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

[Simon O'Keeffe]

supposed to be a 5/5!

An update on one the very first rares I ever got (Balduvian Horde from Alliances)

The original would be almost unplayable in constructed these days, my version might be too good at 5/5, so if you think 4/4 is better then put it there.

[Charlie Grover]

I thought it should be a 5/5. Good good, sorted

[Charlie Grover]

Is there someone bringing sleeves/backing cards already?

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Yes. Assuming Mills turns up with our previous cube. That has about 400 sleeves and basic lands. I have another 100 sleeves I'm bringing, and can bring some more lands.

Scissors might be needed!

[Thomas David Baker]

Good work yesterday team.  I much enjoyed making 5/5s with haste (Wendigo) and 6/6s with trample (Dominating Beast) for 4 in the non-broken draft :)

Can you please all send me your mse-set files for this and any previous You Make the Draft sets that you have made.  I'm going to put up a spoiler and maybe even experiment with some kind of crude multiverse.

Once we get a spoiler up we can look at the cards we all liked and see if that hints on a particular direction for us to go.  As well as deciding themes, tribes, mechanics, etc. we also need to decide on a power level: is this a cube or a set?

I want to call out some great cards from yesterday but of course all my MVPs were busted as all hell so I'm not sure I can call them out!  I'm going to go with Poisonous Frog and Alpha Bear as not-totally-broken but very strong.  I was surprised to find out which of my cards were brokenly powerful.  Obviously I suspected something like Magus of the Blossom.  But Pyromantic Chant was a learning experience.  And I don't think we need to see Sword of Order again any time soon.

Email address for the MSE files is bakert at gmail dot com.

[Kieran Symington]

Once you have your multiverse up I can call out all the awesome cards - and point out all the obvious things like "Titans good in limited" and "Magus based on dominating constructed card slightly overpowered".

[Simon O'Keeffe]

I wanted to thank everyone who designed cards / printed cards / attended!

Was great fun. I also enjoyed the non-broken draft playing against "3 Swords Dingler" and his army of Magus', and squeaking past Grover's land screw in game 3 of match 3 to finally capture a winning record for something on the day.

I also want to apologise for the quantity of bomby rares and mythics we had to endure. I did mention in the opening post to try and limit yourself to 1 mythic, but didn't say anything about trying to keep to a standard rarity distribution with your cards. I guess adding in extra cards to allow for more players certainly let some of mine creep in that I hadn't planned on submitting in my 45. The combination of my super powerful lands, and 12 titans, allowed for some disgusting turn 3 plays.

(Praise to Kieran for designing a whole new mechanic and well balanced cards!).

A few cards I really liked off the top of my head:

Surprise Baloth - who doesn't like scalable cascade spells!

Turtle Major - turtle tribal support is good!

Baker's Flashback discard spell - I loved this card, and it seemed pretty well balanced, offering choice between cycling to draw a card or go for double discard.

Death by Squid! - surely the best name for a magic card ever

As for next steps, in the short term I think I would like to play with the set as it is another time. Only two drafts is a pretty small N to decide to do a whole new one. The multiverse thing would be great as we could fix some cards prior to playing again.

Long term I guess we are aiming to get to a stage where we have a cube/set that we made together that is fun to play, and balanced. Whether this means we want multiples of commons or to retain the highlander aspect still needs to be decided. The only issue I can see of doing it more as a set is that when playing it might be a bit of a chore to build boosters if you wanted to retain some rarity distribution.

[Dan Barrett]

Something Charlie and Louis noticed very quickly - there wasn't a great deal of support for fast aggro decks, particularly in white and red where you'd expect such cards. I had probably the most aggressive deck in draft 1, and it was blue-based, with a lot of my two drops being effectively vanilla bears. As a result, I don't think there's a great incentive to draft aggressive decks right now, as opposed to Charlie-style 5c good stuff or a mid-rangey deck. This is a problem I've had in the past with my own cube.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Hard to say for sure without looking at the full card set, and I know Charlie managed a decent aggro deck in the second draft.

Looking back I can see I had some decent support for aggro in my white cards, red only a little, and the hole is probably good 2 drops that are evasive/annoying to block, and don't cost WW or RR.

Dan Barrett said:

Something Charlie and Louis noticed very quickly - there wasn't a great deal of support for fast aggro decks, particularly in white and red where you'd expect such cards. I had probably the most aggressive deck in draft 1, and it was blue-based, with a lot of my two drops being effectively vanilla bears. As a result, I don't think there's a great incentive to draft aggressive decks right now, as opposed to Charlie-style 5c good stuff or a mid-rangey deck. This is a problem I've had in the past with my own cube.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

One further thing that was noted was once we removed all the broken cards, there was a distinct lack of 6+ mana cost creatures to make all the ramp decks good. Looks like designing balanced fatties is difficult!

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

I think the key is that we learn from these mistakes, I totally agree that we should play with the unbroken cube once or twice more and this time during the event make details notes of how everything plays out.

I also noticed that there wasn't a lot of combo cards going around.

Simon mentioned something towards the end that made a lot of sence everyone next time should design a set that would work as boosters, so you would have 12 commons, 3 uncommons, 1 rare or mythic (times 3 obv)

that would mean that people in there 45 aren't producing 5 titans, 5 swords, 5 multilands, it would mean that if you wanted to do a cycle or rares you would have to try and get someone else to make a couple perhaps

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

sorry forgot to say was an awesome day and had a lot of fun (except for the dredge removal deck which was NOT IN ANY WAY FAIR)