CCDD - Gremlin Pack and Mole Miasma

A philosophical question: does the Detain mechanic work in non-Azorius colors?

CCDD 051820 - Restrictive Priest

"Freeze" effects like Take Into Custody aren't in white's color pie. Discard effects aren't either. Can we make a case for giving it a mechanic that lets an opponent choose between the two?

Lessons from the Exam

Lessons from the Exam
By Jim Harbor

Welcome Artisans, I hope I find you well. The GDS3 has stoked a fire under the custom magic community and I am glad to see it making all of us better designers, regardless of how well we placed. In the spirit of that, I am going to take a look at some of the trickier questions from the GDS3 exam. Instead of looking at just the right answer, I’m going to break down exactly what WOTC was testing; what they see as the signs of a good designer. Hopefully the takeaway from these questions will help us all tune up our design skills.

Keep Your Friends Close

Hey folks. Please enjoy another post from guest columnist Jake Mosby.
—Jay Treat

Understanding the color pie is a core skill for anyone who wants to design Magic cards. Luckily, there are a lot of resources available to designers that analyze the broad strokes of the color pie. Mark Rosewater has been writing about the color pie for 15 years, and he's written at length about how the colors interact with one another. In all that time, I have yet to see anything more than cliffnotes about how colors come into conflict with their allies. For example, if you want to make a set where green is at odds with white (like Mirrodin Besieged), there isn’t a go-to resource out there to help you identify potential sources of that conflict. This article aims to change that.

CCDD 100115—Elevate Perspective, Lessons of our Ancestors & Yore

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/1/2015 - Here are three cards I designed while thinking about green's commitment to heritage.

CCDD 020215: Undercity Hexcaster and Nudge Fate

As I discussed with Jaru, That Kills With Needles last week, Blue Black hybrid is a real problem area of design. And while I recognized counter manipulation is a pretty marginal ability, I thought it worthwhile to see if there are some reasonable commons to offset the mill and evasion commons that normally dominate Dimir hybrid commons.

Subdivisions (Part One)

With the intent to expand Red's mechanical repertoire, a desire sitting patiently at the front my mind as I toiled away at eighteen demoralizing Red commons, I decided to get meta (more meta than usual) and divide one of the many pies within the pie: the Time Pie. Of course, the Time Pie had yet to be referenced in any other piece of Magic design ephemera, so it was up to me to decide what that entailed.