CCDD 08222019 - Martyrize

I played around in every color but Black this week, and I did creatures and enchantments, so I set out to make a Black Instant for today's design. I initially though something along the line of Persecute. I wanted removal that would prevent a player from casting cards with the same name for the rest of the game, but that ended up feeling more white, in the vein of Exclusion Ritual. Tinkering around, I settled on the flavor of a dying creature becoming a martyr, and ended up with this:

CCDD 08212019 - Defiance

Posted without further comment.

CCDD 08202019 - Scale Birds of Various Sizes

Let's move from squirrels to birds. Scale Birds are a cool creative concept, helping to convey the size of BIG things that only are ever seen on very small card arts. What would happen if we tried to capture that mechanically?

Weekend Design Challenge 08162019 - Red Summer

Hey Artisans! I think we're a little overdue for a design challenge. Click through to see this weekend's design parameters. With those as your guidelines, design a custom magic card. Over the course of the weekend, give feedback to your fellow designers on their designs, and incorporate their feedback to iterate on your own. If I have time over the course of next week, I will try to offer some of my own feedback.

CCDD 08152019 - Hermit Squirrel

The Beacon of Creation podcast had a design challenge to create a card for the commander 2019 decks this past week. I had an idea to create a new Magus-like cycle, where instead of creatures embodying various classic non-creature cards, it was artifacts embodying classic creatures. For the Populate deck, I immediately went to Deranged Hermit as a possibility, but they just printed Deep Forest Hermit in Modern Horizons. Instead I came up with this:

The Midnight Hour is Close At Hand: Designing Around Amass

War of the Spark’s Limited format is strangely built, even accounting for the various deviations non-core sets take away from the “normal” Limited experience. Part of it, and the most visible part, is the huge number of planeswalkers, which requires planeswalker removal to be printed at common and makes Stealth Mission into a kill spell. But a larger part of the puzzle is how Amass warped the environment into making a go-tall strategy reliant on a single token a decent value proposition every time.

Eternal Analysis 017—Shift

Shift is Eternal's suspend mechanic, simplified in some ways and… weird in others. Introduced in the sixth full set, Dark Frontier, along with Onslaught, and Twist.