You Make the Draft IV

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Date: Saturday 31st March - 12 noon

Where: Penderel's Oak - High Holborn

 

Concept:  

* Each participator designs 45 Magic cards in Magic Set Editor format

* Send finished cards to [e-mail]

* We print them all out, sleeve them up, and shuffle into boosters

* Draft and enjoy!

 

Although there was only four of us who did this last time, many onlookers expressed their interest in being part of the next one.

 

Threads from previous instances:

You Make the Draft I - Initial thread 

You Make the Draft I - Preliminaries

You Make the Draft I - Aftermath (includes link to visual spoiler of all created cards)

You Make the Draft II - Initial thread

You Make the Draft III - Initial thread

You Make the Draft III - Aftermath (includes link to MSE file)

 

Things we learnt from the previous attempts and loose rules:

• No planeswalkers. Having 8 untested planeswalkers in a draft can be pretty lopsided, especially as people tend not to design simple answer cards as they are dull
• Super power mythic bombs - try and limit yourself to 1, if you desperately need more, let us know and we can try and accommodate them
• Cards must have art (designer secret - finding lots of art first inspires lots of ideas for cards!) (DeviantArt is a pretty good resource)
• Designing heavily linear/parasitic cards, as your 45, that all interact with each other is not really going to work if we get 360 cards total. If you want to do something like this then let everyone know so they can either support your theme or veto it mercilessly
• Having a theme or design goal would be a great way to help tie different peoples 45 cards together. If you have any suggestions please post them

 

EDIT: We have chosen "land matters" as a theme, so try and include a smattering of cards that interact with lands in some way.

People who have expressed interest so far:

1. Simon
2. Tom Baker
3. Kieran 
4. Glenn
5. Andy
6. Dan
7. Charlie
8. Phil
9. Rebecca

EDIT: Design Skeleton file here: YmtSet.mse-set

[Dan Barrett]

FYI Crusading Knight is already taken as a card name, someone pointed out to me.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

So it is!

I'll change it to something else.

[Dan Barrett]

Also it is a mox, not a lotus!

(I posted a link on the goodgamery card design thread)

[Simon O'Keeffe]

I assume this is referring to Flaming Lotus?

Yeah I know it doesn't fit flavourwise, for either really. Moxen all cost 0, and Loti all add 3 mana, but I already had the image and the name Flame Flower seemed a bit naff.

Dan Barrett said:

Also it is a mox, not a lotus!

(I posted a link on the goodgamery card design thread)

[Dan Barrett]

Indeed. FYI - http://forums.goodgamery.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23&start=6780

[Thomas David Baker]

So I think we've decided that what we are building is an Expert-level set draft set.  Something with the power level (and hopefully synergy, fun and balance - eventually) of triple Innistrad Limited.

We're not going to have any single card as good as (say) Grave Titan or Magus of the Blossom because those kind of cards mostly ruin drafts by being overpowered.  So we can run through and cut (almost) every Magus and every Sword and every Titan and so on.

We can/will have build-around-me "rares".  Cards that you are super glad to have in a particular deck but which don't take over the game on their own.  I'm thinking of things like Spider Spawning, Jace's Erasure, Furnace Celebration, Muruganda Petroglyphs, Burning Vengeance, Reveillark, Animate Dead, Worm Harvest, Astral Slide, Searing Meditation.  The only trouble with these kind of cards is that you can end up wanting multiples - but I think we are open to considering a non-singleton format?  And we definitely have to get more focused to make cards like this good.

Personally I'm not very excited about Land Matters.  But if others want to press on down that avenue I am game - I've only designed about three land-related cards so far.

Things we've done that I do like are: Wizards, Corrupt Seer, playing with the top card of your library revealed, Goblin Confidant (who would be a great hoser for the Corrupt Seer deck), Drain Life effects, Zombies, Graveyard interactions, Angel Fire, Golgothan (OP but the idea is good), Flaming Lotus and a bunch of other Affinity-for-basic-land-type cards, Ironhide Rhox. Pitchlight Imp, playable counterspells like Terranull, Curse of a Thousand Deaths (possibly too good), Heart Gem, Migraine, Brimstone Turtle. looting and other forms of virtual card advantage in red, Rampaging Beast, Silent X Cycle, cantrips.

I really like Turtles and Bears and a bunch of Tribal things that might be a little bit too silly but I wonder at my own instincts there as I understand that the tribal limited formats were not very good.

Flavor-wise I wonder if it's worth brainstorming on "things wizards do" or "why does land matter" for some card or mechanic ideas.

[James Mills]

Let me guess Dan, you have the cat avatar? ¬_¬

[Thomas David Baker]

Also I have put up a better visual spoiler of all the cards so far in all three YMTDs by set or all together:

http://magic.bluebones.net/ymtd/

The other spoiler links now redirect to this one.

[Dan Barrett]

Obviously!

James Mills said:

Let me guess Dan, you have the cat avatar? ¬_¬

[James Mills]

Lol, Ahhh man I remember playing mafia with some of these guys on the Magic Lampoon before it changed to MTGrobot.

[Philip Dickinson]

i love that Thanks Bro as a glenn-hoser lol

[Kieran Symington]

Maybe we shouldn't have a theme for the set, but focus on the themes for each colour combination. For example, there's already a pretty sweet B/G graveyard deck just with the cards from the last set - Dredge Zombies, Gravescade, Gravedigger variants, Ploughbringer Beast and Bear Assault as the big finish. If every combination had a theme like this then people could still make cards with some level of freedom (since they could focus on the themes they want to do) and you'd end up with some pretty synergistic decks in the actual draft.