MTG: October’s Custom Cards — Alternate Horror
Ah, Dread Month, a month of horrors and vileness, a month where there’s terrible things afoot and grim subject matter. Well, time to make some spooky cards, right? Nice and easy.
This is a rare time where I had a bit of a problem with making this month’s cards. I started out with one theme — a set of Innistrad-themed cards that used the regional watermarks of the locations around Innistrad. I then tried an idea of a full set of daily zombies, but I immediately got bored with that.
What I did instead was this month, I revisited a bunch of mechanics based on things that might fit in a horror setting. The idea drifted a little, but I still have a bunch of cards I like and am happy with.
MTG: September’s Custom Cards: Dead Mechanics!
Ah, September draws to an end and with it, grows the slow and steady spectre of the horrifying month of October. Before the rising of the dead, though, we are going to look at the places they fall, and explore some Dead Mechanics.
MTG: August’s Custom Cards: Tricksy Cards!
With the end of tricks month we have another collection of daily Magic: The Gathering cards. This month, we didn’t have a mechanical identity to work with, but instead we wanted to work with the same theme of TRICKS.
MTG: July’s Custom Cards: Echo, Echo, Echo!
With Time Spiral Remastered hitting the shelves this year, I got to think about my earliest custom card designs, from back around Onslaught through Time Spiral era. Back when Time Spiral first landed, it brought with it a change to echo, and at that time, Fox and I designed five different ways for Echo to work across the five colours. I love Echo as a mechanic, but it is something of a dead mechanic. Wizards doesn’t tend to play with strict drawback mechanics, which is a bummer (to me).
But despite that, I quite like the way those cards worked out, so I dusted the ideas off and tried to make some new cards using those ideas!
MTG: Not Interested In The Forgotten Realms
Tomorrow Magic: The Gathering – Adventures in the Forgotten Realms will drop on MTG Arena and MTGO. I’m not excited for its release – in fact, at this point when I’m writing this, my initial active resistance to the idea has turned into full-blown antipathy. Simply put: I think this is a bad idea, root and branch.
I don’t mean in that pontificating way of ‘wizards should do this for the good of the game.’ That kind of heavy handed rhetoric involves a vision of the future that feels like climbing mount cleverest. It’s the same mindset that calls for bannings on day one, where your ability to prognosticate about the future of the game is some kind of skill you want to demonstrate. Don’t get me wrong, some people can do that – Pat Chapin was calling Jace overpowered real early, but let’s presume we’re not talking about Hall Of Famer big brain Mike Flores’ Best Friend Pat Chapin.
It’s not like I’m not going to try some of these cards, or even play with them. It’s more that while I may have had interest in trying standard again with the release of a new standard set, that interest dissolved as this set was revealed. I’m more likely to sit things out, because I don’t like this set.
Why don’t I like this set? Especially since I haven’t played with any cards in it?
MTG: June’s Custom Cards: Gruul Turfs!
You know with a whole six months of daily custom cards under my belt there’s the very real chance that I’m going to wind up doing this daily for the rest of the year. Wild.
Anyway, the theme for this month, based on it being Pride Month! is a full month of red-green cards that include the word land. Why? Because there’s no room for Terfs on Gruul Turf.
MTG: Pride
Magic: The Gathering, a Wizards of the Coast product, a Hasbro Partner, is doing things for Pride this month. As they do. As they have done. And it’s hard to grapple with Corporate Pride and this game as a material space doing deliberate actions to include more people.
I think it’s important to remember there are three basic layers of ‘Pride’ at work here. And every detail about Wizards of the Coast as it relates to pride, as a deliberately inscrutable internally silent business, is going to have to be filtered through the fact that this is still the company that treated Orion Black Like This.
May’s Custom Cards: Cephalids!
It’s another month of daily Magic Custom cards, and so here we have another theme! Some people went into Merfolk on May because Mer-May, but I, I chose differently.
I chose Cephalids.
WOTC Employees! This is an article about custom cards! Don’t look, please!
MTG: Winota’s Riders
Hey, I got curious about this idea, why not tell you about it.
April’s Custom Cards: Monsters!
And now, a roundup of the custom cards I put out every day of this month. Here’s a break so any WOTC employees who stumble upon this won’t necessarily see unsolicited designs!
MTG: March’s Custom Cards: Boros Blessings!
March is over, and as I’ve been doing so far this year, it’s time for another round of custom cards! Despite what you may think if you’ve dealt with me on the subreddit, I am not against white getting good stuff. In fact, I’m a firm believer in white’s weakness in Commander presenting an exciting area to put new and interesting things rather than just recoloured Concentrate. It goes even moreso for Boros, where I see their flavour space as full of interesting potential, that largely goes untapped as people just try to fix their problems with the same simple tools of ‘but what if blue,’ and ‘what if I make something overpowered?’ Thus, this month, I’m back to the ‘what about white in multiplayer?’ hobby horse, and we’re looking at Boros Cards. Some quick rules on this front:
Continue Reading →MTG: Defining Pushed
For someone who hasn’t bought a new Magic booster in something like three years, I spend an awful lot of time working on Magic: The Gathering language, card design, and game lore. The primary way I play the game these days is Commander on MTGO, and creating cards on Reddit.
MTG: It’s Tough To Be Competitive (When The Format Doesn’t Want You To Be)
Everyone plays Magic in their own way. The game serves as a platform for players to find one another, but even the people who engage with that platform in ways that seem the same are still approaching it in different ways. Players are simply too complex, motivations to play are too varied, and the game itself is too complicated for two players to sit down and truly want and expect the exact same thing out of the game as they play, and formats and rules and social responsiveness are tools we have to make sure people are at least engaging with one another on a reasonably equal level. The utility of the game is that the game sets rules and boundaries that players can use to meaningfully communicate their own parameters, making it easier to dial into what they want out of the experience.
Knowing that, it’s got to be rough to be into Competitive Commander, or, as it’s known, CEDH.
February’s Custom Cards: Love is in the Air
Alright, another month, another month of custom cards!
This month’s theme, because of the month of smooches was to make a bunch of cards with Partner. Partner is one of those mechanics where it kinda got accidentally effed up in the first round, and that has had problems that CEDH has had to deal with to this very day. I don’t wanna do that, so I’m playing it safe this time.
- Partner cards should cost 3 mana at minimum. We have a couple of them that were too powerful because they’re really flexible (hi, Tymna, hi Thrasios) and they enable too much stuff (hi, Vial Smasher, hi Thrasios).
- Partner cards shouldn’t be single-card engines. They should do one thing reliably. Any given partner card should have interesting interactions, but also be a reasonably handleable card.
- ‘Almost’ cards for Commander, cards that were good once, but aren’t good any more, can be good templates. Cards that you wouldn’t run, but you would if they were always in your opening hand.
- I’m playing it safe here. Assume that for text space and power reasons, I’m being very careful about how much text they have and if I had my druthers, some of these cards would be a little bigger, a little more defensive and maybe have a keyword or two.
- Also, flavour is hard. I know full well that a lot of fan-made custom card flavour text is weak. Broadly speaking, these are ‘first drafty’ flavour, and I do have ideas for how they work, but I don’t think what I’m doing and my ideas can necessarily be easily translated onto the cards. Rather than force it, I leave it off and will explain as best I can when asked.
What did Reddit have to say? Well, for most of them, not much, which makes sense. There was a hilarious bruhaha about Rinrin, because there were fears that she could, for example, cheat out a Consecrated Sphinx for only 2 mana, which means that you spent 6 mana to get a 1/1 consecrated sphinx. This also brought out the suggestion that nobody in commander uses size-based removal.
Also, some people were mad about Tatiana, because a 5 mana steal card without direct counterplay is… what? Unstoppably powerful? Over pushed for the commander environment?
Helpfully, it was pointed out to me by Enderlord that First’s wording needed some refining (and that’s addressed here, with the up to date wording).
Wide Orgo got compared to [mtg_card]Prophet of Kruphix[/mtg_card], which is hilarious. Untapping all your lands and giving all your permanents flash is kind of important parts of Prophet of Kruphix!
MTG: PartnerShips
What if your Commander Deck gave you doki dokis in your kokoro?
MTG: January’s Custom Cards: Witness The Whiteness
WOTC Employees: This article is entirely about about unsolicited game designs, with example cards.
I partake of custom magic design over on a subbidy reddity thing over there, and I make good designs and sometimes, they do not appreciate them because, what, like, people have different tastes or whatever. One thing I’ve been trying to do of late is just do more stuff in general rather than give up on them, with some little once-a-day tasks to keep myself from falling into 2020’s rut of ‘what did I do all day?’ I’ve been seeing if I can find a theme I like, then building around it.
Presented then are the 31 cards of January, themed around the question of adding to white.
By default I’ll always be designing cards for Commander, and with the understanding that that format is not one with a power level banning situation but rather a casual banning situation. Things on the commander banlist are usually there for access reasons or for tedium reasons: They make the game boring and repetitive.
One thing I learned from the custom magic subreddit about this, though, is that people are really inclined to measuring an optimal scenario for white cards. Devotion, for example, is always treated as if it is functionally infinite, as if a multiplayer commander environment isn’t this space renowned for board wipes and proactive removal.
It’s honestly really funny: Mono-white is underpowered and weak in a multiplayer environment, but at least as far as we’re talking here with custom magic creators, it can always get access to infinite resources to do what it wants to do. Weird!
MTG: The Case For White Copying
WOTC Employees: This article does not include unsolicited game designs. This article does discuss hypothetical opportunities for cards or mechanics, but no specific card designs, presented as graphical information.
MTG: Norin’s Impromptu Cream (Get Better Title)
Back in the day of Time Spiral-through-Shadowmoor standard, there was a deck I played in the casual room, and almost kinda thought about writing an article about, but I stopped writing for StarCityGames due to work concerns, and it never wound up happening. I think? Probably not. Ben Bleiwess would know better and I doubt he cares any way.
Here, lemme show you the three weird things that go on in this deck.
MTG: Inevitability and Horror
Magic has done a few different sets that try for horror.
Continue Reading →MTG: Otrimi, I Guess?
First things first, you should read this thread by Orion Black. And this other thread by them. You’ve already seen them? Good! Great! I don’t want anyone who is interested in or playing Magic: The Gathering to do so without at least some awareness of this problem, this persistent problem. I guess my main thinking here is that the least I can do is make sure Wizards has the reputation not as ‘one of the good ones’ but as ‘that one has fucked up a lot and needs to fucking address it.’
I haven’t been playing a lot of Magic: The Gathering. Just other things going on, plus any time a banning happens or a new set releases, prices on MODO get a little weird, in a way I don’t appreciate. Typically if I wait a month, all the things I want to play around with get a bit cheaper, and this few months in Magic’s history have been
weird.
The last time I was playing, I was playing, I kid you not, a budget standard Walls deck, using High Alert and Teyo, the Shieldmage. This means that I haven’t really been paying attention for two whole additions to standard, and I also missed the return of Commander – not 1v1 Commander, but Commander – to the MODO interface.
Let’s then talk about a card I’m kinda intrigued to play with in Commander, but can’t see the ways I’m going to make them work:
MTG: Pick a Card, Any Card
Shuffling isn’t free.
In the world of the custom magic designer, there are some effects you wind up seeing a lot. One of them is the recurrent attempts to recreate the Power 9, another is to try and weasel around the Reserve List, and another is the attempt to fix the problem presented by the economic disparity of the fetchlands. The solution, the amateur designer thinks, is to create another, new, just as good fetchland that’s maybe a tiny bit worse.
The question that doesn’t get asked there, is: Why wouldn’t someone run both?
The problem that follows upon that is any fetchland good enough to run is going to be run by the people who also already have fetchlands (unless you do some ridiculous stuff to ensure the lands aren’t compatible, in which case you’re making the lands bad enough that they’re not runnable).
Really, the solution to fetchlands isn’t to make fetchlands more accessible. It’s to get rid of them entirely.
Set aside my existing complaints with the way fetchlands transform environments into sludgey nothingness. Set aside my complaints that the mana fixing presented by fetchlands and duals creates an environment with different aggressive pressures. Just look at fetchlands in terms of the pragmatic constraint they put on the game at a competitive level for the time spent not playing the game.
The tournament floor rules for shuffling present the idea that a deck must be reasonably randomised. This has led to a collection of best practices for what a shuffle is, which most tournament participants learn to practice and execute. But you don’t just shuffle yourself, you have to present the deck to your opponent, who then have the opportunity to shuffle your deck again, and then present it to you for a final cut. In a tournament environment, some of these shuffles are required.
Searching your deck once a game? Not a big deal, this shuffle-shuffle-cut procedure is a break from the conventional action of the game. Searching your deck then searching your opponent’s deck then searching your deck again then searching their deck again? You’ve added literally minutes to the game for mana smoothing.
This is also why any repeated tutor cards in custom magic need to be regarded with extreme distrust. Cards like [mtg_card]Birthing Pod[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Prime Speaker Vannifar[/mtg_card] are fundamentally dangerous, but it’s almost a grace that as used, they just win the game on the spot.
Custom magic loves repeated tutors, they love engine cards, they love trying to remake cards like [mtg_card]Survival of the Fittest[/mtg_card], or an exploration of Transmute and these designs are fine enough to play with, but when played with, they always present the same problem you get when this game of variance strives to destroy the variance that makes it interesting: The game slows down and gets more boring.
I’ve suggested, half seriously, from time to time, that you could make an interesting Commander format if every card that says ‘shuffle’ is banned. Out of the twenty thousand odd cards that exist, this would get rid of 783 – and a lot of them aren’t great.
Sure, you lose a lot of mana ramp and fixing, but you don’t lose all of it, and suddenly you have to look at colours in terms of all the redundant sorta-good copies that singleton formats promise. It’s a way to force the players to look at cards that they were ignoring, because they could always tutor the best ones.
It’s a way to make magic about controlling attention.
MTG: Reimagining The Nephilim
Warning: hey, WotC employees, this will feature custom designs!
In February 2006, Magic: The Gathering released the set Guildpact, and with it the first four-colour magic cards that had ever been printed. With no prior precedent to work from, these four cards were exciting and they had the intriuging and hitherto unused title Nephilim. They were the Yore-Tiller Nephilim, Glint-Eye Nephilim, Dune-Brood Nephilim, Ink-Treader Nephilim, and Witch-Maw Nephilim.
Nephilim are a reference to a sort of – you know, I’m going to pull the bandaid off and just say that Nephilim are one of those pre-Bible Bible stories that gets trotted out and recycled by various people building RPG Sourcebooks or Religious texts (but I repeat myself). There’s a chance your actual religion actually respects them as actual things that actually exist, but that’s sure not what they’re being used for these days.
Also, if you read the lore you’d know that these Nephilim aren’t the real Nephilim, they’re just magically crafted Nephilimmy things, and they’re sort of pre-god gods of Ravnica, creatures that are so transcendentally powerful and important, that they don’t even need worshippers or sacrifices – their cult calls upon them to be seen not because of their actions, but because of their existence being so fundamentally powerful and dangerous that their presence humbles people.
They also suck ass.
Continue Reading →MTG: Says Trans Rights
You know, it’s pretty rare to be able to mention tabletop games these days that overlap well with my expertise. The history of D&D and queer themes are kinda mutedly embarrassing, videogames so commonly fuck it up, and even in the wild west of board and card games, most high-production value games are struggling with the idea of including women.
In that context it can be downright surprising to look at how Magic: The Gathering, a big budget high production value game that dedicated time and resources on its primary, important platform, to promote and spotlight an important and meaningful trans character and then didn’t colossally heck that character up.
In 2015, to go with the release of the set Fate Reforged, Wizards released a story called The Truth Of Names, by James Wyatt. Completely unironically, I think this is a great story, it’s tight, it’s short, it does world building, you don’t need to know what a Mardu is, but it communicates what they are. It focuses on our protagonist of this story, Alesha, a trans woman warrior who is also the kind of person who can shank a dragon.
Continue Reading →MTG: White Ramp
Christ, really?
Why?
This?
Continue Reading →MTG: April Custom Commander Cards (Part Two)
WOTC Employees: This article is entirely about about unsolicited game designs, with example cards.
And now, the second half of the cards I made for my own edification and fun during the month of April! These cards have had a little bit of feedback and some rewording since their original sharing on Reddit.
Continue Reading →MTG: April Custom Commander Cards (Part One)
WOTC Employees: This article is entirely about about unsolicited game designs, with example cards.
April is meant to be a month where I’m self-indulgent, and it seems one of the things I wanted to be self-indulgent about was wanting to make custom Magic: The Gathering cards to share on reddit, because what I really needed each morning was to open a post and go ‘pah, these fools don’t appreciate my genius.
Continue Reading →MTG: Mel Candy
I’ve spoken in the past about Magic The Gathering‘s player psychographics, characterisations that the game developers use to describe and discuss the types of players that engage with their game. These archetypes are Tammy, Jenny and Spike, and they also kinda line up with other, similar efforts to categorise gameplay choices from the work of Roger Caillois, immense racist and clown-hater.
In the conversation about player psychographics, one Matt Cavotta introduced the idea of the Vorthos, a type of player who cared about and engaged with the game because of its lore, someone for whom the fiction of the play took paramount presence. In Magic’s case, it kind of needed this distinction because there’s a whole collection of people who engage with the game for reasons that treat the game as a secondary element of the game.
And then, with Vorthos, there was one more name that Mark Rosewater introduced, bringing their player nicknames up to five: Mel.
MTG: Big Gulps
WOTC Employees: This article talks about unsolicited game designs, though it does not show any specific example cards.
When it comes to custom magic card design, I’m something of a pain in the ass. I don’t find myself particularly adventuresome in design, and will generally look at things in terms of what space they’re opening up. The effect this has in the community is that I’m the one who’s generally going ‘maybe not this,’ and that can be a real bummer for people. Apparently, I’ve got a reputation for being unpleasable.
One of the topics that we’re – still – hammering on is White. The argument –
no, hang on, it’s a whine.
– is that white is weak and that we in the heroic custom magic mines know better than Wizards, and will produce the cards that ‘fix’ White that they’re too cowardly to print. I’m pretty regularly there to tell people why I don’t think their solutions are good (in my opinion), but I know I don’t often put my ideas out there.
Continue Reading →MTG: Friendly Planeswalkers
There’s a lot of Magic: The Gathering that uses mechanics to express theme. Theme is really important, since being able to see card entities as creatures that relate to one another, enchantments that relate to greater rules, artifacts that have a material existence and lands that can be used or expended is a big part of how you manage the mental load of all the game parts happening at once. This is going to be a quick introduction, then we’re going to do a list, so buckle up.
Continue Reading →MTG: Dinobots (Not The Transformers) Commanders!
Hello, Wizards of the Coast employees. This blog post is going to feature custom cards and I know you’re not allowed to look at those. So, please, go elsewhere, sorry!
Magic The Gathering? In Smooch month? is this going to be about shipping? Is this going to be about Nissa and Chandra, and the War Of the Spark: Forsaken?
No.
Because I don’t really care about that.
I mean I don’t have the book; I don’t plan on buying the book; the book was handled so badly that Wizards of the Coast apologised for it, and there are rundowns on how the writing is bad (even setting aside the subject matter) and ways that the Nissa/Chandra romance was specifically handled, and really, you don’t need someone who hasn’t got the book, and has no interest in reading it, to go over it.
Instead, I want to talk about a shipping pair I learned about from Twitter, and has basically no basis in actual canon but I don’t care.
MTG: Stop Designing White Counterspells
Seriously. That’s it. Those four words.
Alright, fine.
White in the Throne of Eldraine standard period, isn’t great! It’s not very strong and uh, also in Commander, white’s not very strong, and so the Content Creation mill has kicked in and presented the brilliant idea of White Bad. The Magic community, being the reasonable well-rounded and thoughtful group of people they are have immediately leapt face-first into a wall.
We’re not good with handling conversations that need words.
One of the places that people have decided this needs addressing is by saying that white (which is the WORST COLOUR and ALWAYS SUCKS) needs to have CARD DRAW and RAMP and COUNTERSPELLS. Now, I’ve some sympathy to the problems presented before (and I’ve written about it), but the last one bothers me, because it’s the same, simple, looping argument. It’s very catastrophised and gets to involve things like ‘Maro doesn’t know what he’s talking about’ and ‘Maro hates white,’ which… yeah. Do I bust out the statistics and the historical context to address these arguments? Sometimes – it’s just it’s work, and because it’s social media, that argument drifts away and I have to go re-make it an hour later. I want it all centralised and convenient.
Here, then is my thoughts on why we should stop designing custom white counterspells. If you’re a Wizards employee, current or former, rejoice, because I’m not going to show any custom designs here or even talk about them in depth. I’m just going to go over the idea of white getting counterspells at all.
And first, some context!
Continue Reading →