Magic: The Removing

For a long time, many Magic players advised players just getting into limited formats to follow the heuristic "BREAD". After bombs – the absolute strongest cards in a set, that could singlehandedly change a losing game into a come-from-behind victory – the acronym recommended that players draft removal.

Although BREAD is better used as a vehicle for butter and jam than as a Magic strategy, the fact remains that removal is the cornerstone of Magic by providing a necessary element of interactivity and allowing players to affect each others' plans. Entire colors are frequently made or broken by how strong their removal performs. However, while there have been plenty of set breakdowns based on their removal spells, I have not yet seen a breakdown of general removal effects at common in modern Magic and what they need to be effective. That's what this article intends to fix, color-by-color.

The Great Redesigner Search: Booster

Welcome to the final chapter of The Great Redesigner Search, a series where I redo all of my GDS3 entries. This week was the booster pack challenge, or as I like to think of it, a thinly-veiled version of the "design a bunch of commons" challenge. As always, you can read my original entries and judge commentary here.

Tesla Design Challenge 072216 — Hello World

Hi everybody! Over at the Multiverse, we're taking the final steps towards finalizing the commons in the skeleton, in preparation for imminent all-commons playtesting. This week, we're going to have a fun triple-fold challenge: filling in the rest of the commons, in addition to filling in flavor text and the rest of the world of Kaladesh.

Tesla Design Challenge 0328016 — Top-Down Designs

Hello again, everyone! Yes, this week is a Tesla double feature! Yesterday, I discussed some approaches to filling the Tesla set skeleton as a team. One such method I mentioned was producing 'bounties', various ideas that simply must be in the final set as a card. This week, we're going to be focusing on one such bounty... the top-down design!

Tesla: Playtest Engineering II: Designing Cards

Hello again, everybody! I'm back from my holiday vacation, and eager to jump once more into the fray! Last time, we began a series on designing an all commons playtest, from start to finish. In the first part, we talked about the overall structure of a playtest set, and how one can use concepts like as-fan to help quickly create such a structure, using our custom collaborative set Tesla as an example. This time, we're going to learn how to quickly fill in this structure with actual cards.

Tesla: Make Common Cause

This article is WotC safe.

Hello again everyone! Last time, the Tesla Project forum debuted, where the discussion from Our Refinery has continued nicely. Over the past week, alongside discussing proposals and alterations for the candidate mechanics, many of us have begun to design example commons for the mechanics - which leads directly into our topic for this week, designing commons for playtesting our mechanics.