Art Shuffle Inspiration
4/2/07
The second design challenge for the Great Designer Search was titled “Picture This” and here’s how they described it.
“During development, cards often get killed that open up slots. The lead developer then sends email out to all the designers asking them to design cards to fill the holes. These holes are as specific as they can be to ensure that the development team is getting as useful a list as possible. This week's challenge will be to fill ten holes. For our test today, we're assuming that these ten holes came late in the process. So late, in fact, that all the art is in. Your ten cards have to make use of the ten pieces of art assigned to the ten holes. Feel free to use any piece on any card but all ten must be used.”
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/designersearch/episode3
Here are the cards I created as I followed along with the contest for fun. I’ve listed the description of the cards they were asking for as well, so you can judge how closely I followed their guidelines.
White (uncommon): We need an answer to all the token making in the environment. Be subtle.
White (rare): We're looking for a weird Johnny-style enchantment
Blue (common): We need a sorcery. No card filtering or drawing. No bounce (aka returning cards to hand).
Blue (rare): We need a creature. Something splashy for Timmy.
Black (uncommon): Make an aura you want to put on your own creatures.
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Black (rare): Can be anything.
Red (common): Instant or sorcery. No direct damage or destruction (artifact or land).
Red (uncommon): Creature. Want a build around me for draft (aka something that will encourage players to go down a path or paths he or she wouldn't normally had they not drafted this card early; examples of this type of card are Lightning Rift, Mark of Eviction and Momentary Blink).
Green (common): Creature. Something that costs four or more mana.
Green (rare): Non-creature spell. Green's lacking in "wow" factor (aka something that will impress the player by how different it is).
So the point of the exercise was to see how well you filled holes in a set. I was really happy with how the cards turned out, although a few things stand out now as needing a bit refinement (Why would Militarized Zone’s ability restrict sacrificing tokens, if their converted mana cost is zero?) In fact I was so happy with how these turned out, I retooled one of them and planted it in Conquest. And another one was the basis for the design of an entire color in Conquest, (although the color is different than the card it’s on here.)
Which cards do you think were lifted from this list of ten and remade for Conquest?