Card of the Week Contest #288: Sweet & Simple

spazlaz: In my opinion these are two faces of only one card so i would not allow to mention "Trample". An 8/8 for 3 mana doesn't really need Trample anyway.

shiftyhomunculus: So you have the choice between paying 5 mana for a 4/5 or 4 mana for a 4/5 Trample + free Helix ?

@niridulian: 10/10 seems a bit strong considering you can play it with this. spazlaz's 8/8 looks terrifying enough already. ^-^

Flowering Meadow
Basic Land Creature - Plant
Centuries after the death of the Verdant King, the meadows still bloomed over his long-buried tomb.
0/2

No rules-text here, your honor!

EDIT: Damn it, 2wb ! You ninja'd me by literal seconds.

Izzet Electrofreak 
Creature - Human Wizard
"The secret here is more power! So give me some!"
-Magister Essen.
2/3

Lol this contest made MSEers so angery. I think i will modify my list of challenges for if i win one day because it surely will make you way more angery as it is right now.

Tesagk: No it's not about trolling. I just planned challenges that would ask you to focus on stuff that's usually not so important to MSE users. The problem is that now i notice that it would push us to create cards that will probably never be played (or are just not playable at all). Today i see that designing cards that will never be played is a major frustration for everyone so i'll just avoid asking for this if i have to propose a challenge.
(For example one of my ideas was "Design any card but intentionally make its rule text as badly worded as possible. It must still be understandable by a beginner player and its properties (effects, targets, etc) must not be ambiguous.". I just blinded myself into thinking that anyone would be happy to participate into any challenge regardless if it's pointless or not.)

2wb Dang it, I should have put a next to it. I was mostly just pointing out the hilariously close timing on our posts. I'm actually thinking of replacing my entry because, as you point out, I would need to rewrite the comp rules (and because it's stupid broken.)

arthurxiv The thing about contests like this one is that they basically design your card for you unless you try to cheat the rules. There really is only so much design space for vanillas - scratch that, there's only so much interesting design space for vanillas. Vanilla cards are deck filler. Basically, if we were playing strictly by the rules, there'd be something like three submissions and then everyone would lose interest. It's like going to a cooking competition and being told that they want you to make dry toast.

Much like actual card design, contest design demands a minimum of 'oh, I'm so very clever!' prompts¹. And "make me a vanilla" is very much an "I'm so clever!" prompt.

¹ Unlike some people around here, I think 'oh, I'm so clever!' cards have their place. The real issue is that we're all dumber than we think we are. The one part of NWO that I fully agree with is that board states should be as transparent as possible. And, honestly? In most cases, card designs are as clear as mud. And 'clever' designs tend to be even worse.

One thing you have to realize: most of the people here don't like writing flavortext .

Hmm, that’s interesting. I personally find enjoyment in writing flavor text when the text box has room and need for it.

Flavor is a huge part of card design, so writing decent flavor text can be really quite important. I know it can be difficult (at least for me), but it shouldn’t be discounted.

burntsquirrelman Yea, I’m with ya.

Seeing as this challenge is (as expected) quite controversial and has sparked a quite civil discussion (which I'm really glad for, btw – I love this community ) over these past few days, I decided to also give my two cents and kind of give a behind the curtains view of my thought process on this as well as other challenges.

As most of you probably know, I normally send around the PMs asking for the new challenges every Sunday to the current leader(s) as well as runner-up(s) in the active poll (there are some exceptions when one user is clearly in the lead by a landslide and sends me a message first as they won't be available over the weekend or something). On Monday the current challenge and poll are closed and the new challenge gets set up – which first means „cleaning up“ the challenge a bit. In most cases this just means adding some links and references (like I here added the link to the official vanilla definition) or cleaning up some wording, sometimes I add or remove some minor restrictions or additions to the challenge (most obvious example would be when a challenge repeats itself I add the restriction to not reuse an older entry from its previous iteration(s)) – and sometimes I do indeed flat out reject a challenge.

Please keep in mind this happens only very frequently (I can only remember on such challenge, but I'm pretty sure there was a second one I rejected but just cannot remember right now) and if possible (a.k.a. unless I read the challenge only right before setting everything up) I try to contact the user and ask for a replacement – and also and obviously, my own personal taste is not a factor for rejecting a challenge or not (I did mention a few times in the past when I didn't like a specific challenge) .

So now, to be completely honest (as I already told @niridulian when I sent my normal „congratz“ after they had indeed won last week's poll) this was indeed a challenge I did ponder about potentially rejecting at first for the reasons already mentioned by some. It's obviously very different from our normal challenges, and the design space for vanillas is (obviously) limited. Still I decided to not reject this challenge after all because:

• Vanillas can be fun and interesting. We have had two vanilla CotW winners I can think of and cards like Infinity Elemental (to a minor degree) or Yargle, Glutton of Urborg (to a much bigger degree) have made quite the stirr in the MtG community as a whole.
• There are some ways to tackle this challenge „normally“ be using interesting stats, cool flavor, or meme entries..
• ..yet you can kind of „cheat“ the system instead by playing with unique mana types, land creatures (Dryad Arbor is a vanilla as well after all), or similar.

So while I totally agree this challenge being very different, completely understand why some dislike it, and definitely agree challenges like this shouldn't become the norm in the future, I think it is a very unique challenge to have for once – so I greenlit it and don't in fact regret doing so There are some quite nice entries out here already and we frankly have had challenges with a much smaller turnout in the past.

PS: I hope you don't mind me pointing you out arthurxiv, but this might be a good example to finsh things off:



This for example is a challenge I would indeed have rejected as it's point is basically to „design any card and be bad at the wording“ – whereas the goal of these challenges in the end always is supposed to be ending up with cards that WotC might/could print in some way. The card might only work in an Un-Set or even only work as a gimmik promo, but still.

Hope you all don't mind my little ramblings (and some of you might even find it interesting?) – this text kind of ended up being much longer than originally planned

Another possibility for this challenge would have been to make Universal Automaton but without the Changeling ability and adding each type manually in the type bar.

Roll Safe Think About It

Right, I remember that challenge. (I won it!) But I think the current challenge is currently a subset - and the least interesting subset - of most challenges. Every entry in this challenge would work for your challenge, or the "ten words or less" challenge... et cetera.

Alseid Steppe
Land Creature — Plains Nymph
1/1