#3smuth

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of the things you love, to obsess over details that distract you from the emotional core of what loving something really is. Sometimes we need a little extra help to shake all that off and get back to basics. After all, what are friends for?

My last couple challenges have been a little technical: I always feel like if I’m able to make you rethink your resources, or your expectations, or even your approach to design, that’s when I’ve done my job as a judge. But as important as those things are, design can’t be all about rethinking: it has to be about refeeling too. And who better to help us reconnect with the feeling that underpins all great design than our best friends.

The Goals (M.E.O.W.)

Mandatory: Design a nonlegendary creature card based around your* pet.

Encouraged: The best designs will be those that convey individual personality beyond just a species or creature type.

Optional: You are welcome to show off more exotic animals that you’re close to, but we’re just as excited to see your dog or cat.

Warning: Don’t forget the basics. Our focus is on emotion this week, but strong design is what will ensure your audience gets to feel it too.

*Don’t have a pet at home? Use a childhood pet. Your best friend’s pet. Your neighbour’s pet. Your aunt’s. Whatever critter you know that has burrowed its way into your heart, I want to see that connection. I want to feel it.

And very, very importantly, for this week: PICS PLEASE. Choosing art can be easy for once, just snap a cute pic of your furry (scaly, feathery, slimy...) friend for all to see. Just make sure to credit all artwork appropriately! Please and thank you!

What are you waiting for? Someone just gave you permission to show off your pets, so get to it! You know what to do!

[ @3smuth​ ]

I've been following you for years and I was never aware you spoke Turkish too. What do you mean about swallowing endings?

We have one late addition to our judges' examples this week:

For our example post this week, I bring you a couple of friends from my own household:

Sheltered Housecat

My cat, Logan, is a real handsome fellow. He was found abandoned, and ever since I took him in he’s been so grateful that he’ll put up with every method I’ve devised to annoy him. I wanted to represent that resilience with some kind of indestructible or recursion mechanic, and tying it to him finding a home seemed thematically appropriate. Mechanically I tried to play it a little safe with the cost relative to the power of a hard-to-answer aggressive one-drop, but it’s hard for me to gauge how playable the resulting card actually is.

Ravenous Whelp

My daughter’s new puppy, Taro, is still at the age that he’ll try to eat anything - small as he is, the tactic is surprisingly effective. The mechanics were straight from his personality: stealing whatever he can find, treating it as food, and biting at anyone foolish enough to try to stop him. Mechanically it’s powerful removal that when used as a three-drop leaves a window open to answer it, or can be used at 5+ mana to destroy something outright.

[ @3smuth ]

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BONUS: I wanted to make sure that all of our judges got a chance to join in this week, so meet a few more of our friends!

Maul Jester

@abelzumi‘s pup Liberty seems easily distracted, picking fights with squirrels and hounds, and chasing cats and birds out of its yard.

Noisy Lapcat

@mistershinyobject has Harry, a kitty that is hard to ignore and demands the full attention of everyone he brushes up against.

Curious Stray

Per tradition, we’re going to give a quick rundown of the elements of the set. I always recommend checking out Mark Rosewater’s existing articles on the overall design of the set: and as a bonus, take a peek at the individual design stories article. These will offer a lot of insight into routes that design considered and then avoided, or things they tried desperately to make work but couldn’t. We’ll cover the basics here, but there’s a lot more to it than will fit in a single blog post.

Mechanics

The named mechanics in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms are Dungeons, Classes, and d20. Each of these mechanics has their own flavour and mechanical limitations, which may or may not change with rarity. The dice-rolling d20 mechanic, for example, is limited to glorified coin flips at low rarities, offering only improved results for high rolls, while at higher rarities it’s allowed more flexibility; conversely, cards that trigger Dungeon effects are broadly limited to triggering only once per turn, regardless of rarity. Pay attention not only to what the mechanics do, but how they’re used.

Archetypes

The signpost uncommons of a new set always provide a lot of information about what the set is doing, and playing into the themes of a color pair - or overlapping the themes of two archetypes in their shared color - can be a great way to make a design feel like it belongs in the set. Some of these archetypes will overlap explicitly with mechanics in the set (WU & WB Dungeons, UR Dice), some will be traditional archetypes within their color pair (UB Evasion, RW Equipment), while still others will be interesting new themes unique to the set (BR Treasures, RG Pack Tactics).

Themes

Congratulations to our winners this week: @snugz, @starch255, and @teaxch!

Frenzied Jouster

This was my pick for best use of naming, with the overall name feeling reasonable and relating pretty directly with the mechanics. The mechanics themselves are reasonable too, and the whole package comes across as evocative enough that I can immediately picture the art for a card like this. If I had one little nitpick, I wish the last ability triggered on attacking alone - it's not alphabetically necessary, but it's the way that other attack triggers on exalted cards have been structured. Overall though, I think this was my favourite this week.

Quartz Sphinx

I actually had this slot set aside for my favourite use of named counters, but nobody wound up using that tool: instead, I picked this one for its clever use of "just beneath" being applied in a slightly new way. Admittedly, the rate on this one is a ways off - it's powerful, repeatable removal on an evasive threat, which demands probably a couple more mana to keep the ability as it stands now. Regardless, the fact that you literally get to insert the card anywhere you like within an opponent's deck just tickled me so much, and even feels a bit Sphinx-y: choosing a number feels like a riddle, trying to figure out how far away you should place the card to keep the opponent from simply writing it off.

Illithid Ceremorphosis

Succeeding on this challenge without using the card's name is especially tricky, and doing it in such a concise design is similarly impressive: but most impressive is the fact that the design itself feels pretty darn cohesive. The combination of convoke and jump-start on a spell that creates lots of tokens is genuinely intriguing, since the first cast helps ramp up the second. Squid Wizards (with flying) are admittedly a little silly, but the overall design seemed very reasonable to me. If I had one nitpick, it's that the tokens are able to convoke for the blue in the spell's cost, but not the green - it feels like a slight miss, but admittedly it would almost never matter either way.

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Check back in tomorrow for our runners-up!

Congratulations to our winners this week: @deg99, @partlycloudly-partlyfuckoff, and @reaperfromtheabyss!

Multiclass Champion

It's a little surprising that the set didn't contain at least one rare build-around card for Classes, so I think its inclusion here makes a lot of sense. I think the trinket text callback to the party mechanic that it shares a Standard environment with is cute, and while White doesn't get a lot of mana fixing, Runeforge Champion definitely suggests that it can access it for things well within its wheelhouse, like enchantment subtypes. The power/toughness ability trying to count only differently-named Classes is awkward because there's no clean way to template it, but a version of it that simply adds up class levels probably isn't too unreasonable with comparable stats.

Alchemist's Prize

I'm not sure what the flavour of this particular design was supposed to evoke, but I admit that there's more to Faerûn than I'm immediately familiar with. This design is a solid dungeon payoff with an aggressive slant, however being focused in red makes it require quite a bit of help to make use of - which is probably useful for balancing what is otherwise a powerful, resilient, and evasive threat. I think there's a chance the ability wants to check whether you completed that dungeon rather than just that you've generally completed any, since completing dungeons can be very quick (and profitable) for an aggressive deck to do - having the threat recur once every four ventures feels closer to something like Arclight Phoenix, which has a similar statline to this and is already pretty powerful.

Arcane Delver

I really enjoyed this design, providing an avenue for consistent once-per-turn venturing that still feels reasonable when you're able to get more than that out of it. The first ability feels immediately evocative of a wizard that prefers adventuring to being cooped up reading dusty books, and the second ability is a powerful payoff for committing to doing so. I do think the second ability should probably use Ellywick Tumblestrum's "for each differently named dungeon" template, both because tracking total dungeon completions is trickier (remembering how many times you've already completed a dungeon when this gets played late is harder than remembering which dungeons you've completed), and because capping the ability at drawing three cards sounds awfully powerful already.

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Thanks for all the submissions this week, I enjoyed getting to see your takes on one of my favourite sets in recent memory!

You Happen Upon a Design Challenge

With the release of Adventures in the Forgotten Realms once again lining up conveniently with our schedule, we are looking for missed opportunities, untapped potential, or clever designs that you feel were missing from the set. AFR was revolutionary in at least a couple of ways, which always means that some amount of the exciting space for the set wound up going unrealised.

The Goals (M.E.O.W.)

Mandatory:  Design a card that could have appeared in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. Use only mechanics from the set or those that are evergreen.

Encouraged:  The most successful designs unite solid design principles with the unique tools and goals of the set.

Optional: You don’t need to use any of the named mechanics from the set, as long as your card feels like it belongs within the set mechanically and flavourfully.

Warning: Be mindful of how the set uses its tools and mechanics, and how much a single card can do to serve, change, or undermine those themes.

The top-down nature of this set should provide lots of space for top-down designs, but the innovative mechanics should also provide a good foundation for bottom-up designs as well. I’m hopeful that we’ll see a number of strong designs coming from both directions.

Once again, the full set is visible here, so be sure to look through it as you’re working on your designs for this week. As always, if you have any further questions about this week’s challenge or the expectations for you, feel free to drop us a line.

[ @3smuth​ ]