CCDD 041420 - Shimmering Battlement

Magic has lots of lands that tap only for colorless and then activate with a specific color or combination of colors, like Academy Ruins or Blighted Woodland and their respective cycles. But the activated non-mana ability has to be pretty good to make a nonbasic Wastes playable. One way to narrow that gap: start from a land that's slightly better, like Shimmering Grotto.

CCDD 021419 - Some More More Interesting Slivers (Part 2)

Yesterday I showed off some more off-beat sliver designs for white, blue and black. Today I'll cover red and green, and maybe talk about some more color interactions.

For those looking for Valentines Day content, rest assured that Slivers are very near and dear to my heart.

CCDD 021319 - Some More Interesting Slivers (Part 1)

Last week I gave myself the challenge of making a cycle of slivers that incorporated the five clan mechanics from Khans of Tarkir into their designs. I had fairly strict design parameters for myself - the mechanics had to be the Khans ones, not the Fate Reforged or Dragons of Tarkir ones. I wanted to get the execution as clean as I could, and not gunk up the individual slivers with additional rules beyond the core of the clan mechanic. Unfortunately, as Nich Grayson rightfully pointed out, this resulted in some relatively unexciting Sliver designs.

Eternal Analysis 011—The Must-Play Kill Spells

I'm a huge sucker for cycles and so is Dire Wolf (and so is Wizards). Most often, cycles exist to demonstrate the nature of the set by viewing it through the lens of each color/faction (and to demonstrate the nature of each color/faction through the lens of the set). Sometimes, though, they exist purely to support a number of archetypes. This is particularly the case with 2+color cycles like dual lands and the 10 Eternal cards we're looking at today.

CCDD 061118 - Characteristic Anthems

Back before the GDS Bullet Train left the station, I had started an exploration of Form of enchantments exploring what they might look like separated from Red's history with the template. While working on that, I gave a lot of thought to both the Iconic and Characteristic races in Magic, and how they are captured mechanically.

CCDD 02012018 - Monocolor Guildmages

I came up with a monocolor guildmage during the Goblin Game I ran last week, and decided to make a tight cycle out it.

Weekend Design Challenge 010518—Cycling It Out

Click through to see the requirements for your design test, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

Spotlight Challenge 1 Final Review—Zeno Rage

Here's the challenge Zeno Rage is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Here's the initial submission.

Let's take a look at the final submission.

Spotlight Challenge 1 Initial Review—Zeno Rage

Here's the challenge Zeno Rage is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Let's take a look at the initial submission.

Spotlight Challenge 1—Zeno Rage

This fortnight, Zeno Rage is going to take lead on this challenge:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Zeffrikommons, Part 3: Cyclical Behavior

In the Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogues I attend, during Rosh Hashanah prayers, someone stands next to the person leading the prayers and, at specific times during the services, sounds a shofar. A shofar is a hollowed-out ram's horn akin to a single-note trumpet. It is used briefly at various points during the primary services on Rosh Hashanah, but at the end of the services, a long series of note-patterns is sounded, roughly equal in length to all the other times the shofar was sounded earlier in the services.

Weekend Design Challenge Review 042415—cycle patching

Weekend Design Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Design Challenge 042415—cycle patching

Weekend Design Challenge
Greetings, artisans! Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every  submission warrants feedback, and everyone is encouraged to give feedback. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times, though only the version rendered will be included in the review, if someone volunteers to render the cards.

Suvnica Week 13 Review, Part 2: Colorblind (Guild Artifact Cycles)

Here's a secret - Ravnica's cycle of guild artifacts is directly responsible for Suvnica even being a thing. Most of them were pretty bad, but I still think that they were some of the funner designs to come out of a set practically overflowing with fun designs. There were a few different things that inspired me to pitch this project, but a WAC around the time of Dragon's Maze got my hopes up that they would revisit the cycle in DGM (they didn't). I kept struggling to make a Simic artifact, and while I kept coming up with good designs (I thought) none of them felt like they made sense in Simic creatively. This in turn got me thinking about guilds with different philosophical focuses, and now here we are 750 card designs later. More rambling later. For now, here's the designs you guys came up with for the Suvnican analogue to that cycle:

Suvnica Week 11 Review: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Guilds are great and all, but even multicolor sets need some monocolor love. Let's see what guild-neutral cycles you guys came up with.

Designing Suvnica, Week 13: Gangster's Paradise

Theros previews are right around the corner. I'm hoping to wrap up this stage of Suvnica design right around the time that the RtR block starts fading into the background. With that in mind, this week we're rolling right along with another guild keyword, as well as another cycle challenge.

Designing Suvnica, Week 11: Five-Card Cycle

Getting a late start this week. Sorry about that. We'll skip the keywords and do two more on Monday. For the weekend, let's think about non-guild alligned rare cycles.

Suvnica Week 9 Review, Part 2: Do the Evolution (Evolving Cycle Review)

The cycle challenge was pretty  tricky. The goal was to show how a cycle that was represented across all ten guilds would evolve over the course of the block. This meant that not only did you have to capture the guild's feel in its representative card in the cycle, but also that there had to be some clear mechanical shift in the way the card would operate if the guild were placed in a different set in the block.

Designing Suvnica, Week 9: The Same Thing Different

Hey everyone! Sorry I'm running a little late with this. It has become pretty clear that two keywords a week is going to be impossible to keep up with. In the interests of keeping this project moving along at a reasonable pace without drowning under it, I'll be doing the keyword challenges alongside other challenges, which should keep the workload bearable.

I'll discuss the non-keyword challenge first, then we'll talk about which guild is getting keyword suggestions this week.

Suvnica Week 4 Review, Part 3: Here It Goes Again (Cycles)

A tremendous amount of what made Ravnica so interesting was its implementation of cycles and how it developed them over the course of three sets. The cycles on RtR were a little less noteworthy, since they were spread out across two sets (less room to change them) and the sets they were in were much smaller (set sizes were reduced around the time of Shards). A major part of the Suvnica project is going to be looking into old cycles and redesigning them to match our new visions of the guilds, as well as creating other cycles from scratch. This was our first stab at the latter category - here's what we came up with.