CCDD 030821 - Headmistress Greag

Inspired by the teaser for Strixhaven, here's a charming commander.

CCDD 111720 – The Cooler Ludevic

Ludevic, Necro-Alchemist was kind of underwhelming so I made a couple top-down Ludevic designs.

 

CCDD 102220 - Silent Frostwing

Here's another one to add to the Hushbringer family of designs. (I imagine the art for this as an owl.)

CCDD 100120 - Inconspicuous Stalker

Invisible Stalker showed that hexproof and unblockable make for un-interactive gameplay, especially in combination. I went looking for ways to make them more interactive while still having a big impact on gameplay, and found an approach that works for both.

CCDD 090920 – Market Guardians

"In response, I call my stockbroker."

CCDD 090820 - Panpiper

There's nothing too innovative about today's design. I just happened to be looking at the tribute mechanic for some reason and wondered about putting more power into the modal part instead of the base creature.

CCDD 090320 - Lightning Berserker

It always bothered me a little that there wasn't much point in blocking Ball Lightning. Absorbing a few points of damage isn't normally worth losing an X/2 or X/3 creature, so the Lightning was basically just a burn spell that could be "countered" by first strike or instant-speed removal. Eventually I decided to make a version that didn't have that problem.

CCDD 082620 - Doomed Soulbinder

This is a Zombie tribal card-- kind of. My inspiration was roughly "Why is Zombie a creature type? It's just some other kind of creature that's been reanimated." That got me thinking about how to give non-Zombies some graveyard / Zombie synergies.

CCDD 082520 - Merfolk Dancer

Here's a Blind Phantasm modeling a weird idea for an ability word!

CCDD 073020 - Feather, Watch-Angel

This card started out as a "bottom-up" design. I wanted to see what a build-around card for mechanics like replicate or strive would look like, since those mechanics don't fit well in traditional spellslinger decks. I quickly realized that it needed a fairly minor reward to be balanced, and then it wouldn't be as exciting, so I went looking for ways to make it spicier. Things got out of hand from there...

CCDD 072220 - Flamekin Scout

There's nothing too groundbreaking about this design since we already have things like Generator Servant and Neheb, the Eternal, but I liked the idea of a creature that could act as a Pyretic Ritual via a saboteur ability. It's a common, so it doesn't need to do anything too fancy anyway.

Weekend Design Challenge 071020 - Jumpstarted Legends

Hey Artisans! Click through to see this weekend's design challenge. Your mission is to design a custom magic card that follows the guidelines. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. I'll try to offer some feedback of my own starting on Monday.

CCDD 070720 - Robo-Brawler

This is a classic example of a pure Mel design. Given the concept, the text box has basically zero flexibility, so the only available "knobs" are the power/toughness and mana cost.

CCDD 070220 - Jor Kadeen, the Resister

Here's another take on "encourage interaction through combat by doing broken things if opponents don't interact." It's the flip side of the previous CCDD in it's framed positively-- your own creatures are the ones being encouraged (okay, required) to attack. The payoff is that blocking is pretty much the only way your opponents can interact profitably.

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 062520 - Adaptation

Here's a design inspired by Hostility, which turns Lava Spike-style direct damage into creature tokens. I wanted to capture the same feeling of rewarding a type of effect that isn't normally a great investment. Ikoria gave me exactly the tools I needed to do that in green.

CCDD 061220 - One-Eye, the Wanderer

Designing "Norse gods" has been an appealing design goal since we saw Magic take on the Greek pantheon in Theros, even more so since we met the Egyptian gods of Amonkhet. I've seen several neat ideas from other sources but there's still one implementation that appeals the most to me as a mechanical and flavor match.

CCDD 061020 - Recording Angel

A top-down design based on the name.

CCDD 052820 - Towering Strider

What exactly is the flavor of trample, anyway? Are we supposed to imagine Proud Wildbonder literally running over a Pyroceratops, for example? Or is he just so fast and furious that his momentum carries him past the Dinosaur's corpse and into the opponent's face? I don't really have an answer, so this is just a long way of letting you know that I have no idea whether Towering Strider's ability makes sense.

CCDD 052520 - Goblin Savant

Nothing too fancy today, just a red one-drop in the vein of Foundry Street Denizen or Monastery Swiftspear.