CCDD 101717—Dragonette

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/17/2017 - Here's yet another pass at the baby dragon trope.

Weekend Art Challenge 022417—Jennifer Miller

Click through to see the illustration and design requirements for your single  card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which you may use to revise your submission any number of times. I will aim to review the most recent submission from each designer.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 091616 -- CristianAC

Weekend Art Challenge Review

Design a card with a new keyword or ability word. Bonus points if it riffs off of an existing keyword that hasn't been used in a long while.

Weekend Art Challenge 091616 -- CristianAC

Weekend Art Challenge
Greetings, Artisans! Go ahead and click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your 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 if there's any ambiguity as to what your final submission is, I'll make my best guess when doing the renders.

CCDD 090816--Slime Whelp

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/8/2016 - Today for Ooze Week, Slime Whelp asks you to feed it creatures from your deck, and it's up to you how many cards to gamble to make that happen. If you can feed it four times (or Titanic Growth it), it becomes a dragon. Flying in green?! Yeah. When you work for it through creatures.

CCDD 053116—Cloudwailer

Cool Card Design of the Day
5/31/2016 - Dragons belong in all colors, but it's hard to make green dragons when all dragons fly and green doesn't. Here's one solution.

CCDD 032515—Commit (Kavu Dragon & Virulent Necrosis)

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/25/2015 - Commit is a new iteration on the idea I was pursuing with incant and predict over a year ago; Easing the mana burden of a spell in exchange for broadcasting your intention to cast it next turn.

CCDD 031915—Dragon Warrior

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/19/2015 - Dragons of Tarkir's Dragon Hunter has a lot going for it. It's an Elite Vanguard that benefits from Tarkir's warrior tribal and it can even block a dragon every turn safely. What it can't do—even if you bolster it to the size where it can deal dragons lethal damage—is hunt dragons.

CCDD 031115—Hungry Wyrm (Feed)

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/11/2015 - Every time they reprint Dragon Fodder, I want to make a mechanic like devour, but better. It's entirely debatable whether feed is better, but let's take a look anyhow.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 010215—Dragon

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge 010215—Dragon

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.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 122713—Sandara

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 071213—depingo

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Here's the challenge we're reviewing today.

CCDD 071912—Non-Red Dragons

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/19/2012 - I was hoping HavelockV would talk more about some of the Dragon submissions for his last Design Challenge, but I believe he's swamped with real life. So instead, I'd like to share with some of the dragon designs I chose Isochron Familiar over, and why.

First up, is the obligatory Cold Dragon. I'm glad I didn't submit this one, because Chris' Dragon of Winter's Breath is better. His isn't as splashy, but it's simpler and still gets across the freezing breath concept.

M13 Recap / Dragon

Welcome!
It occurs to me that new readers of the site will be seeing this project from the most recent post backward without context, so I wanted to offer a quick explanation and a link to the index of all posts for the series. Back in August I announced the start of a collaborative set design project. It would be a core set because it seemed like hubris for an amateur designer to start by making an expert-level expansion set. Ironically, with the perspective and experience of having worked on the set for half a year, I'm no longer convinced a core set is actually easier to design. While the level of expectation is lower, there are more requirements and more specific expectations to fulfill. Maybe when we get around to collaborating on an expert set, I'll see different.

M13 Mythic Dragon part III

This dragon discussion has been a lot of fun for me. Therapeutic, even. It's a real challenge to find red dragon designs that really deserve to be mythic, are appropriate for core sets in general and M13 in specific, and not trumped by some pre-existing design. That said, thanks to all your brilliant ideas and feedback, we've got some real contenders. Here's the latest version of my short list (I know, it's not that short; you all have too many great ideas):

M13 Choosing a Mythic Dragon

I can't thank this community enough for the amazing discussion and awesome ideas you all contributed to in the last week. There were a ton of great dragon ideas, many of which are better saved for an expert expansion where they can truly shine in all their zany hotness. I've mocked up the ones that I think are the best fit not just for a core set, but M13 in particular. I want to share them with you so that you can vote which ones you like the best and the least and so we can consider any final edits to them. Do not take the absence of a design you proposed or liked as judgment against that design. There were a couple that are arguably better in the abstract than the following, but that just weren't appropriate for Magic 2013.

M13 Mythic Dragon

Every set needs an exciting dragon. At least, that's the logic behind Balefire Dragon and Moonveil Dragon. However true it is for a gothic horror set, there can be no question how important it is for a core set. The number one thing players will be disappointed not to see in the set that introduces them to Magic is an impressive dragon. There are 98 cards with subtype "dragon" and many more cards that interact with or even just reference them. Right now Magic 2013 is looking for its poster dragon. It could be a reprint, but it needs to be worthy of mythic rarity, appropriate to the setting-neutral environment, and feel refreshing. Bogardan Hellkite was a great inclusion in M10, but would be a bit repetitive to bring back again so soon.