Month: August 2019

Hey there! I’m Scott from the top four of last year’s Great Designer Search 3. Welcome back to another installment of Deadly Designs, where we usually talk about Magic card design from an outsider’s perspective… but today some big news hit, and we have to discuss it.

In case you missed it, Wizards dropped the most recent State of the Beta, and it’s a doozy. While there’s a lot of info in it, the most impactful for most people has been the announcements regarding Historic, the format on Arena where our old cards will be playable.

While there was some good news, including clarification that there would be ranked Historic, best of three, and more, there was one huge bombshell: starting in November, it will cost 2 wildcards to craft 1 Historic card.

Hey there! I’m Scott from the top four of last year’s Great Designer Search 3. Welcome back to another installment of Deadly Designs, where we talk about Magic card design from an outsider’s perspective.

Last time we used our powers of deduction to try and predict the mechanics in the upcoming Throne of Eldraine set. But this time I want to pose a question: is the upkeep step going extinct?

Paradox Haze says: “Uh, I hope not…”

First, you might be wondering two things: “why would you bother thinking about this?” and “who cares?”

So let’s take a look at both those questions, starting with part one, the inspiration behind this question: evidence of the upkeep step becoming extinct.

Hey there! I’m Scott from the top four of last year’s Great Designer Search 3. Welcome back to another installment of Deadly Designs, where we talk about Magic card design from an outsider’s perspective.

Last time we talked at length about Risen Reef, but this time I want to focus on the future, specifically the next set that’s coming out in the fall: Throne of Eldraine.

We’ve seen a lot of art from the set and heard that the inspiration behind it is “Grimm’s fairy tales meets Camelot,” but we still don’t know much about the actual mechanics. So that’s why today I want to take the hints that we’ve gotten and try to figure out what the cards in the set might actually do.

It might seem silly to try and guess the mechanics when they’ll just be spoiled in a few weeks, but as a design exercise it can still be fun. Even though we probably won’t guess right, perhaps the ideas we come up with could inspire some custom cards or sets of our own!

There’s two mechanics we can guess about, so let’s go ahead and start with: