack and Mole Miasma

A philosophical question: does the Detain mechanic work in non-Azorius colors?

CCDD 20210721 - Feigned Death

Looking at other potential keywords to bring back. Purely in terms of name, Conspire is a great fit for the flavor of the set. Mechanically it was kind of a whiff. It's just difficult enough to pull off that you can't reliably do it often, but it reads like it would be easier to do. This results in a lot of feel-bad plays, even when the effect is perfectly serviceable without the copy. I could image a 5-10 card cycle of hybrid common spells carrying it.

CCDD 20210720 - Promising Swindler and Bounty Bolt

Starting to think about which mechanics would be useful to include as a returning mechanic for my Heist Movie set. Renown seems like it might be a good place to start - thieves and charlatans can gain a bit of notoriety. The biggest strike against it is that, to play in the trope space, being recognizable in the heist world is a bit of double edged sword, as you have people paying attention to you when you need to be inconspicuous. Translating that into mechanics means finding ways to punish renown, which is not a great recipe for a mechanic like that.

Weekend Design Challenge 071721 - Seal

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 070921 - Non-D&D Classes

Happy Friday Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Once you've gone and made your own card for submission, go ahead and offer some feedback on your fellow Artisans' cards. Throughout next week I'll try to offer some feedback of my own.

Weekend Design Challenge 070221 - Dragon

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.)

CCDD 20210701 - Killer's Provisioner

Another variation on the perfect timing mechanical space I want to keyword for Cornea.