MTG: Kamigawa Revamp, Part 5: Betrayers of Kamigawa
Wizards of the Coast Employees, this article is going to feature custom card designs.
Goodness me, this project took some time. The opening documents you’ve read so far have all been done, weeks, no, almost months in advance, but as I sit here and pen this, it’s only two weeks before it goes up – and my goodness it has been a time to get this project finished.
First, let’s introduce you to the cards, and then we’ll talk some afterwards.
MTG: Kamigawa Revamp, Part 4: Skeletonising
If you thought the last two discussions on structural problems was exciting, wait till you see what we got this time – lists!
In Nuts and Bolts: Design Skeleton, Mark Rosewater gives an – admittedly out of date – block structure, which we can use for our two Kamigawa sets. Or more precisely, we can use it to break down how to make a skeleton out of Dominaria. It gives an outline for how many cards of each effect you should be expecting to put in a set,
Continue Reading →MTG: Kamigawa Revamp, Part 3: Legendary
Wizards of the Coast Employees, this article is going to feature custom card designs.
We’ve talked about the structural problems of Kamigawa 1.0, but just to recap, the whole set is about six conflicting factions – five mono-coloured groups against the five-coloured omnishambles that is the Spirit faction. With that problem ‘examined’ last time, it’s time to attack the next structural problem: Legendary.
Now, when I examined Kamigawa from the ground up, there’s a bunch of stuff in the set that works out well. Bushido is a good little combat complicator, even if cards printed with it overvalued it, making them mostly only valuable or meaningful within the context of limited creature combat. The flip cards and ninjutsu both work. Yet legendary, as represented on cards, presents two problems.
Continue Reading →MTG: Kamigawa Revamp, Part 2: The Kami War
Wizards of the Coast Employees, this article is going to feature custom card designs.
When you want to dismantle a set and fix it, it seems to me you should want to get down as close as possible to the basics of what went into that set. Strip it down, examine the central principles, and see what you can do to fix them. You need to find the things that made the set feel the way it did without, hopefully, carrying forwards the things that made it feel bad. Which means that you want to represent the same general factional struggle and strife, you want things to broadly still have the same boxes they can land in and in Kamigawa that means addressing the big flavour underpinning the whole thing:
The Kami War.
Continue Reading →MTG: Kamigawa Revamp, Part 1: First Principles
This is an article that discusses custom set design but does not show any custom designed cards.
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