M13 White Planeswalker

A long time back we discussed which planeswalker we wanted to use in white. We agreed on Elspeth primarily for two reasons: One, a lot of people are big fans of Elspeth as a character. I know I am. Two, Ajani had clearly been printed too much and Gideon Jura had just gotten his reprint, while neither of Elspeth's cards had been reprinted yet.

I am Iron Man

Last night while tinkering with EDH decks, Iron Man popped up on shuffle at the same time the movie came on TV (yes, I live in a world of constant overstimulation). Surely it was a sign! The cosmos were demanding to know, "What would Iron Man the Magic card look like?"

A Quick Survey

I am curious about the play habits of MtG players who are also interested in card and game design. If you have a minute, please check out this short survey, and leave a comment with your responses.

M13 Recap / Dragon

Welcome!
It occurs to me that new readers of the site will be seeing this project from the most recent post backward without context, so I wanted to offer a quick explanation and a link to the index of all posts for the series. Back in August I announced the start of a collaborative set design project. It would be a core set because it seemed like hubris for an amateur designer to start by making an expert-level expansion set. Ironically, with the perspective and experience of having worked on the set for half a year, I'm no longer convinced a core set is actually easier to design. While the level of expectation is lower, there are more requirements and more specific expectations to fulfill. Maybe when we get around to collaborating on an expert set, I'll see different.

CCDD 030912—Ire Phoenix

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/9/2012 - MTG Color Pie recently asked what color you would move the Phoenix to. His concern being—as I understand it—that red doesn't normally get creature recursion and thus that this creature type is out of color. He's quite right that red doesn't get creature recursion and I would agree that the existence of phoenixes doesn't justify more red cards that recur creatures, but I say you could never put a phoenix in another color and that they do red good.

The important distinction is that the source of the rebirth for the phoenix is fire. White can resurrect, black can animate corpses and green can survive what would kill less hearty creatures. Red can't do any of that. But it can, in this one instance, be reborn through flame.

M13 Mythic Dragon part III

This dragon discussion has been a lot of fun for me. Therapeutic, even. It's a real challenge to find red dragon designs that really deserve to be mythic, are appropriate for core sets in general and M13 in specific, and not trumped by some pre-existing design. That said, thanks to all your brilliant ideas and feedback, we've got some real contenders. Here's the latest version of my short list (I know, it's not that short; you all have too many great ideas):

CCDD 030112—Break Morale

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/1/2012 - It's been a while since my last post. There was a death in the family and then work exploded. I'm still catching up so I haven't had a chance to post another update on the M13 Dragon discussion, but I wanted to get something up, so here's a quick CCDD.

This is a top-down design, so I'll let you read it before I explain anything.