CCDD 100813—Plague Caller

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/8/2013 - Plague Caller is directly inspired by Pasteur's Killer Queen. I wanted to capitalize on the bugs-killing-you story by making it clear that it's a swarm and they're eating you and your protein grows the swarm.

Weekend [Art] Challenge 100413—Interaction Chain

Weekend Art Challenge
Click through to see this weekend's art and the design requirements for your card submission, due Monday morning. Every submission warrants feedback, which I will try to provide, and which everyone is welcome to provide as well.

If you choose, you may use that feedback to revise your submission any number of times. I will post and review the most recent submission from each designer some time on Monday, life permitting. To help ensure I recreate your design accurately, please use CARDNAME instead of ~ in your submissions.

CCDD 100313—Fortune's Favor

Cool Card Design of the Day
10/3/2013 - I was scanning my old CCDD folder for designs that seemed less boring than the ones in my new folder. I found several, but this one from May 2012 stuck out to me because of the art, which reminds me of Theros. I'm not claiming any kind of prescience; I just think it's neat how this could work in Theros almost as-is.

Designing Suvnica, Week 15: More Equal than Others

Time for us to start narrowing down the final mechanics we'll be playtesting with. I was originally going to host this part of the proceedings over on the guild's profile page, but I think I'll just throw the final candidates for playtesting there and have the conversation and arguments on a separate page instead.

Designing for Low-Skill Players: The Best of All Possible Worlds

Gottfried Leibniz may have been a brilliant philosopher and mathematician, but he just couldn't catch a break. Not only did Newton's cronies unfairly accuse him of plagiarizing the calculus, but Voltaire viciously parodied him in Candide. Leibniz was caricatured as the naive Dr. Pangloss, who persistently asserted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. 

Little did Voltaire know that this ideal world, known to us as "Magical Christmas Land", would one day be populated by millions of low-skill players!

Mechanical Engineering: The Next Stages of Suvnica

A typical Fall-realease large expansion set has 249 cards. Excluding basic lands, the entirety of the Return to Ravnica block had 654 unique cards. Since we started Suvnica a few months ago, we have created (and in a few cases, pre-printed) 845 cards. Now that we've wrapped up the last of our guild keyword submissions, it's probably a good time to take a look at where we're at and where we'll be going.

Lessons from YMTC4

I was lucky enough to help with the initial selection of design submissions for You Make The Card 4. Now that the community's card is complete, I'd like to share some of my takeaways from that experience. I don't speak on behalf of Wizards in any way.