2024 in Cycles | Ongoing Project | Week 10 +11 / 52

Designs were intentionally left simple and at common/uncommon power level. Greyfin Shark actually was an older design I came up with around three years ago but then suddenly remembered when trying to think of a fitting fish design for this „cycle“.

I think my favorite card this week was the one that I came up with first: Hunting Cheetah. I've been a fan of this type of evasion for red ever since Gingerbrute, and exert works just fine both as a balancing tool as well as for flavor reasons.

@ZephyrPhantom; Big thanks for the feedback! Agreed with Artificial Landscaping probably being a bit too bendy for Standard but too slow for Modern and above – it'd most likely see most play in artifact-themed Commander decks.

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Week 03: card & board games

As it's probably rather obvious, this „cycle“ was based on my entry for the current CotW contest. Since I started with an enemy-colored design, I chose to do all five cards this way.

Straight Flush is one of those designs, that feels quite simple but turns into a messy word soup when translated into a card. I do remember there exists a mechanic directly counting consecutively increasing mana values, but I really couldn't remember it from the top of my head (really sorry!) and didn't really have the time to look it up.. Snakes and Ladders is a bit weird as it's directly representing the entire game rather than just a part of one – which is why I decided to turn it into a world enchantment.

I think my favorite design this time around is a tie between Go To Jail and The Joker, the latter a design I definitely expect to show up in real Magic at some point in the future.

Week 05: dice rolls

Since the two last week's were tied together by flavor, I wanted to go with a mechanical theme again for this one. And since I had fitting designs in two weekly contests already, I decided on dice rolling.

Since this week's „cycle“ was supposed to only contain monocolored cards, I dropped the from Forgotten Past's cost – to be honest, I actually do prefer Backgrounds to be monocolored for the most part, so this fits nicely. Design note: The commander receives the coin flipping ability on ETB, so even if the Background gets removed, it'll still work. Originally, I thought about designing cards using die rolls as well as coin flips – but in the end, I already ended up with five dice rolling concepts I wanted to use, so there was no need to do coin flips anymore. Yaris, Fiery Gamber still caring about coins is a small nod to this.

My favorite design this week is Blessing in Disguise for sure though. I like the concept of cards caring about specific numbers you roll on any dice rolls, and the way this card balances itself is quite funny to me. (Like getting unlucky ona d4 is much more common than with a d20, but you only get a much smaller token in compensation as well.) Only wish I had an idea for what to do with the artwork though. Didn't have any specific art direction in mind and my random searches didn't really end up with something that really clicked with me.

Update

So, as you might have realized there was no update here for a while. Basically I had two very busy weeks – but thankfully I managed to come up with some designs nethertheless, I just didn't have the time to add the cards into MSE let alone write some comments. But now, it's finally time to catch up again!

Since I don't want to dump all cycles at once (especially since this would mean I'd have to write all comments at once^^), I'll drop one cycle every one or two days till I'm caught up again. Start post will get updated once I'm done, no point in doing that every single time.

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Week 07: commander deck — Rakdos

This week's cycle on its own actually doesn't follow the initial rules for this project, but is rather part of a five week „mega cycle.“ It was inspired by my entry for the Multiple Card Challenge (which was helpful as it meant I only had to come up with two additional cards), basically each of the five weeks will feature a potential commander for a two-colored deck and four cards for the 99. Some design guidelines for each of the five weeks:

• If possible represent all rarities between the five cards.
• If possible use different card types for the non-commander designs.
• Try to showcase both colors in a balanced way.
• Try to not make the designs feel too forced and designed purely for the deck, giving them different flavors or similar.

For this week's Rakdos deck I gave myself the additional restriction of doing different types of tokens for each card.

As melono rightfully pointed out Incubator tokens might not have been the best choice for Matgenu, Living Oil itself – ironically it actually wasn't at first but got changed last minute when I remembered the Incubate ability and wanted to reduce the word count. Also yeah, the token is using the wrong template as I don't have the one I'd need (if it's even out there already – I'm seriously behind updating my templates..).

Charted Hillscape is (obviously) meant to be part of a cycle.

I remember hainvg some trouble deciding on the stats with Sanguine Engulfment, the card changed from instant to sorcery CMC2 to 3 and rarity several times.

My favorite design for this week is my take on a planeswalker Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar: I like how Jafok, Extraplanar Cook by itself uses Food tokens in a more agressive way – and I totally love the token artworks I found for them

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Week 08: Spirit Island (published by Greater Than Games)

This week's „cycle“ contains five top down designs based on the game Spirit Island after we gifted its second expansion to our son for his birthday. The game plays on an island invaded by a colonizing force – and each player chooses an island spirit to drive them off. Each player has abilities you can draft from cards, except each spirit has a different set starting hand plus some extra abilities / rules tied to this spirit alone similar to Vanguards. If you don't know the game and have to option to test it – give it a try, it's awesome! But I guess it's time to stop sounding like a board game salesman and move on to the card designs, I guess

I had to do a card for Shroud of Silent Mist since it's the spirit I played with over the weekend. I know dividing by three is rather unusual in MtG, as you'd probably guess it's taken directly from the original and I liked it as starting off point for the „three-theme“ I ended up with. It might play better without it though (it'd obviously be stronger, but strength isn't always everything).

I actually changed my chosen spirit for the blue card when that design didn't really come together in the end, but kept one of its abilities for Ocean's Hungry Grasp. While its first ability therefore doesn't really make as much sence as reference as it'd have been for the original choice, I still like it quite much.

Grinning Trickster Stirs Up Trouble (all of these names are original, btw^^) is more of a flavor than purely mechanical translation – might be why it's so clean (even if still quite wordy thanks to the reminder text xD).

My favorite design in the end might be the spirit my son played with over the weekend: Starlight Seeks Its Form. In the game it doesn't have any specific rules attached to it by default compared to the other spirits, but rather allows for an insane amount of abilities to choose from allowing you to unlock some of them during the game. Obviously my card version is different as you make all choices before the game starts, but the „build your own spirit“ concept imho shines through nicely nethertheless and it for sure makes for a unique commander concept.