Magic: the Gathering in the UK

You Make the Draft III

Date: Saturday 3rd March - 12 noon

Where: Games Club - County Hotel

The idea:

* You design and submit 45 Magic cards in Magic Set Editor format

* Send finished cards to sim.okeeffe@gmail.com

* So do 7 other people

* We print them all out, shuffle into boosters

* draft and enjoy!

From comments in other threads it seems like there is definitely some desire to do this again. I personally had loads of fun, both designing and playing with the cards.

Threads from 1st time around:

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 - Aftermath

Things we learnt from the first time & suggestions:

Mixing "normal" and "funny" cards. Obviously we had the laughs but they tend not to be so funny the second time round
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
Similarly maybe we went too heavy on super power mythic bombs
Cards must have art (designer secret - finding lots of art first inspires lots of ideas for cards!)
Card designs should be scrutinised by somebody after submission to fix obvious rules/power issues
Having a theme or mechanic would really help tie the set together and help design cards
Someone has to design the sensible artifact/enchantment removal. I know they can be boring, but I'm sure there is interesting ways to do it

In the YMtD II there was some consensus that people wanted to design a big block of cards in a particular colour. We could certainly approach it this way.

Interested Parties:

Simon
Tom
Kieron
Glenn
Tim

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Glenn Goldsworthy on February 28, 2012 at 2:05pm

I will stress due to the nature of the beast I have quite a few rares, but am gonna have a bit of a think about the structure over the next few days, might hold some of the major players back otherwise might have a few to many powerful dudes. Am trying to get some of the minor players in though.

Might be easier to just do 1 series at a time but thats a different kettle of fish really

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Permalink Reply by Simon O'Keeffe on February 28, 2012 at 2:12pm

So as a holdover from the previous set we made I certainly have a few cards that play with the library, specifically the top card of your library. The graveyard is the other zone that my cards effect.

As for tribal, I have cards that have similar creature types but I have very few active cards which support tribal or are tribal in nature.

Edit. I also have a mechanic I'm trying to template properly:

Deathbound X: Y (Whenever a permanent of type X goes to the graveyard you may do Y)

eg:

Deathbound Creature: put a +1/+1 counter on ~

I'm wondering if that is too clunky and I should just call it Deathbound and have it trigger off creatures going to the yard.

TimsWheelbarrow said:

I should be able to make 45 cards by Thursday... it's Tuesday today, right? Will try to make sure my commons are all nice and simple to read so that the draft doesn't take forever.

Are we looking to prioritise any zones or anything in this set (e.g. hand size, graveyard) or card types? Is it particularly tribal?

Will try to make sure I have a good mix of colours, but if one colour is under-designed I can probably pick up some slack.

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Permalink Reply by TimsWheelbarrow on February 28, 2012 at 3:56pm

Sounds like fun. I've actually never got around to designing a whole set, so I might just do that once this is all done. It's always been something I've avoided in the past as the guys at R&D get a little antsy about conversations involving 'You should have a look at this set that I've designed'.

A lot of my cards thus far involve variations on drawing cards/milling cards. For example, my mythic rare;

Tim-twister

Sorcery

Switch your graveyard and your library. Shuffle your library. Discard your hand. Draw 7 cards

It looks unbelievably broken, but I think it is actually just very good. You can't play it until comparatively late game (at least 9-10 cards in graveyard), and when you do it is kind of like a weird Creeping Renaissance. My set might well also include Tim Walk, Tim Vault and Force of Willoughby ;)

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Permalink Reply by Simon O'Keeffe on February 28, 2012 at 4:27pm

Hah, those are awesome Tim.

I imagine you might even sneak in a pinger, called Tim...

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Permalink Reply by TimsWheelbarrow on February 28, 2012 at 7:36pm

On your mechanic Simon, I don't know if it really needs a keyword, unless you want to grant the ability to other creatures in play, or layer it with a lot of other abilities. I mean, Falkenrath Noble kind of has Deathbound, and flying, and something like Village Cannibals has Deathbound: Humans, which doesn't really take up too much real estate on the card.

Also, if it's deathbound for anything apart from creatures, it isn't really death... ;)

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Goldsworthy on February 29, 2012 at 8:55am

I have completed 36 cards need to come up with something, I do have 12 black cards out of the set so can't just go for the lower level badguys as expected unless someone wants to pick up the slack and do zero black cards to help me out

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Permalink Reply by Simon O'Keeffe on February 29, 2012 at 9:39am

Good points. I kind of know the name doesn't really fit right if it extends to non-creature cards, but I haven't really come up with anything better yet.

It feels like the kind of thing Wizards might keyword, and I'm trying a few things out that reference it, but I might just restrict it to triggering off creatures going to the yard.

I also have another mechanic which I think is probably horribly broken (rules wise), but I kind of understand in my head how it works:

Void Chant - 1W

Instant

Target creature gets +1/+1 until end of turn.

Flux W (Whenever this card changes zones you may pay its Flux cost. If you do put a copy of it on the stack)

TimsWheelbarrow said:

On your mechanic Simon, I don't know if it really needs a keyword, unless you want to grant the ability to other creatures in play, or layer it with a lot of other abilities. I mean, Falkenrath Noble kind of has Deathbound, and flying, and something like Village Cannibals has Deathbound: Humans, which doesn't really take up too much real estate on the card.

Also, if it's deathbound for anything apart from creatures, it isn't really death... ;)

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Permalink Reply by Thom Richardson on February 29, 2012 at 1:38pm

Imagine casting that card with past in flames in your deck!

TimsWheelbarrow said:

Sounds like fun. I've actually never got around to designing a whole set, so I might just do that once this is all done. It's always been something I've avoided in the past as the guys at R&D get a little antsy about conversations involving 'You should have a look at this set that I've designed'.

A lot of my cards thus far involve variations on drawing cards/milling cards. For example, my mythic rare;

Tim-twister

2U

Sorcery

Switch your graveyard and your library. Shuffle your library. Discard your hand. Draw 7 cards

It looks unbelievably broken, but I think it is actually just very good. You can't play it until comparatively late game (at least 9-10 cards in graveyard), and when you do it is kind of like a weird Creeping Renaissance. My set might well also include Tim Walk, Tim Vault and Force of Willoughby ;)