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]

Here are some more things we learnt from last time:

• We were much more restrained in creating mythic level uber-bomb cards, in fact we only had to issue errata to maybe 4/5 cards on the day, and most of those were rules issues rather than power level.
• Tribal cards are pretty cool, but actually hard to draft in a cube style format where there is only ever one of each card. Kieran managed a pretty good wizard deck in the first game, but Bear or Frog tribal decks never really fully materialised. These might work if we turn it into a set with multiples of the commons.
• We had a real scarcity of flyers in the format, such that a 7 mana 3/7 flyer was pretty darn good
• The more text there is on a card the less likely it is to be picked. I had a couple of enchantments that were pretty wordy due to counters and such. I don't think any of them were ever played.
• People also don't like randomness. I had a couple of cards that had some random elements, again I don't think any of them were ever played.
• All the cards having art was awesome, the set looked really good, and if you spent ages trimming all the white corners I doubt anyone would even know you were playing with proxies until they got up close.

Regarding a theme, I personally like lands, so was thinking of devoting some cards that interact with them. I know Zendikar was supposed to be the 'land' block, but it never really felt like it to me. Perhaps we could bring back Landfall and do something interesting with it?

[Dan Barrett]

KIERAN!

Also, I am happy to pursue a "lands matter" theme, and if we want to suggest a few creature types we should all make a few of I'd be down with that too.

[Glenn Goldsworthy]

cieron?

 

I should be able to make this depending on wedding stuff, will check, not sure I will have time to design a hole 45 cards though, happy to change a few but those we discussed Simon, not sure if you want to make the changes think there were only a couple.

My theme was obv supernatural, if anyone wants to make any cards interact then, angels, demons and subtype supernatural were all used

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Hah! Copy and pasting fail.

Fixing it now before Kieran notices..

Dan Barrett said:

KIERAN!

Also, I am happy to pursue a "lands matter" theme, and if we want to suggest a few creature types we should all make a few of I'd be down with that too.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Rebecca, after going through, click on the link that says 'Magic Set Editor 2'

This will take you to another page that looks a bit spammy, don't click anything there and your download should start.

Once installed you should be able to make a new set and create away!

Once thing I would recommend people do is to go into the Set Info tab (little star symbol) and put their name in as the Artist and/or copyright. This way when we lump all the cards together people will be able to tell which ones are yours.

If you want to get funky with mana symbols and card frames I would recommend installing the following patches to MSE:

1st installer in this thread: http://mtg.pifro.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1422

1st installer in this thread: http://mtg.pifro.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=401&start=0

There is more funky templates out there if you look, but I haven't gone any further than this.

Rebecca Bonfield said:

Simon.  Interested in this though unsure if I will be able to make it.  After clicking on your link to Magic Set Edition do I just click on the top download link and then use?  I am technology illiterate.

[Thomas David Baker]

Yep, definitely interested.  I have found my cards that I did for YMtD II that never happened.  There are 24 cards, all Black.  The creatures are mostly Zombies but only one of the cards actually references Zombies.  They are largely graveyard-interacting.  I know I seem obsessed with the Graveyard but these were from long before Innistrad and the thusly-inspired Graveyard cube!  I think they are quite fun but not overpowered so I want to use them.

If anyone feels inclined to just skip black in the interests of color balance they should do so.

Not sure what the rest of my cards are going to be but I would kind of like to design some Red cards I don't hate.

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Okay that could work. If people want to design for a particular colour or two I think we can accommodate that.

I have about 40 new Bear cards that I made, but I think I'll keep those aside for now, don't want to overdo the joke :-)

[Thomas David Baker]

I still think of this set as being about Zombies and Wizards but I'm not sure why.  We talked about having 5 sets of Wizards one for each color.  Perhaps we could do: W - Clerics and Knights, U - Wizards and something, B - Wizards (Necromancers) and Zombies, R - Wizards and something, G - Druids and Bears (?)  I'm not sure how exciting actual tribal cards are but might as well share a little theme?  What color are Frogs?  Green?

[Dan Barrett]

Frogs - green/blue?

[Dan Barrett]

Finishing Tom's cycle:

U - Wizards and birds? Or Fish?

R - Wizards and warriors? Shamans? Berzerkers?

[Simon O'Keeffe]

Frogs so far have been G/B. With Kieran, Tim, and I independently all making black Frogs that hurt other Frogs, e.g.

Pond Scum - B

Creature Frog - 1/1

Sacrfice ~: Destroy target Frog

Swampcycling 2

I also had Bears as G/R, but with at least one bear for the other colours. We can always add in a couple of changelings to help support tribal.

In white we had quite a few Spirits, so consider them maybe?

To keep to the wizard theme I guess you could have Red as Shamans?

As for the other Blue creature type, I vote for Turtles :-)

[Kieran Symington]

Up for doing this again for sure. "Land matters" seems like a decent theme since there's probably a lot you can do with it. Other than that, definately think Turtle should be a tribe, and there's tons of art for regular fantasy-types like wizards, zombies, angels etc. but I really don't think there's enough artwork of anthropomorphic Frogs on the internet to have them be a tribe in an 8-man!