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 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.

Zeffrikommons Part 4: Ash to Bone

Hello? Is this thing on? 1-2, 1-2?

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Zeffrikommons, Part 3: Cyclical Behavior

In the Modern Orthodox Jewish synagogues I attend, during Rosh Hashanah prayers, someone stands next to the person leading the prayers and, at specific times during the services, sounds a shofar. A shofar is a hollowed-out ram's horn akin to a single-note trumpet. It is used briefly at various points during the primary services on Rosh Hashanah, but at the end of the services, a long series of note-patterns is sounded, roughly equal in length to all the other times the shofar was sounded earlier in the services.

Zeffrikomons, Part 2: White Creatures and Spells

Hi Artisans. I'm still doing a bunch of Zeffrikar work behind the scenes, and I'm hoping to have the final list of skeleton commons ready to go before Battle for Zendikar spoiler season really starts. I haven't had a lot of time to write up much as far as the development goes, but I have most of my common pool completed, except for a few segments I wanted to write about separately. This week I'll be starting to piece together the skeleton for the white commons. Today I'm posting the white cards I have so far, and I'll follow up with some other materials and exercises I want to consider before the design skeleton starts in earnest.

Zeffrikommons, Part 1: Common Red Creatures

Here on GA, we tend to put a lot of focus on designing individual cards and mechanics. This is great for the feedback we provide and encourage, and I think that it's a great set of development tools for all of us, especially those of us planning on competing in the next GDS. In fact, the types of designs we spend most of our time on here pushes the skills MaRo & Co. were looking at when selecting the finalists for GDS2. After the essays and the test, we had to design 10 cards that would be used to showcase a set during the course of a preview week. The emphasis was on designing one card to fill one slot that appealed to a particular type of player/reader.

Designing Suvnica, Week 3: Birth, School, Work, Death

(5/16 Update: Something went kahblewy when I tried to check in on the blog from my phone this evening, and this page reverted to a very old draft. I'm reconstructing it from my RSS feed, and I'm hoping that the comments and the post stayed intact. If you see that your comment was lost, please repost.)
Alright. Four guilds down, six to go. Before we talk this week's guilds though, I wanted to start discussing something that came up in last week's design challenge.

So far, everyone has been pretty good about designing across different rarities. Out of the 70 cards sitting in the Suvnica file on my computer so far, we have about 25 commons, another 25 uncommons, 16 rares and 4 mythics. While a few of the submitted commons should probably be bumped up to uncommon, by and large everyone has been doing a phenomenal job with them.