Magic the Gathering

Casual

Why Design Magic Cards?

By Andrew Wilson ⋅ November 25, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Wiz­ards of the Coast designs hun­dreds of cards each year, but that doesn’t quench people’s cre­ativ­ity for mak­ing new cards—in fact, it only gives peo­ple more inspi­ra­tion. If you’re any­thing like me, tons of other peo­ple across the Inter­net, many Fri­day Night Magic play­ers, or lots of peo­ple at kitchen tables across the world; then you’ve at some point been inspired with a Magic card design of your own.

In this arti­cle, I’ll answer the ques­tion, “What do I do with my card designs?” Pos­si­ble future arti­cles may include specifics on card design tools and for­mat­ting, tricks for design­ing bet­ter cards, and any other of a plethora of top­ics about the broad realm of mak­ing Magic cards.

Why Design Magic Cards?

Wiz­ards of the Coast knows what it wants to do with its cards. They release four sets each year, and each one is built for draft­ing and play­ing sealed deck, and is full of cards expected to be used in block and stan­dard, and pos­si­bly extended and legacy con­structed formats.

When you cre­ate a card, you can’t do any of those things with it. That’s a sad truth. You can’t bust your new awe­some cre­ation out of a Zendikar pack and play it in your draft deck. You can’t print out four copies, sleeve them up, and head off to Fri­day Night Magic. I think those real­i­ties alone pre­vent too many peo­ple from get­ting super excited about design­ing their own cards. Unless you won an Invi­ta­tional or got a job at Wiz­ards, you were out of luck.

For­tu­nately, peo­ple play Magic in a lot of dif­fer­ent ways. There are a few rea­sons peo­ple enjoy design­ing cards, and there­fore a few rea­sons to write about how to do so. But, I think the most com­pelling rea­son to both design and write about design­ing Magic is that you want to play with the cards. And so, with­out a way to play with your cards, what good is an arti­cle about design­ing cards? That’s why I’m going to cover a few for­mats where you just might be able to get away with sleev­ing up your cre­ations and bring­ing the beats.

Casual, Kitchen Table Magic

This is the first, eas­i­est option. Your ‘kitchen table’ may be in your game room base­ment, the lunch room at school, a table at your local card shop, or an actual kitchen table. The point is that there are no DCI num­bers, rank­ings, format-based card restric­tions, or tier one decks, and the rea­son you play is just to have fun.

‘The point is to have fun,’ though, also hap­pens to be one of the most impor­tant social con­tracts in all of Magic’s array of for­mats. Part of design­ing Magic cards is bal­ance, and that becomes all the more impor­tant in kitchen table Magic. If you want your friends to let you play with cards you made up, you need to show them that you’re cre­at­ing fair and bal­anced cards. Part of the fun of Magic can be find­ing bro­ken card com­bi­na­tions and abus­ing them in your deck, but when you design the cards that are in your deck, bro­ken com­bi­na­tions just make your friends hate you faster and destroy your cred­i­bil­ity when you want to intro­duce future creations.

Elder Dragon Highlander

In a lot of ways, EDH is like the kitchen table when it comes to design­ing your own cards. In fact, for some peo­ple the kitchen table is EDH. It includes the same social con­tract of hav­ing fun. How­ever, EDH is full of pow­er­ful spells, so there’s more lee­way in cre­at­ing a flashier, bombier card to put into your deck. Just make sure that’s it’s the type of card to gar­ner a, “Wow, cool!” type of response, and not a frus­trated gri­mace from your opponent.

You may even design your own gen­eral, but hav­ing that kind of con­trol over your col­ors and the abil­ity of the cen­tral card in your deck might be push­ing your friends’ col­lec­tive patience a lit­tle too far ?

The Cube

Just as EDH had a sim­i­lar­ity to kitchen table Magic, cube draft­ing has a sim­i­lar­ity to EDH. That is, they both are chock-full of bomby and flashy cards. Now, I have never cube drafted, and in fact I have a per­sonal grudge against cubes, but I’ll get to that in a moment. But, from what I under­stand, each player builds his or her own cube with dif­fer­ent goals. Of course, those goals tend to involve them and their friends hav­ing fun. So, when design­ing cards for your cube, bomby and flashy cards should be fine. In fact, crazy combo pieces should be fine as well. You might shy away from com­mon and weaker uncommon-style cards.

Any­one can draft any card from your cube, so your friends should be just as excited about just about any­thing you pull out of the hat… just as long as it’s not absurd or totally game-warping.

Repack Draft­ing

Huh? What’s repack draft­ing? Well, remem­ber when I said I had a grudge against cubes? That’s because I’d been ‘repack draft­ing’ for years before I’d ever heard of a cube or the con­cept became so popular.

While cubes tend to include extremely pow­er­ful cards and make for a dif­fer­ent style of draft­ing expe­ri­ence, what I call ‘repack draft­ing’ cre­ates a more typ­i­cal lim­ited feel, but with the diver­sity of all Magic’s expan­sions (or rather, all of them that I choose to include). Basi­cally I have com­mons, uncom­mons and rares in sep­a­rate sec­tions, with each sec­tion shuf­fled dis­tinctly. (Actu­ally, the com­mons are also sorted by color before being sorted.) When prepar­ing a draft, eleven com­mons, three uncom­mons, and one rare are pulled from their appro­pri­ate sec­tions (with­out look­ing at what the cards are, of course) to build a pack. Make enough packs for every­one involved, then draft as nor­mal: Rochester, Win­ston, nor­mal, or what­ever. Then at the end of the draft, sort the cards and put them back.

The cards included are just some of my favorite com­mons, uncom­mons and rares that might not have a place any­where else. Every draft is a new and unique blend of cards from all across Magic, but with­out the absurd power level and inter­ac­tions poten­tial of a cube.

As you can see, a repack draft col­lec­tion is a great for­mat for which to design new Magic cards. Com­mons, uncom­mons and rares of all vari­eties are all fair game, as they are equally acces­si­ble to every­one, and every style of card is expected, just as in a nor­mal set of Magic. Once again, you still want to avoid absurd and extremely over­pow­ered designs: crazy game-warping bombs can ruin any for­mat. Also note that rar­ity assign­ing is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant in this for­mat, as it’s the only one of the four I’ve listed where it actu­ally makes any dif­fer­ence. While putting a common-worthy design into an uncom­mon slot might only be slightly dis­ap­point­ing for the player who opens it, hav­ing com­mons in rare slots or rares in com­mon slots can have unfore­seen consequences.

Well, I hope you’ve enjoyed this first look at what you can do with your card designs. And next time you turn your friend’s dog or Gan­dalf the Grey into a Magic card, why not try sleev­ing it up?