Tinkering With the "No-Shuffle Solution"

Aaron Forsythe had some interesting Twitter comments about R&D's move towards using "look at the top N cards for [card type(s)], put it into your hand and the rest on the bottom" technology rather than tutoring or card draw, which led to a discussion of whether the mechanic inherently had bad feelings associated with it.

CCDD 111716—Bestial Call

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/17/2016 - Here are five variations on the same basic idea—rewarding vanilla creatures without increasing their stats—across three rarities.

CCDD 072616—Temporal Refraction

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/26/2016 - Here's a quirky card draw spell. It can draw you a ton of cards, but many decks would just prefer Divination. And that's good.

CCDD 072516—Linked

Cool Card Design of the Day
7/25/2016 - Thematically, linked represents a psychic connection/ability. Mechanically, it's grandeur meets Panglacial Wurm. Take a look at the first card and then we can discuss more.

CCDD 110912—Buried Treasure

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/9/2012 - I mentioned that Wednesday's crazy mechanic bury had been inspired by an idea that was itself inspired by the set submissions. Today, I want to show you the middleman, but I can't do that without telling you about the original because—and yes this is a serious flaw—it really doesn't make any sense out of context.

Actually, there wasn't a single mechanic I can point to, it was more a confluence of similar mechanics. Dig, Explore and some un-keyworded abilities all shared in common a similar action: looking at or revealing the top N cards of your library. For the most part, these were smoothing mechanics—the kind of thing that's important for keeping games moving forward and making more games competitive, but that tends not to be terribly sexy. Smoothing mechanics keep exciting sets selling because of the good gameplay they support, but they don't make a set anymore exciting to begin with.

My goal was to make the choice to use one of these mechanics more exciting. To compel people to make their decks better by adding interest to the workhorse cards they might ignore otherwise.

CCDD 110712—Bury

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/7/2012 - This keyword was inspired by a keyword that was inspired by a couple of the recent submissions for Sephorgia. I made literally 12 versions of it, swinging between things that were more like Suspend, more like Miracle or more novel. I settled on two versions I want to share with that I feel are simple, unique and interesting enough. I'm going to share six cards executed using each version to demonstrate the differences.