Robot Viking

In the middle of a Cube draft the other week, I had a weird brainstorm for a new Magic mechanic. At first I called it, “Ghost Card,” which is fine as a working title, but ultimately too close to a terrible Bill Cosby movie. The idea is to give a card an advantage by making [...]

Inspired by Lovecraftian horrors that inspire fear at their cosmic might and utter loss of sanity at their malevolent horribleness, Unstable Arithmetic is another way to overcome the inherent badness of Auras in Magic.

Some months ago, we started work here on a “pretend” Magic set. Work on the unnamed set stalled for a while, but now it has a name and I think it’s time to get back to work.

The fine folks at Rite Publishing clearly decided that Super Genius Games’ time thief was too good an idea to be used for just one class, so they’ve introduced Secrets of the Taskshaper. The taskshaper is a a hybrid class with all kinds of proficiencies and skills.

I’ve been following along with Magic’s Great Designer Search 2 — the eight finalists have some really cool ideas in their sets, but it turns out executing those ideas with Magic’s mechanics is harder than it looks. It’s been tough here at the RV too, as we’ve tried to find a good military themed mechanic. [...]

As Magic’s Great Designer Search 2 surges along without us, we can continue making our own cards for the hypothetical Robot Viking Magic set. Mastery of the Mind seems simple (and powerful) enough. What I want to discuss is the proper costing of this card.

I’m under a bunch of work deadlines today and won’t have time for a proper post, but here’s a few quick ideas for mechanics for our hypothetical Magic set, for those who’ve been involved in that.

The Robot Viking entry into Magic’s Great Designer Search 2 passed muster, so we’re on to the second round (it’s not quite as exciting as it sounds). The third round requires that entrants create their own Magic set, based on a new world that will bring the card designs to life. We’ve got an interesting [...]

What if a card created counters that didn’t actually do anything? You’d have to rely on other cards to make those counters function. The real twist: those counters don’t always do the same thing. That’s the concept we’re exploring with this edition of Crash Test Magic.

I’ve had this card idea kicking around in my head ever since Grand Prix D.C., when I had to take Gallows Road to get to the convention center. I immediately decided it would be an awesome name for a Magic card, and would naturally be a land. But what would it do?

It’s been a long while since we had an edition of Crash Test Magic. Conjecturing about hypothetical Magic cards seems like a fun way to pass an afternoon, so here we are: a card that doesn’t exist. But if it did, could you make a broken combo or brutally efficient deck out of it?

The sweet Sliver Premium Deck Wizards of the Coast recently released got me thinking about those weird polygenomic critters. A lot of Slivers have already been designed, using most of the basic keywords in Magic, but no one’s made a Sliver using one of the most popular current mechanics: Cascade.

Crash Test Magic (where we design and test new spells, cards or features for our favorite games) has been away too long. Don’t call it a comeback — this new 4E monster power will make even low-level minions into a serious threat.

All the excitement over Magic’s newest set (Zendikar, if you’ve been pointedly looking away the last few months) and the way it is heavily land-focused got me thinking about other ways you could link cards to land. What if the creatures could actually live on your lands? The result is not so much a card [...]