Day -29: The Artifact Design Rule

No journal comic today. So far, I just have a sketch for panel one. There's a number of reasons that I could mention for why no comic got created, but I'm not going to go over them. That'd be a waste of time. I mean, it was 8:30 P.M. when I started this blog post, and I don't think rushing this second comic and making it sloppy would be nice. No way. But, anyway, yeah, let's move on to talking about Magic. *snap snap*

Today, I took the multiple-choice test that was given during the initial wave of testing of The Great Designer Search four years ago. Mark Rosewater went over the answers to the test in his column, so I read that as well. I got 26 out of 35 correct. Missed four too many to pass on to the next round (the participants needed at least 30 correct), but, at least, I'm more prepared now for the actual thing. To be fair, many of the questions happen to be ones that a lot of other people missed, too. And I believe one of the questions may be outdated according to 2010 Magic design principles.

One question of note was that, in 2006, as a design rule, artifacts should not have colored mana symbols in their mana cost. Since then, there was the whole Shards of Alara block where artifacts had colored mana symbols in their mana cost. However, this made me wonder whether they've updated their design rules since then or, just for Shards of Alara block, they were able to make an exception. (And Reaper King exists, too, but he was able to be cast for 10 of anything, like a regular artifact, though.)

Mark Rosewater backed up this design rule (in his column in 2006) by saying that they never printed an artifact with colored mana symbols in the mana cost. So, if that's the only reason why artifacts should never have colored mana symbols in their mana cost, that reason is certainly gone. There are many colored artifacts now.

And if there's another reason that exists nowadays, I don't think it should. I feel that artifacts should able to be aligned with colors of mana. Relics imbued with magic, you know? And it's just unnecessarily restricting on design space, too.

I just now tweeted Mark Rosewater regarding this rule. I'll let you know what he says, if he does respond. EDIT: A shout-out to @mtgcolorpie for discussing this rule with me on Twitter when he saw my tweet.

That's all I have for today, and if you are also gearing up for this Game Designer Search 2, here's a links to the page containing links to pages related to the last Great Designer Search:

The Great Designer Search page

Cheers,

Bradley