Design Review of Dark Ascension—Black

White | Blue | Black | Red | Green | Other

Unlike Sanctuary Cat, Black Cat is on theme …at least as much as witches, superstition and Halloween are. As a variant of Ravenous Rats it's fairly neat. Trading immediate effect for an upgrade to random discard. I can say more than a few players avoided killing my Black Cats at the Prerelease for fear of losing the best card in their hand. That it's a zombie—while unnecessary for flavor—sure is nice when you've got a Gravecrawler or Diregraf Captain. Or Ghoulcaller's Chant or Ghoulraiser. Oh, and it's a nice sacrifice target to enable morbid. That's a lot of bad luck for your opponent.

Design Review of Dark Ascension—Blue

White | Blue | Black | Red | Green | Other

Artful Dodge is probably worse than Distortion Strike, since it doesn't boost power and costs twice as much, but the option to get the second effect whenever you want, including the same turn, can't be underestimated. I'm glad they didn't duplicate the effect and went with the simplest version. That said, dodging doesn't feel like the right flavor for attacking unblocked.

Design Review of Dark Ascension—White

White | Blue | Black | Red | Green | Other

There're too many awesome design things happening in Dark Ascension to let them pass unobserved. I'll be breaking it up by color in the standard order because I don't see a reason to do it any other way.

CCDD 012012—Demon Spawn

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/20/2012 - Today's card is just for fun. It was inspired by a comment Ken Nagle tweeted:

Overheard in The Pit: "Kids are like card advantage."

Naturally that inspired a card design.

CCDD 011812—Safe Ward, etc

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/19/2012 - Today's cards are a direct follow up from yesterday's discussion of Runeward Bear. Wobbles had suggested moving the ability that helps prevent the aura-problem to the aura itself. Rather than put split second on the aura, he used the bear's hexproof-while-targeted ability, which I prefer because it's the least disturbance that achieves our goal. Next, Chah helped pare down the reminder text to something reasonable.

There are a few ways this could look. First, it could be an additive keyword on the aura.

CCDD 011812—Runeward Bear

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/18/2012 - A lot of the value of hexproof—when it's not making non-interactive cards like Invisible Stalker—is the ability to enchant your creature without risking being two-for-oned. Today I'm proposing a very marginal ability that offers much of the same benefit without making your creature entirely immune to your opponent's removal.

CCDD 011412—Belittle, Extinguish, Reject

Cool Card Design of the Day
1/14/2012 - I've been exploring simple options with which to complement the most common spells in the game quite a bit recently. There have been exceptions, but most of the time I've come up empty. Naturalize, for instance, is a card that I have yet to see an alternative for that is as simple and useful. Today I want to show you my experiments in creating alternates to basic countermagic.

First up is a minor mutation to Mana Leak.