Tesla: Playtest Engineering II: Designing Cards

Hello again, everybody! I'm back from my holiday vacation, and eager to jump once more into the fray! Last time, we began a series on designing an all commons playtest, from start to finish. In the first part, we talked about the overall structure of a playtest set, and how one can use concepts like as-fan to help quickly create such a structure, using our custom collaborative set Tesla as an example. This time, we're going to learn how to quickly fill in this structure with actual cards.

Spotlight Challenge 2—lpaulsen

This fortnight, lpaulsen is going to take lead on this challenge:

Come up with a new kind of mana cost or iterate on an existing one, and design 5 commons and 5 non-commons that demonstrate its value.

CCDD 010716—Augment

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/20/2016 - The new existence of {C} got me thinking about forged again. I started mocking up some cards and found the same problem kicker has: If you don't have the extra/right mana when you cast the spell, the best mode is forever lost. If only there were some way to attain the same flavor, but let players get the bonus whenever their colorless mana shows up. Monstrosity was that tech.

CCDD 010616—Mardu Downrider

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/6/2016 - Top-down. Went Mardu just because I needed a tribe name to proceed Downrider. That gave me good flavor text though.

Prodigal Pyromancer with risk. Ashmouth Hound++.

CCDD 10516—Battlefield Ruler & Conqueror King

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/5/2016 - Two top-down designs from the same art. One probably a bit too strong and the other a bit weak.

Auto-Link in Comments

You can now auto-link cards in the comments section. Blogger won't allow the <U> tag, which is what we use in the main content section, but you can use the <A> tag. Any <A> tag that doesn't have an HREF attribute will attempt to preview the card name it wraps. These will appear underlined.

Spotlight Challenge 1 Initial Review—Zeno Rage

Here's the challenge Zeno Rage is taking lead on:

Design a cycle of mythic rare legendary creatures to be the marquee cards for a new launch of Commander decks.

Let's take a look at the initial submission.