CCDD 101918—mystery

Cool Card Design of the Day
In the last Beacon of Creation podcast I listened to (I'm a bit behind), they speculated briefly about a mystery card type / mechanic and how that might interact with clues. It seemed like having a clue should help you solve a mystery. Here are five executions of that idea.

CCDD 061318 - Planeswalker Aether Trails

I was thinking about yesterday's Planeswalking exercise and how PW-matters cards are very tricky to do at uncommon due to the inherent mythicness of the type. Hour of Devastation had an interesting take on the theme, with a direct-to-sideboard/jank box cycle that relied heavily on their thematic tie to the story to justify their existence.

CCDD 042918—Now or Later Land

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/29/2018 - Now or Later Land is a rare dual land cycle where you choose whether you can't use it the turn you play it or the turn after.

CCDD 072617—Distant Minotaur cycle

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/26/2017 - We've got creatures with ETB effects that cycle, and creatures with cycling triggers, but we don't have creatures that give you an effect whether you cast them or cycle them.(The Bant Sojourners cycle is as close as we come.) It should look like evoke, but with card draw.

CCDD 120716—Army Trumpet, Balloon & Prison

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/7/2016 - A vertical cycle to reward the white mage for going wide.

CCDD 080316—Escalating Storm

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/3/2016 - This cycle is literally escalate-as-powered-by-storm, but it uses neither keyword because that would add text without aiding understanding, and it won't be used on more than these five cards (because the design space is even smaller than escalate's already small space).

CCDD 072716—Alleytown and friends

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/27/2016 - I designed Alleytown after the colored cycle, but it's the only one that does just what I wanted: A simple land that sacks into a small creature for a reasonable price.

CCDD 071316—Iaiajutsu Master's cycle

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/13/2016 - This mechanic would make for a terrible keyword because it can only matter at most once per game, so I put it on a rare. Then another. Settled on a cycle. Still possibly too much, but I like what it offers at rare.

CCDD 040716—Flagstones of Krosa & Ancient Volcano

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/7/2016 - Another way to achieve "sacrifice this land for a card later in the game" is to make cards that eat each other when you play duplicates. It so happens the current legend rule handles this kind of interaction, so rather than reinvent the wheel, I made a common Flagstones of Trokair.

CCDD 033016 -- Cluebombs

Cool Card Design of the Day
03/30/16 - I'm a big fan of clues in SoI (although I'm still not convinced Investigate was necessary as a keyword), and I really like that there are a few cards that care about them as a subtype. I thought it would be interesting to make some nontoken clues (which include the cantrip ability).

Spotlight Challenge 4 Final Review—Czynski

Here's the challenge Czynski took lead on:

Design a cycle of each color's iconic creature—Angel, Sphinx, Demon, Dragon, and Hydra—for a specific plane. You may choose or invent a plane if you like, otherwise design for Tesla/Kaladesh. Also design a sixth card—a common or uncommon—that mentions one or more of these creature types in an organic way.

Here's the initial submission.

Let's take a look at the final submission.

Spotlight Challenge 4 Initial Review—Czynski

Here's the challenge Czynski is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of each color's iconic creature—Angel, Sphinx, Demon, Dragon, and Hydra—for a specific plane. You may choose or invent a plane if you like, otherwise design for Tesla/Kaladesh. Also design a sixth card—a common or uncommon—that mentions one or more of these creature types in an organic way.

Spotlight Challenge 4—Czynski

This fortnight, Czynski is going to take lead on this challenge:

Design a cycle of each color's iconic creature—Angel, Sphinx, Demon, Dragon, and Hydra—for a specific plane. You may choose or invent a plane if you like, otherwise design for Tesla/Kaladesh. Also design a sixth card—a common or uncommon—that mentions one or more of these creature types in an organic way.

CCDD 011416—Enhance

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/14/2016 - Completing this week's exploration…
Assist was much simpler than mentor, but still not relevant to Limited. Today, we look for something that works without opening one or two particular mythics in your booster pack.

CCDD 011316—Assist

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/13/2016 - Iterating on yesterday's planeswalker-fueled-spells idea. Mentor was too complex for common, and its design space was deeply constrained looking for scaling effects. Assist uses a threshold allowing us to customize a binary reward, both simplifying the card and opening up new possible designs. *Nothing mentioning planeswalkers should be common, so these are uncommon.

CCDD 011216—Mentor

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/12/2016 - Czynski mentioned using planeswalker (or player) loyalty to help cast spells and it got me thinking of ways that your planeswalkers could help you with your own magic. Today, I share my first pass exploring that idea. It's a bit too complex and narrower than one might first expect, which is why I've got a better pass coming tomorrow. Still, worth sharing.

Weekend Art Challenge 121914—Syst-eeem

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.

CCDD 121514—Gold Dragons 2

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/15/2014 - Last week I posted four R-D dragons and Evan made an important observation: "The white, blue, and black ones all feel like they could be monocolored examples of those colors' respective iconics." And he was dead-on. The white one could easily be a mono-white angel; the blue one would make an odd sphinx, but is monoblue; and the black one would be an unusal demon but is monoblack. Clearly, these dragons have to feel as red as they do their second color, and they have to feel more like dragons than not.

Here's another go:

CCDD 121114—Gold Dragons

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/11/2014 - I happened upon a Question Mark or similar about how we see red's iconic creature in every color, which is obviously an odd thing to do with a color's iconic and something we see almost none of with the other color's iconics. The answer, of course, is that dragons are everyone's favorite creature type in Fantasy and pretty much everywhere else.

To that end, I propose a cycle of dragons for each color that are also red, so that each color can have their dragon-y fun without robbing red of its iconic creature.

CCDD 062514—Master Fire / Life / Science / Death / Nature

Cool Card Design of the Day
6/25/2014 - I think I designed these while looking for ways to interact with Theros' +1/+1 counters.