Day -21: Feedback

When I posted my card designs for the first card designing challenge, I received some feedback from my friend Grant about two of the cards. Specifically, these two:

Contempt's Quelch, I believe, was the fine the way it is. The problem was that it's not good enough for Spike. By interacting with someone who does play Magic and win money doing it, I gained some insight in how other players that aren't like me would evaluate my card designs. Looking over my eight cards, it seems that none of my cards were really screaming, "I'm for you, Spike!" So, obviously, the correct thing to do is to have some Spike cards. Why not adjust Contempt's Quelch to fit more for Spike, so I fulfill every player's needs? (Actually, I'm not sure there was anything Timmy enough in my entry, besides Halo Archon.) Anyway, we jokingly "negotiated" on the changes to the card and ended up with this:

It still makes me uneasy, since green is supposed to suck at destroying creatures. But, whatever. It's all food for thought. The other fix is something I totally agree with. I didn't elegantly execute Halo Archon as well as I could have. Here's the more elegant solution:

Now, it's all better. The simple sentence of "X must be equal to your life total." solves the problem better than not giving this card a mana cost and providing an alternate casting method. Hooray. Also, one thing is that I didn't add the reminder text of "(Halo Archon is white.)"  last time, and I still gotta do that this time since the mana cost doesn't have any white mana symbols in it.

Also, I read this primer from ManaNation.com, an article preparing you for The Great Designer Search 2, so if you're interested in entering, I suggest you take a gander. There's gotta be at least some useful bit of information that could help you.

Another useful article is Nuts and Bolts: Design Skeleton. Mark Rosewater goes through the process of creating a design skeleton for the common cards of an imaginary set, and in it, there are some things to keep in mind when designing cards, such as which colors get to do which things.

I'm currently working on designing cards for the three five-card cycles challenge. I've decided to do four cycles because they ask for a cycle for each rarity, and, well, there's a mythic rarity now. 

One more thing: I talked about the design rule for colored artifacts in a previous post. I also had a discussion with MTG Color Pie over Twitter about it, and it ended up that he asked Mark Rosewater at the recent PAX party about it. According to @mtgcolorpie's tweet, Mark had this to say, "Once we break a rule doesn't mean we always break a rule." This seems to be true with only Transguild Courier, Reaper King and the Shards of Alara block flying in the face of that ol' design rule. That's only three exceptions in Magic's history, when artifacts show up in almost every single set.

I think the reason why I even questioned it is because the reason of "we've never had an artifact printed with a colored mana cost" wasn't a good enough reason to me. However, he may not have been talking about the WHOLE reason why artifacts aren't colored. That would've been a tangent as he was going over the answers for the multiple-choice test of the last Great Designer Search.

That's all. I'll get those four five-card cycles (twenty cards!) designed as soon as possible.

Cheers,

Bradley