CCDD 072820 - Dovin's Prerogative

Most high-profile "hate cards" target specific broken strategies: Relic of Progenitus for graveyards, Stony Silence for artifacts, Damping Sphere for storm, and so forth. A while back I thought about turning this around. If I could define what was "unreasonable" in a game of Magic, and target that, then maybe I could create the One Hate Card To Rule Them All. Here's what I came up with.

CCDD 063020 - Quincy, Master Bureaucrat

Attacking and blocking with creatures is a big part of what makes Magic fun, but some decks just don't want to fight fair. They focus on finding ways to win-- or at least accrue an overwhelming advantage-- outside of combat. In the interest of fun I like to find cards that make those decks less appealing, but it's hard to interact favorably with strategies that are fundamentally non-interactive. Sometimes, I find, it's better to fight unfair with unfair.

CCDD 032220 - A Little Something Extra

Combat tricks are a bad value proposition in many ways. They aren't consistently worth a card, they're vulnerable to instant-speed removal, and so on. What's more, they aren't even all that tricky. Because they cost mana they're at least somewhat telegraphed, and easy to play around once they're suspected. What would it take to work around that problem? Here's one idea.

CCDD 031120 - Eidren, Unblemished

Most of the actual Magic I play these days is casual Commander, and designing cool Commanders is a special hobby of mine. Our playgroup has a running joke about how boringly powerful one player's Golgari decks are, so I thought I'd look for some fresh build-around design space in black-green.

CCDD 022420 - Eroding Hiking Trail

Like many here (I bet), I have a stable of card design hobby-horses that I keep coming back to. One of those is enters-the-battlefield-untapped dual lands. (I tend to think we have plenty of enters-the-battlefield-tapped-with-upside duals. Finding downsides that let the land enter untapped is harder.) Here's an example:

The Rise and Fall of a Card Type

The release of a new Jace, Chandra and Garruk in Magic 2012 has crystallized a trend in my mind relating to the introduction of new card types to the game.

Planeswalkers

When the first five planeswalkers are released in Lorwyn, they're all very strong cards. To use the limited pointing scale in a constructed context, they are all 4.0s. That is, if you build a deck of that color, you pretty much always stick all the planeswalkers you can into it. Liliana and Chandra don't get quite as much love, but that's more a matter of cost/archetypes not quite fitting.