Thursday, April 11, 2013

Daily Card Redesign #100: Shocklands Cycle

Daily Card Redesign is a daily Magic: The Gathering design exercise where I randomly choose a card for the scenario of it being killed late during its own set's development. I design a replacement card that uses the same art, is the same color, is the same rarity, and has a name that, alphabetically, keeps it within the same collector number for the set.

Woohoo! My 100th day-in-a-row of designing a Magic: The Gathering card every day! To commemorate this milestone, I created a screencast video of me in the process of doing my redesign. This is my first video for Daily Card Redesign. Let me know how it is! Give me feedback! ...I know there are some things I'd change for the next time I do a video! Anyway, here's today's card (or, cycle, in this case) to redesign:


Redesign Video:


Redesigned Card:


So... These new shocklands (which they wouldn't be called anymore since you don't ever suffer "shock damage" from this new design. 

So, this condition passes in that you can't just put a ton of the dual lands into your deck without having lands that enter the battlefield tapped. And it's really hard to have a five-color card get cast. When you do with Transguild Courier, you'll already have had access to four mana, which means you won't get to benefit fully until turn five. 

Also, this doesn't accidentally enable all the lands in this cycle. Cast a red card, and you only have four guild lands enabled. Cast a red AND green card, and you just have seven guild lands. But, to even get to this point of enabling guild dual lands, you'll need to have given yourself access to red or green mana.  I figure there's enough caveats in place with this cycle.

I do know that anything beyond a turn that requires a player to keep track of something (especially retroactively), it's generally not designed. But, this is just checking to see if you cast a spell at all. Which should actually be easy to track since your board state tracks it for you. You just check: "Do I have any nonland card on the battlefield, in my graveyard, or in exile? If so, I probably cast those cards. What colors are they?"

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