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

There are a number of evergreen archetypes that Wizards goes back to when a color pair doesn't have anything in particular it wants to d...

Magic  brought with it an enormous boom in the then-new trading card game genre, with dozens of competitors beginning and ending in the 1990...

 Welcome to the next installment of "The Perfect Storm", a recurring article series where I randomly choose four mechanics rated b...

Welcome to a new installment in my series, The Usual Suspects. For those who haven't seen the first edition, in The Usual Suspects I tak...

Part of being a good game designer involves knowing when to do things your players don't like. Sometimes this is because your responsibi...

Common knowledge among those who pay attention to Magic  design is that the most-played format isn't really a format: It's "kit...

 Mark Rosewater's Storm Scale is an unofficial measurement for how likely a certain mechanic is to appear in an upcoming set. He has des...

For a long time, many Magic  players advised players just getting into limited formats to follow the heuristic "BREAD". After bomb...

Welcome to the beginning of what I expect will be a recurring segment on Goblin Artisans. In The Usual Suspects, I will analyze a card arche...

Tibalt's Trickery  caught the eye of the Magic  player base as soon as it was revealed. It was a counterspell in red, something that had...

This is the second edition of my series on the inherent memory issues with modal double-faced cards and how different sets resolve them in d...

This is the third article in my series of designing for player psychographics. I encourage you to read my articles about Timmy/Tammy and Jo...

This article is the second of my three-part article series about designing for the Magic  player psychographics. Check out the one about Tim...

A couple years ago (gross, I can't believe it was a couple years ago) I wrote an article about designing for the player psychographic Ti...

Besides New World Order, the largest structural change to Magic  sets in the last 10 years is the introduction of "signpost uncommons,...

Zendikar Rising was the first set to introduce modal double-faced cards (MDFCs), cards that had two sides where each could be cast from your...

One of  Magic 's defining features is its mutability. Every format and every set brings with it new opportunities for players to redefin...

My defining guideline for game design is impact . Broadly speaking, impact is how much a game sticks with you: How much you remember a game ...

Why do bad cards happen to good people?