Of Other Multiverses

By lpaulsen

Hi everyone! I'm Luke. I comment on Goblin Artisans as lpaulsen and occasionally post my own custom Magic design projects at mondaymorningmaro.blogspot.com.

Here's a little known fact about me, though: I have a fictional alter ego who's a planeswalker.

Designing Archfrenemies

By Bradley Rose

“Wait, what’s Archfrenemies?” you ask as you read the title of this blog post. If this describes you, check out my Card Kingdom blog post on the rules of this Cube draft innovation and Archenemy variant by clicking here.

To summarize, it’s a Cube draft followed by an eight-player game with two archenemies and two three-player teams. It has its own special rules to help ensure this “large multiplayer” format is still fun.

This post will look at issues inherent to multiplayer games and cover how Archfrenemies design and pack rarity distribution addressed those issues.

The Pirate Problem: Flavor Doesn't Make a Tribe

By Larcent

I've been playing in the beta for Magic: The Gathering Arena since February. My experience in this very limited game environment has helped me think a lot about tribal design, particularly where Ixalan block succeeded and failed. Let's talk about Pirates and figure out what the heck happened with them, design-wise.

Designing for Discovery: Test Your Mettle

Designing for Discovery: Test Your Mettle
By Larcent

"What an odd card," I muttered to myself when I first read Path of Mettle and Metzali, Tower of Triumph, when they were spoiled in Rivals of Ixalan.

I was not alone in that reaction. Luis Scott-Vargas called them "bizarre" in his initial set review. Melissa DeTora called it the "weirdest card in the set."

A Taxing Argument

A Taxing Argument
By Jim Harbor

Welcome artisans. Today I’m going to do something a bit different. I’m posting a single card design and will talk about its implications for an overall format and the game as a whole. This is more “big picture” design about how the implications of one simple card can be quite impactful on design.

Lessons from the Exam

Lessons from the Exam
By Jim Harbor

Welcome Artisans, I hope I find you well. The GDS3 has stoked a fire under the custom magic community and I am glad to see it making all of us better designers, regardless of how well we placed. In the spirit of that, I am going to take a look at some of the trickier questions from the GDS3 exam. Instead of looking at just the right answer, I’m going to break down exactly what WOTC was testing; what they see as the signs of a good designer. Hopefully the takeaway from these questions will help us all tune up our design skills.