Now is the time of year where the old clan gathers, usually in Phoenix, for some Spring Training action, along with Rock Band, socialization and sitting around in a property that could pass for a cult complex. Sadly, with a vacation balance of -14 hours, and a Sunday - Saturday rental preventing a weekend barnstorm, we had to pass on going this ( Read more... )

When Conflux came out, I thought "what wacky in-theme thing could I do that Wizards wouldn't dare?", to which the answer was "Hey, let's make every non-land card multicolor". I started work on that and had to push up the production schedule suddenly when the first thing they leaked... was an all-gold set. Sigh. The first couple cards spoiled had ( Read more... )

This year was a little weird. Since Wizards isn't releasing a "third" set in the traditional fashion, I didn't have a lot to go on. I couldn't try to guess what they would do, and since they set it up as a 2-set block, they closed off a lot of design space ( Read more... )

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/usnat07/judge

Another year, another 165 card set exploring the theme of the year's block ( Read more... )

And so it ends. The final challenge - create all the commons for one color in a 180 card expansion set (so 11 cards) and an appropriate rare for the prerelease card ( Read more... )

My other Magic duties and lack of internet access at Worlds meant a delay on getting this one done. Still did it in a bit over a day ( Read more... )

This week, Un-cards! Almost no other restrictions, except that they had to be multicolored and rare. You couldn't repeat a color combination. Oh, and now you need names, flavor text and descriptions about the cards.

Desiging Un-cards is great fun.

( cards, only insane )

This was a great challenge and a lot of fun. It forced me into top-down design mode and I pretty much had to come up with entirely new cards ( Read more... )

Test #4 got released. In it, the designers were randomly assigned 1 cycle each of rare, uncommon and common. At least 1 had to be tight and 1 had to be loose. Then, at most 50 words to talk about each cycle.

I got out my trusty die, and randomly assigned myself instants, creatures and enchantments.

( More cards behind the cut )