CCDD 111720 – The Cooler Ludevic

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

 

Weekend Art Challenge 070816—homoseptimus

Hello All! Anastase here with another challenge for you guys!

This week we are going to imagine Ludevic!

He has not yet been spoiled, so let us see if we can find a way to make the quintessential legendary stitcher alchemist come to life!

CCDD 070516—Rise Up

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/5/2016 - This is not a spoiler for Eldritch Moon, it's a response to a design challenge Zefferal tweeted:

Thursday's #AskAnArtisan. Make an #MTGEMN card for this art and I'll offer critique. #MTGDesign #Liliana pic.twitter.com/j1KkXJkB8i

— Jay Zeffren (@zefferal) June 30, 2016

New Mechanic Review—Meld

WotC revealed the new keywords in Eldritch Moon Monday and you've been very patient as I've slowly built up to reviewing Meld from a Design perspective. There are lots of strong feelings about this mechanic, and rightly so.

Official spoilers follow, but no custom cards do.

New Mechanic Review—Emerge

WotC revealed the new keywords in Eldritch Moon Monday and I'm killing time until the Prerelease by reviewing them from a Design perspective instead. Today, we'll take a look at emerge.

Official spoilers follow, but no custom cards do.

New Mechanic Review—Escalate

WotC revealed the new keywords in Eldritch Moon today and I'm very excited to try them out. Since the Prerelease isn't also today, let's review them from a Design perspective instead. Today, we'll take a look at escalate.

Official spoilers follow, but no custom cards do.

CCDD 051816—Stitched

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/18/2016 - I started exploring a new Skaab mechanic—perhaps because Shadows refused to deliver on that aspect of its predecessor—and hit upon a keyword fun enough to just keep making cards for. Check it out.

CCDD 051116—Something in the Woods

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/11/2016 - The woods used to be terrifying, back before we'd hunted all the predators close to extinction.

CCDD 051016—Determined Hunter

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/10/2016 - Top-down update to Elite Inquisitor / Slayer of the Wicked.

CCDD 042516—Goldnight Betrayer

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/25/2016 - I'm not entirely sold on Goldnight Castigator. It suffers double damage, but its toughness was doubled, so that ability doesn't matter. If it were red-white, the combination would be cute, but red doesn't do giant toughness, so it's just a poorly delivered joke.

I played it this weekend and against it, and Castigator cost its caster the game every time. Not surprising, since if you boil it down, it's a 4/4 haste flyer for four with a huge downside—a downside that red is least equipped to mitigate. It certainly compares poorly to Thundermaw Hellkite, for a mythic.

None of that is to say that the design goal or the flavor are bad… I love them both. Which is why I wanted to find an execution that does them more justice.

CCDD 033116—Thraben Bandit

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/20/2016 - This illustration begged for a Shadows over Innistrad design.

Tesla: The Dish on Kaladesh

Lately, we've been focusing on designing mechanics and finding themes for Tesla, building up a toolbox and refining our vision for when we move from exploratory design to individual card design. This week, I'd like to zoom out from mechanics, and look at an even bigger picture than Tesla's themes - this week, let's look at the setting of Tesla.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 092013—ChaoYuanXu

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

Weekend Art Challenge 092013—ChaoYuanXu

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ in your submissions.

Unifying Theory #1 - A card-by-card GDS/Innistrad review

Hello, my name is Scott Van Essen. If you’ve heard of me at all, it’s almost certainly as a finalist for the first Great Designer Search and, more recently, making top 3 during GDS2. I hold the dubious honor of being the most successful GDS competitor who does not work for Wizards. (Go me?)

A year ago, I had just been informed that I was a finalist for GDS2. Five years ago, I had just finished the first round of GDS1. With a little perspective and a crazy year behind me, it seems like an appropriate time to kick off my new column: Unifying Theory. This column will attempt to distill my thoughts on Magic, design, games, and play into something informative and entertaining. I hope that at the very least the dozens of fans and supporters I picked up during the GDS enjoy what I have to say.

Popping the Hood: White in Innistrad

Hey all, my name is Rowan, aka uber_pochacco on Twitter, aka unbrokencircle from way back when on the GDS2 wiki. During GDS2, I helped the contestants by spending a lot of time looking at old cards, both individually and on a set-by-set basis, in order to learn more about Magic design. That information was invaluable in creating sets of commons that looked like they could have come from an actual Magic set. But that sort of analysis is also useful in analyzing new sets and uncovering specific design decisions that were made which aren't always obvious at first glance. As Mark Rosewater said during the GDS2, one of the best ways to learn about Magic design philosophy is to look at current Magic sets. Today I'll be using this technique to look at how White in Innistrad compares to other sets and why.