CCDD 070716—Screwed

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/7/2016 - Yesterday's Deluxe aims to help players stuck with cards in hand, but flies dangerously close to Saviors of Kamigawa's "don't play your cards" mechanic. It's also hard to develop and reads poorly. It might play quite well, but even if it does, we can surely find something that accomplishes similar goals without all those drawbacks.

Let's attack the problem from another angle.

CCDD 073012—Shortcut Through the Woods

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/30/2012 - I'm not sure how I came to this design. Couldn't have been top-down from the art. Maybe I started with the primary effect as a no-shuffling version of Rampant Growth, found the flavor that would match the random wandering effect and that some somehow triggered the idea to add madness. Maybe I was just looking for madness effects and realized there wasn't a land fetch card with madness yet.

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:

CCDD 041911—Common Man Lands

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/19/2011 - I was thinking about designs that could make Magic better, and whenever I do that I always come back to fixing land-screw. Every single game of Magic will have a loser, but as long as that loss feels earned (that is, both players felt like they had a chance to win that game and there was some engaging back and forth) good players won't mind. It's the games where you have to mulligan to four or where you never draw a third or fourth land or where you draw six land cards in a row that are frustrating because you lost to forces primarily out of your control. I haven't been keeping stats, but it feels like this happens about every 1 in 5 games, which is a lot. In fact, this is Magic's biggest failing as a game and one of the top reasons we lose players.