CCDD 090920 – Market Guardians

"In response, I call my stockbroker."

CCDD 08202020 - Krenko's Big Move

I had a long twitter conversation about the best Goblins last night, and that got me thinking about having a central Goblin villain in a story. Krenko is the closest existing contender, but we never get to see him do something truly despicable on screen. I came up with a story beat that might escalate him to villain status, and I came up with a story spotlight card for the set where it happens. 

The Great Redesigner Search: The Design Test

About two years ago, I went on a reality show and my life changed forever.

Weekend Art Challenge 102017—AlexandrescuPaul

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.

CCDD 112416—Seprimus

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/24/2016 - One cornucopia of cards coming up. Happy Thanksgiving!

CCDD 120715—Engrave Guilt

Cool Card Design of the Day
12/7/2015 - This design's been sitting in my folder getting passed over dozens of times for being unworthy. I finally re-worked it.

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.

Theros Review (Part 1—Multicolor)

The problem with reviewing a set when it first comes out is that all your opinions are speculation. No matter how talented or experienced you are at dissecting new sets and predicting card value, deck archetypes and how much fun it'll all be, you don't have the perspective born from playing with those actual cards in the actual environment and that will limit the value of your writing.

The flipside is that no one will care what you think if you write about it after everyone knows the environment. Unless you're not writing strategy tips, but instead analyzing the set for game design nuggets. Let's do that now, with a season of perspective under our belts.

Multicolor

Agent of Horizons and 9 more cards comprise a double cycle of common creatures with off-color activated abilities. These cards push players toward two-color combinations and help give direction in a draft without hurting a player's chance of casting her spells like gold cards do. For that reason, all five ally color pairs and all five enemy color pairs are represented—to keep the format interesting, we want at least those 10 decks to exist and have unique identities. Some of these cards are better than others (which is inevitable for a large cycle) and that might be an indication that Development thought the {B}{G} deck needed less help than the {U}{B} deck, for instance.

CCDD 040913—Farhaven Wanderer

Cool Card Design of the Day
4/9/2013 - I made these in July while anticipating the eventual release of Return to Ravnica. I wanted to create a cycle of monocolored creatures with an activated ability that works with either of the allied colors and an upgraded version of that ability that works with both (IE, in a three-color deck). I didn't particularly expect anything like that in Ravnica, but it was an interesting exercise just the same. Some of these are much better/worse than others, showing how tough it can be to make a tight cycle sometimes.

CCDD 031011—Student of the Elements

Cool Card Design of the Day

3/10/2011 - Student of the Elements is another art-inspired design (sadly, from before I started noting where the art was from). It felt distinctly red and blue and so I started looking for an unexplored overlap between those two colors. As looting has only recently been proposed as a red mechanic, there is a lot of virgin territory opened up there that I would like to explore.