Now We Can Embed Mana Symbols

Weekend Art Challenge 032913—Maze Champion

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Remember that you may ask for feedback by mid-day Sunday and redesign your submission once after you get it.

Set Design: Open Thread

Readers, it's been a long and interesting journey from our eight original pitches to the final three. Our discussions have been productive and illuminating, and I have no doubt that any of Ankh-Theb, Ekkremes, or Frontier would be a fruitful design project. Nonetheless, the time has come to choose which set we're going to design. The Goblin Artisans authors will soon make a decision.

This thread is for feedback on that decision. Which set do you think has made the most progress during pre-design? What obstacles do you see ahead? Where is the best potential? What themes or mechanics are most exciting? Which questions are still unanswered?

This seems like as good a time as any to articulate our mission statement: we are trying to design a large standalone set using the standards of Magic R&D. Thus, we'll work within the framework of New World Order, the color pie, player psychographics, etc. Please keep these issues in mind while commenting on the viability of our options.

Mo' Forests, Mo' Problems

This article is a long answer to the short question:
“What upsets you about Sylvan Primordial?”

CCDD 032813—Universal Twine

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/28/2013 - Dear Johnny, I know how you like wacky effects like Mind Bend, Artificial Evolution or overload that change the text of spells and let you do things no one ever intended or expected. Universal Twine does let you change how an entire class of cards works, but it really just makes them do more, rather than different.

I understand if you're mad that this card is for other people. But don't be mad at Spike or Melvin; they didn't even know you and I were together. Instead, be mad at me. I'm the one to blame. Even so, I do hope you'll be able to forgive me one day, because I still care about you. I always will.

CCDD 032713—Mecha

Cool Card Design of the Day
3/27/2013 - Today is more about trying to visually demonstrate a really crazy idea we were discussing for Ekkremes than focusing on a particular card design. The very brief version is: What if there were dual-faced artifacts and the reverse sides combine in pairs to form a new card…and the reverse is a split so that you can combine those two cards in multiple ways?

I know that makes no sense to read, and that's why I've mocked up the back side of two such cards.

Set Design: Unanswered Question #9

We're back in Egypt for another important question about Ankh-Theb. The single most iconic Egyptian creature is, of course, the mummy. Magic hasn't made many cards in this vein before, possibly because they're so evocative of a specific flavor, which doesn't always fit into magepunk fantasy. Cyclopean Mummy and Vengeful Pharaoh are the two exceptions.

Many of our Ankh-Theb pitches have had some version of a Mummify mechanic, but I don't think any of them is a slam dunk. "Vanillification" isn't likely to be a crowd-pleaser, and reincarnating DFCs feel more Indian that Egyptian. It's also possible, as Wobbles suggested, that mummies simply aren't scary unless you take them out of ancient Egypt. Readers, can you build a better mummy?