CCDD 113012—Dig

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/30/2012 - Pasteur's latest submission for Frontier includes Dig as a smoothing mechanic half-way between cycling and landcycling. You don't get to search your library or choose which card you get, but you are guaranteed a land card. He wasn't the first to propose Dig for this challenge and this challenge wasn't the first time Dig has been proposed, but it's an appealing mechanic because it fixes mana well while remaining fairly quick to execute and of low enough power level to go on a lot of cards without ruining their appeal.

Dig 2 (2, Discard this card: Reveal cards from the top of your library until you reveal a land card. Put that card into your hand and the rest on the bottom of your library in a random order.)

CCDD 112912—Stoic Defender

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/29/2012 - This card's been sitting in the file for a while. It had an additional clause which ensured you only got the defensive exalted bonus if you also attacked with Stoic Defender, but that seemed much too fiddly to keep. I'm guessing it had been included originally to force you to risk an attack and prevent you from just sitting back and blocking, but it read strangely and introduces (light) memory issues. The card's just cleaner without. It probably doesn't need vigilance now either.

CCDD 112812—Resilience Sphere

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/28/2012 - I'm confident we'll see more hard-to-target effects like Frost Titan's in the future. In fact, I fully expect "spells [and abilities] targeting ~ cost opponents N more to cast" to be keyworded someday. Until then, we'll seed the future with one-off effects. Today's card actually makes the added cost symmetric, but it does so as a cost for a useful effect, rather than a penalty.

CCDD 112712—Ashen Furnace

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/27/2012 - Loosely inspired by the Ruins of Trokair cycle and Lake of the Dead, Ashen Furnace turns out to be a sort of reverse Dust Bowl.

CCDD 112612—Steal Fate

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/26/2012 - Reverse Fatespinner. Instead of robbing an opponent of part of her turn, Steal Fate gives you more turn. It happens to do so in a punisher-mechanic way, that lets your opponent prevent you from taking a particular bonus by conceding it herself, but that would be a desperate choice indeed and one you're just as likely to profit from.

CCDD 112412—Peer Below

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/24/2012 - I don't know that this effect is particularly red, though I do think it's at least arguable. It's really just what came to mind when I saw this Dwarf inspecting this crag.

What do you think? Red can discard cards to draw a cards and it can sacrifice Mountains to empower effects. Is this kosher? Assuming we agree it doesn't belong in a core set, what kind of expert set might Peer Below belong in?

CCDD 112312—Migration

Cool Card Design of the Day
11/23/2012 - Caring about or messing with the colored and colorless symbols in a card's mana cost isn't a deep well, but I come back to it every now and again. I found this art, knew it had to be Migration and immediately made Naked Singularity. Dang. Tried again and... this very non-Timmy card came out.

Shrug.