Weekend Design Challenge 111320 - Themed Dual Land

Happy Friday, 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 022420 - Eroding Hiking Trail

Like many here (I bet), I have a stable of card design hobby-horses that I keep coming back to. One of those is enters-the-battlefield-untapped dual lands. (I tend to think we have plenty of enters-the-battlefield-tapped-with-upside duals. Finding downsides that let the land enter untapped is harder.) Here's an example:

Eternal Analysis 002—Power Cards

Sigils are power cards that work exactly like basic lands. There are also three cycles of dual power cards in all ten faction pairs, three cycles of mono-colored power cards, and a few unaffiliated power cards.

CCDD 062018—Strictly Dual Land

Cool Card Design of the Day
In the vein of on-the-nose dual lands like Luxury Suite, here's a very strong dual land that can only be used in a two-color deck. (Which would support Ravnica's stated goal of being a two-color gold block, but not the Standard environment it actually facilitated.)

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 042518 - Steam Vent Remixes and Overdesign

I've been thinking a lot about rare land cycles a lot recently, and Ravnica's shocklands have been bugging me.

CCDD 082217—Wanderwine Hub

Cool Card Design of the Day
8/27/2017 - This is mostly less powerful than the actual Wanderwine Hub, but it's also more sensical. It just seems silly how often you reveal a merfolk card and then immediately cast that same card. And it's not like revealing a merfolk and then doing something else with your mana makes any more sense.

CCDD 030317—Bad Cairns

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/3/2017 - Here's a bonus CCDD I made before MaRo's review of dual lands, but is sure relevant to the filter lands he discussed.

CCDD 110116—Scrytastic Dual Land

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/1/2016 - Was thinking about costs small enough to fill the role of letting a land ETB untapped, and came up with this half-scry-half-etbt idea supporting two-color decks.

Weekend [Art] Design Challenge—070414

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's design requirements for your single card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well. You may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times.

Why the Scry Lands are Rare

As soon as the scry lands were revealed in this week's Latest Developments, there was a massive outcry that these cards had the wrong rarity. After all, look at Kazandu Refuge, Gruul Guildgate, Savage Lands, and Highland Weald. Don't they establish that a dual land which enters the battlefield tapped with some minor benefit is common or uncommon?

Well, maybe. But there's a much more important convention which takes precedence over that one:

CCDD 032213—Heart of the Taiga

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/22/2013 - I was thinking this morning about how perfect the Sunpetal Grove cycle and the Razorverge Thicket cycles are, when it occurred to me that they are entirely bottom-up designs. Both answer the question, "What kind of restriction can we put on a dual land that will keep them very usable in the right kinds of decks?" That's an excellent question to answer, but it's all about gameplay and none about resonance. What would a dual land with a top-down restriction look like?

I failed to answer that question today, but the attempt led me to something interesting just the same:

CCDD 042211—Ridgeview Copse

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/22/2011 - I'm really happy with Ridgeview Copse. It was inspired by Tom LaPille's excellent article, Common Comparisons, in which he discusses the effect of Karoos in Ravnica (the common, two-mana, bounce-lands). The intent of their design was to offer common color-fixing to enable two- and three-color decks as the set demanded, but they were so strong—effectively 2:1 card advantage from a land—that players picked them who weren't even running both colors. I'll explain the design logic behind Ridgeview Copse and how that relates after you take a look:

Pursuing the Obvious Solution

As I continue to pluck away at designing Melody, the set I first conceptualized for GDS2, I've found myself succumbing to instances of self-doubt brought on by an uncomfortable realization of re-treading the past. As a musician, writer, painter, I've had to overcome this same debilitating condition a number of times, it being both intrinsic and anathema to nearly all creative endeavors. Perhaps I could go further and say that it's one of the absolutes of the human condition, a quality born of the struggle between individualism and an acknowledgment of history. So hopefully you all know what it is that I'm talking about and can empathize, even if you are not currently engaged in Magic design.