Weekend Art Challenge Review 032516—Answer Cards

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hello all! Anastase here, reviewing the answer cards challenge, or should I say the "take that -----!" challenge?

The idea behind an answer card is to find the question (a bit like Jeopardy if I understand correctly what that game is about?).

Here the questions generally were:
Which mechanic is not fun when abused?
Mechanic X is not fun when abused, how can I answer it?

I took the liberty of adding flavor text to all the cards submitted based on suggestions in the comments.

Strangely, the main controversy in the challenge was weather the art #1 by Roswell-Ivory is an angel or an archon. (I would lean toward the second.)

On with the cards!

Weekend Art Challenge 032516—Answer Cards

Weekend Art Challenge
Hello Artisans. Anastase here. This week I suggest you the following challenge:

There are in Magic many 'answer' cards. R&D uses those as safety plugs to prevent crazy combos to dominate constructed formats, by giving you silver bullets against them.

Cards like Grafdigger's Cage, Loxodon Smiter and Stony Silence come to mind.

Design an 'answer' card that either:

• uses the word 'instead'
• specifically prevents your opponent from doing a small subset of possible actions

Bonus point if the card is neither oppressive nor totally useless in other situations.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 032715—aviaku

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

Weekend Art Challenge 032715—aviaku

Weekend Art 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.

21 Ways to Design a Card Part 8: Design an Answer to a Card

I would like to applaud Wizards of the Coast for its epic, brave choice today, announcing to ban Jace, the Mind Sculptor and Stoneforge Mystic.

There are many factors leading up to the dominance of those two cards in Standard. Some of them couldn't be helped, at least with the knowledge at the time. But one of the contributing factors that could have been avoided was the lack of general-purpose answer cards like Pithing Needle to fight problem cards.

In today's post, I'd like to discuss designing cards that answer other cards.