CCDD 111720 – The Cooler Ludevic

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

 

CCDD 093020 - Nepenthe

I found a cool graveyard-hate effect that wasn't worth a card in most cases, so here's a cantrip version.

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 052120 - Your Worst Nightmare

This design was inspired by effects like Vile Rebirth and Scarab Feast that black uses to interact with opponents' graveyards. Exiling even a whole graveyard is barely worth a card on its own most of the time-- Tormod's Crypt is evidence of that-- so the effects are often very cheap and have additional value stapled on. What would a higher-mana-cost version of those cards look like?

CCDD 051420 - Kael of Clan Nel Toth

Here's a commander design! It started out as part of a cycle where I was trying to give common deck-building themes (e.g. spellslinger, +1/+1 counters) support in an unusual color combination. This one was for graveyard decks, as the name suggests.

CCDD 041220 - Bonelord Skeletrex

Loosely based on an I Think You Should Leave sketch that basically encapsulates my taste in comedy.

CCDD 032720 - Read the Ancient Scrolls

Here's a common meant to show off a mechanic. This time around the model is Divination.

CCDD 031120 - Eidren, Unblemished

Most of the actual Magic I play these days is casual Commander, and designing cool Commanders is a special hobby of mine. Our playgroup has a running joke about how boringly powerful one player's Golgari decks are, so I thought I'd look for some fresh build-around design space in black-green.

CCDD 021820 - Boogeyman

Reanimation spells like Cauldron's Gift usually have to target expensive creatures to be worth it. If you're spending 4-5 mana and a card, you want to be getting a creature that's worth at least that much, not some random 3/3. Even creatures with reanimation built-in often want extra bonuses when they come back-- like Pharika's Spawn and the other Escape creatures from Theros Beyond Death. So what would it take to make a 1-mana creature an appealing reanimation target?

Eternal Analysis 005—Tribute

Tribute is one of Eternal's poorer keywords, which is a shame because it's so close to being morbid.

CCDD 091317—Bad Memory

Cool Card Design of the Day
9/13/2017 - Yawgmoth's Will as a saboteur effect.

CCDD 072216—Addams Family

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/22/2016 - The Gravedigger equivalent of a Squadron Hawk.
(Designed bottom-up, not top-down.)

CCDD 071916—Dirge

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/19/2016 - Another scaling mechanic that rewards combat with cheaper spells, this one modeled after morbid.

CCDD 022516—Jury-Rig

Cool Card Design of the Day
2/23/2016 - Inspired by Devin's initial Spotlight Challenge submission, I wanted to find a mechanic that combined unearth with a way to get your artifact into the graveyard, like cycling. That led me to something similar to dash.

CCDD 120115—Grave Desecrator

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/1/2015 - Here's a dangerous way to get added value from your zombie cards.

CCDD 100715—Pupal Wurm

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/7/2015 - Pupal Wurm is a wurm-tribal card that cares about your wurms living or dead. Because that's a green thing to do.

CCDD 100115—Elevate Perspective, Lessons of our Ancestors & Yore

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/1/2015 - Here are three cards I designed while thinking about green's commitment to heritage.

Tesla Horizons: Graveyard Shift

As we continue exploratory design for Tesla we'll be looking at all of our options for mechanically representing Tesla's progress theme (as discussed here). Each piece will examine what a few of the possible implementations might do to the surrounding set.

The first post looked at cards that improved themselves, tracking progress with the battlefield, and explicitly counting progress counters.

The second post investigated using lands and mana to track how far you've progressed.

Today we'll see if we can track progress using the graveyard rather than the battlefield.

CCDD 030415—Leaping Frog Strike

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/4/2015 - There's a lot of merit in the idea behind Jade's Great Cleave and Czynki's Strike of the Student. I wanted to explore a shorter iteration to see if we can find something that strikes the same nerve but is simple enough for common.

Tesla: MapQuest

[WotC Safe: No Original Designs in this Post]

We're still in exploratory design for Tesla, and as such we haven't nailed down many absolutes about where the eventual design is headed. Really all we know is that the set is going to involve artifacts and be themed around progress: change, improvement, and abandoning the old ways. That's all well and good, but thus far I've been leading you on a sort of haphazard perusal of design space.

Well not today. Exploratory design is supposed to map the territory, which means not just knowing what's out there, but where each fork in the road leads. We need an answer:

How does the way we represent our progress theme mechanically influence the rest of the design?

But it begs a more basic question:

What are our options for representing progress?

That's what I hope to answer today.