Goblin Artisans Weekend Art Challenge: Anndr

Illustration by aandr on deviantART

I participate in, some of the time, this Magic: The Gathering design challenge series that occurs every weekend over on the Goblin Artisans blog called "Weekend Art Challenge." Headed by Jay Treat, he gives a challenge to the design community to submit card designs that both makes use of art he provides and follows rules constraints he establishes. Sometimes, the art he provides is existing Magic art from an upcoming set, where the challenge is to try to design cards that would fit for that upcoming art's card, like the Maze Champion challenge.

I'm writing today about my design for the current challenge based on a piece of art by Anndr. While Jay has used outside art for the challenge, he has put the rule in place that it has to feel like it would fit in the upcoming set Dragon's Maze while giving the option to the designer to use either "Crop A" (the left side) or "Crop B" (the right side) of the wide piece of art.

It's interesting in that Crop B provides two humanoids in the picture while Crop A does not yet shows some foreground art. At first, I thought of a watchtower concept, where you would spy on the enemy lands from high above your watchtower. Or, you would give a creature enough elevation to have reach and/or first strike (like with archers).

But then I thought more about how interesting it was that there were two individuals in the art of Crop B. As Evan Jones pointed out, Crop B depicts two individuals but doesn't focus on these two particularly. Instead, there's something about the land around them that's important. But what could make the land around them important enough to warrant placing two individuals there in the art?

...Then it clicked. Sometimes, a place can't be a particular place without people making it into that place. What kind of place? A secret meeting place, for one!

Why would there be a secret meeting place? Well, in the flavor of Dragon's Maze, there's these alliances forming between guilds, as connected to the random secret guild you get as part of your prerelease guild pack. I'm not sure what more there is in the story of alliances between guilds, but there's at least three-color action going on here, like the revealed Dragon's Maze split card Beck & Call.

I originally wanted to make sure that the creatures themselves had to be multicolored but had colors that each other didn't share (like Simic and Azorius meeting up), but then I figured that was letting flavor get too much in the way of the design itself. The card name is generic enough that you might want to reprint it in the future. Thus, the core essence of a secret meeting place should really just involve a swapping of information between two individuals. So, just the requirement of two creatures is needed is all.

As for costing, since Jayemdae Tome requires four mana, I had this be costed at 3 mana (2 in the cost plus the tap symbol for the land itself) plus two untapped creatures to make up for that missing fourth mana. Plus , the 2 in the cost requirements was aesthetically fitting to the two untapped creatures that were needing to be tapped. Also, the fact that the land also produces a mana while Jayemdae Tome doesn't balances itself out as it takes up one of your valuable land slots producing colorless mana while other lands could have given you one or more mana.

But, hey - if the cost isn't right, development can tweak it. :)

Daily Card Redesign #102: Mask of Law and Grace

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.

Redesign:

I come up with yet another variant of Pacifism! That's two days in a row! 

From the art, it looked like the creature couldn't see where it was going! A blinding light! ...Which made me think of the phrase "blind justice." And that's what I based my top-down design from.

From there, I looked up cards that reference "Justice" and copied the effect of Swift Justice for the abilities this card would grant. The "swift" part is the fact that this is an instant. I also figured that being granted +1/+0 is part of the "surprise" of the swift justice, like how a surprise round in RPGs gives the surpriser a benefit.

But the blind part didn't make sense just like this. I thought of protection, but I didn't want to grant protection from black and from red again. And then that's when I thought of Bonds of Faith. I'm a fan of that design, so I decided to adopt it for this card.

If you're a righteous creature (it's on your side), it will benefit from the Blind Justice. Otherwise, it will be blinded and become incapacitated.

P.S. I'm aware that the card is a reference to both Voice of Law and Voice of Grace. While both of those Angels are a mjaor part of the Voice cycle that stretched multiple Magic: The Gathering sets), I believe this reference card is not also such a significant card.

Daily Card Redesign #101: Karma

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.

Redesign:

There's no Pacifism in Alpha, so this card slot seemed like a fitting place to include a Pacifism-like effect. Since the original design referenced Swamps, I figured that it was important to maintain this card slot's effect of being a card that is effective against players with Swamps.

Thus, combine the two points I mentioned above, and you get this new Pacifism variant!

For the name, since the the art depicts plants/vines wrapping the creature, I couldn't name it anything referencing using the power of plants and nature - because that would be a green thing. Karma was already doing a good job showing why this was happening - because the Swamp's vegetation is turning  against the player that dared used Swamps in the first place. Karma is a very white concept, which already takes care of what I need as a name for what the heck is going on in this card.

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?"

Daily Card Redesign #99: Spreading Algae

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.

We're almost there! #100 is right around the corner! Here's the 99th randomized card:

Redesign:

I figured that the algae grows on the swamps after they're tapped, and it's hard to make them fresh again when they're buried undernreath all that algae. Only when you decide to remove the algae and benefit the controller can Swamp untap for another go.

Daily Card Redesign #98: Chilling Apparition

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.

Redesign:

This ghost looks like a regular human until you get a closer look at it and stumble upon a horrifying revelation - it has no face, and it's actually a spirit! Thus, it forces the creature to be horrified and incapacitated by what it sees. It's a somewhat magical effect, I would imagine, because it can repeatedly do this to a creature.

The conditions I set of the effect activating whenever it taps and then lasting until it untaps is a flavorful one. The ghost here hides its face under a cloak (untapped). Then, whenever it reveals its face, it horrifies whoever it is showing its face to. The cloak stays open while its tapped. The moment it untaps is when it puts the cloak back over its face.

This effect is indeed similar to detain and is a color bleed for black for the sake of flavor. Fear functions similarly with evasion, but not letting a creature be able to attack feels out of character for black. Is this too much of a violation of the color pie?

Daily Card Redesign #97: Negate

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.

Redesign:

I wanted to have quite different criteria for this card, but because this is a block that cares about creatures, Negate was pretty spot on for that. However, this does get to counter tribal cards, which seemed not within the spirit of what Negate was supposed to do. 

Instead, we get a card with this kind of text, where both creature AND tribal card types get access to creature types. Let's not counter those.

Daily Card Redesign #96: Nephalia Smuggler

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.

Redesign:

Hmm. I think that wording is right. Not sure. Let me know otherwise with what the proper templating would be! 

Anyway, what's supposed to happen is that the opponent is forced to block both creatures or none of them at all. The flavor is that they're both in the same coach. Thus, it's impossible for one to be stopped without the other being stopped.

Also, the fact that this guy is inviting another person into his carriage seemed like a PERFECT opportunity for soulbond. In fact, the art of Nephalia Smuggler is more fitting for a soulbond creature than, say, Wingcrafter is! It's so natural.

I realize that this card's power level may be low. He has higher toughness because the vehicle provides some toughness.