The Great Cardsmith Designer Search - Stage 1: The Design Challenge

1235

Comments

  • edited October 2018
    6th place, gotta be better next time I suppose. Thanks for the feedback @bnew07. I agree with all your points, except that black also has land destruction. But, it could still have been mono-green. I could have sworn there were more sweepers at uncommon, but looking through them now, it looks like they're all at rare. Oh well.

    Also, thanks for your comments and feedback @ningyounk. Unfortunately, I did not have time to act on it yesterday.
  • edited October 2018
    Sorry @Ranshi922 better luck next time
  • @fiskerton

    You are correct that black does get land destruction, my mistake.
  • edited October 2018
    Well then. I got last place. This is fine. Everything is fine.



    (Go to 0:46 time code)
  • @Aggroman15 all the scores and feedback are available in the google doc I linked above
  • Congrats to everyone above me on the top 8, especially the top three! A lot of cool cards out of even this round.
  • edited October 2018
    @bnew07 thank you for the feedback! I have a bit of counterfeedback - I completely understand your grading, but I would like to mention a few things where I have other conceptions about the rules/color pie.
    To note: I am not against your gradings or for some reaosn upset about my scores, I just want to point out a few things that I may use later and don't want to be docked for.

    1) Valorous Strike - In Khans of Tarkir specifically, there were multiple cycles of cards which were monocolor but gave an off-color ability when you controlled a certain colored permanent; for example, Wandering Champion. This is why I felt it would be fine to have the card be able to be cast with only white mana.

    2) Arcane Rupture - this isn't a rules response, just a response; without the untapping of lands, the card is monored, as red can care about instants and sorceries and deal damage to creatures (Spite of Mogis).

    3) Soul's Confinement - This is a contentious one; you said this card could be done in monoblack, but just because both abilities are in black doesn't mean it can be printed in monoblack; some examples for this include most recently Ochran Assassin and Undercity Uprising I'm not saying it can't be done in monoblack, just that that assertion isn't always true.
  • @TheCenterOfTheUniverse

    1) I was quite unsure about how to evaluate that and looking back at the cycle you referenced I feel like those cards are minor bends (personal opinion, not WOTC verified), but probably okay for the reason you specified. I think Valorous strike is okay for the same reason that the Fate Reforged cycle was okay even though they were bends. Again, I could be wrong but this kind of effect is a pretty big gray area in general so I appreciate you pointing out a precedent that I forgot about.

    2) good point, you are correct.

    3) you are correct that cards that can be printed in monocolor are regularly printed as gold cards. The reason I made the scoring distinction for this challenge was to encourage everyone to justify making a gold card instead of a monocolor Card. For WOTC, they print enough cards that they can’t realistically make true gold cards that can’t be monocolor all the time (especially in Ravnica sets) but we aren’t limited by flavor considerations that they are and as such have access to considerably more design space. All in all, you are definitely right that just cause a card can be mono color doesn’t mean that it should /can’t be gold , but for this challenge I wanted to incentivize true gold cards that needed both colors.
  • @bnew07
    I had guessed that you wanted us to make actual gold cards instead of cheap monocolor cards like Justice Strike.
    Thank you for the response!
  • Well, it kind of sucks that I got last, but I appreciate your feedback and understand all the points that you made about my cards. I feel that I could have taken a lot more time to create these cards, as I just kind of said, "OK! I've came up with a cool concept. Now let's quick make a card and move on to other things!" So the cards were not thoroughly thought out, which made mistakes inevitable. I will try to take your advice and use it to make my cards better in the future! (Mostly by remembering to do things that I forgot to on these ones. I still feel kind of stupid because I didn't specify round up or down on River Hydra.) Anyways, thanks for the challenge!
  • I feel like it was silly and ballsy of me to try to include something that I made for another contest as this...
  • Dang. Well, good job to all, and especially those who moved on! I'm only sad I was busy enough to prevent joining in when this was going on. Maybe next time, if there is one, heh.
  • @Shadow29870, get on untap and join my draft
  • untap.in join my draft
  • I'm on the site. Where do I go?
  • ok. I am goint to start a new one bc this just filled
  • Where and how!?
  • untap.in look in mtg games and my draft should be therr
  • Wazzit called?
  • Its called GRN 29870
  • Nice job to all who entered and congratulations to those in the contest! I am honored to be competing with some of the best smiths out there.
  • @bnew07
    Wow, that was an impressive amount of feedback! I know we both realize that this is a learning experience for everyone (and you probably have it the hardest without a judging panel to assist you), but I think you will improve with your scoring as time goes on. As @DomriKade is an MtG judge--and out apparently, though I'm unsure about deservedly--I suggest you consult him as you continue scoring in the future, if for no other reason than to get a broadened perspective. I think you're tackling things in a good way, but it feels as though you're doing a little bit of the opposite here of what WotC does (though it might be appropriate) where they commend ingenuity/creativity the most, you appear to commend conservative cards that are very similar to existing card designs to a higher degree. Awesome job, nonetheless, I'm looking forward to future stages!

    Congratulations other entrants, and especially top 8!
  • @bnew07
    I was very impressed by how smoothly that challenge went =D You took that very seriously and I think that's partly why you have such a low drop-out rate, and such a high quality of entries. It is quite spectacular for something that demanding on the forum. I really like the 5-cards format and I'm really excited to see how it's going to progress, especially since there seems to be a lot of interest for this GCDS!

    Now, I don't usually do that but since it's going to be an ongoing challenge I wanted to give a small feedback on the challenge itself. Note that it's only my personal opinion of course. Here are a few points I wanted to raise:

    1) A big part of the original design challenge was to show you could design for each rarity. I was quite surprised to see it was an all-uncommon challenge. For future challenges, I hope we'll get to design for different rarities as well ^^ If a single-rarity challenge was happening again, may I suggest an all-Rare instead of all-Uncommon challenge? Uncommon is perfect at showing you know the subtle design rules, but it prevents bolder designs from happening, which is all the salt of design contests ^^

    2) I've always been a bit wary about score systems with points in grading Magic cards. I always thought it was too complex to grade with points, at it tends to have bad side effects:
    - It warps the importance of different aspects of designs. For instance, is having one typo really as important as making a multicoloured card that's actually monocoloured?
    - It ignores the interaction between the different elements. For instance, you can have a colour pie bend that's perfectly justified for some reason, but you will still lose points for it.
    - It ignores the overall quality of the entry. For instance, did you have a good mix of safe but clever cards vs. more original but pushing-the-boundaries cards.

    I don't know how other people feel about it but at least now you know how I think ^^ Obviously I'm entirely fine following the rules you set for your challenge, it's just for a matter of discussion.

    3) Is there anything planned for people elminated or who didn't enter originally for the next challenges? The interest for the contest seems to be pretty high and it's going to take months, so I'll drop the idea here: a small cup for participants outside the Top 8. I understand it's a lot of additional work, so if you're interested in the idea I would be willing to help judge the small cup so it gives you a minimal amount of additional work :)
  • @TheCenterOfTheUniverse
    WOTC really try hard not to do multicoloured cards that could be monocoloured. Ravnica is a special case because of the sheer amount of gold cards in it. But even then, I wanted to mention that both Ochran Assassin and Undercity Uprising were subtly multicoloured and wouldn't be done in monoGreen. That's because the interaction of fight + deathtouch is deemed too close to a kill spell for Green so it's not allowed (you can consider "have to be blocked by all creatures" as a weird fight effect.) MaRo stated multiple times that, even though both fight and deathtouch were in green, the combination of the two on the same card was not ;) http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/158049122108/could-green-have-a-11-death-touch-with-when-this
This discussion has been closed.