Some card designs

One of my favorite things to do in spare minutes (or hours) here and there is design magic cards.I think designing a magic card is a lot of fun because there are a huge amount of parameters to tweak and tune but enough limitations to generally prevent being creatively overwhelmed. To explain what I mean, imagine you were give 5 one inch cube wooden blocks and told to make something creative and interesting. You say... Ok... let's see I can line them up this way... or that way... or maybe like this or that... meh.There aren't enough options to make the design interesting. Now imagine you were give 10,000 such blocks. My response would be Ummmm... a creative wipe-out. I feel like designing magic cards gives you just the right amount of blocks.




In fact, designing a deck can be viewed in a similar way. It's a creative process with a large but manageable number of number of parameters. I think creative process is a big part of why I enjoy magic so much.

For more about Magic design check out Wizards of the Coast's Great Designer Search. It was an open Magic design contest where the judges (designers) critiqued the contestants designs as a part of weekly feature on Daily MTG. It piqued my interest in Magic design. I believe the first one took place around 2007 and the second one wrapped up recently.

On to the cards!

Moonstone (rare)
3
Legendary Artifact
Whenever you draw a basic land card you may reveal it to draw another card. Use this ability only once per turn.

I was playing a game recently and had a Farsight Mask in play.I've always thought that was a pretty bizarre card, but sometimes it can be pretty good. I thought, "it basically randomly draws you cards". Then I thought, "Hey that would be cool. Let me design a card that randomly draws cards" and the result is Moonstone. My first thought was to use a coin flip, but for some reason every time I see that on a card I hate it. Randomness is a big part of the game, but that just seems to make it too obvious or something. Also I don't really want to flip a coin every turn. Then I thought to use Magic's built in randomizer, the card draw. I was looking for an approximately 50/50 split, land vs non-land. I was sensing this was too powerful so I chose to trigger off land (will trigger less often) and added the basic land restriction to tone down power a little more and reward using basic lands. Legend status and one per turn restrictions add more control. I think this card is interesting because it increases the value of all of your future card draws; its value increases over time. For this reason it would probably fit better with control decks than aggro. I can't decide if this is too powerful or not. It probably is, but my imaginary development team can tweak the cost as needed.

Boomslang Shaman (rare)
2gu
Creature - Human Shaman
2/2
[card] enters the battlefield with 2 +1/+1 counters on it.
Shroud.
gu: Remove a counter from [card] and place it on target creature. That creature gains shroud until EOT.

I built a creature heavy green-blue Heirloom deck (the Heirloom format will surely be the topic of a future post) loaded with hybrid creatures. I wanted a 4 drop to instantly protect all my smaller creatures. Inspired by Simic Guildmage and Plaxcaster Frogling, this is what I came up with. I think this is a neat combination of the green and blue colors and very within the "Simic" mindset. Built in shroud was to avoid shenanigans targeting himself or other copies.Originally the ability didn't cost any mana, but that might be a little much. I think it's kinda cool how if you drop it on turn 4 your opponent has one turn to take out one creature (but not your Boomslang Shaman) then you get into safe mode, but if you draw it later in the game and have 6 mana out then you get insta-protection.The cost on the ability made be feel better about the fairly generous 4/4 stats also.

Haunted Marsh (uncommon)
Land - Swamp
When [card] enters the battlefield you lose 2 life.
bbbb: [card] becomes a 4/2 black horror creature until EOT.

Inspired by casing Tendrils of Corruption with a Barren Moor on the battlefield. Many black cards require not just black mana but swamps. However, I always found it a bit dull to run 24 swamps even though it was probably optimal for my Tendrils, Corrupt, and Mind Sludge. I figure this is sort of the swamp version of Dread Statuary (I love that card by the way).
A Gatherer search revealed Leechridden Swamp serves a similar role.

Tyrannosaurs Rex (mythic)
4gg
Creature - Lizard
7/7
Trample, Haste
[card] gets +2/2 for each creature blocking it.

This one is inspired by one of Ethan Fleischer's designs for his pre-historic world in GDS2. I even stole his 4gg, 7/7, trample stats. A mythic T-rex is just super epic. One of the judges said that's the kind of card they could put on the front of a booster box to sell a set. So naturally I wanted to try to come up with a design that did justice to the awesome parameters of "mythic t-rex".

I thought 4gg, 7/7, trample was an excellent starting point. My main goal was to make this feel like a T-rex but also be very powerful. If my design wasn't powerful then I failed the T-rex. Trample on a large creature makes blocking much less valuable, but if you are low on life then you can start feeding the monster creatures to reduce damage by their toughness. Multiple blockers can absorb all the damage or even team up to kill the attacker. This design's +2/+2 for each blocker makes blocking even less effective, particularly with multiple blockers. It's kind of like super-trample which seems appropriate for this card. The T-rex for all intensive purposes is unblockable, a huge 7 hit clock. Of course he's not technically unblockable so you certainly can try, but carnage will ensue.

Haste wasn't on there until the last minute, but I thought of Terra Stomper and realized my T-rex needed more power. I love Terra Stomper but he doesn't win tournaments so I need one more ability to push the T-rex over the edge. I thought about defensive abilities like protection or hexproof, but that's not really T-rex. He is fast though. Huge, mean, and fast.