Robot Viking

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 [...]

For this edition of Crash Test Magic, I’ve put together a card inspired by an article in Discover Magazine that would probably require five pages of Oracle text and drive even Level 3 judges to drink.

It’s time for another round of Crash Test Magic. This week, we aren’t debating the merits of a fictional card design — this week, we’re going to build a deck.

Crash Test Magic returns with a vengeance this week with not one custom Magic card design, but a whole cycle of five cards. We’ve even created a new keyword: Cursed! See if you can break them, abuse them, create amazing combos or come up with some more card ideas using this mechanic.

After a bit of a hiatus, Crash Test Magic returns with a new hypothetical Magic card for you to break, abuse or otherwise form insidious combos with. Or you could simply discuss the pure genius that surely must be behind the design of Apocalypse Ink.

Our almost-but-not-quite-weekly Monday feature returns this week with a new fighter exploit for D&D 4th Edition. Is a combat power based on a skill check broken?

Crash test magic took a week off due to the holiday, but now it’s back. This week, we step away from Magic: the Gathering card ideas and take a look at a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons artifact called the Southern Blade. It can be very difficult to balance powerful magic items, especially when it’s [...]

The feature formerly known as “Break This Card” now has a new name: Crash Test Magic (thanks to qhartman for the suggestion that lead to me to the idea). With the new name, we are free to explore beyond card games, and since the number of tabletop games without some kind of magic in them [...]

Last week’s debut edition of Break This Card was a lot of fun, so we’re going to make it a regular feature. This week, I came up with a variation on serious burn that probably won’t result in any turn one kills (try your best to prove me wrong), but might be horribly broken all [...]

Last Friday, I posted a Magic card that I created myself based on the Forgotten Realms city of Waterdeep. Over the weekend, we realized the card was horribly abusable. Since talking about game design is one of my favorite things, I thought it would be fun to see what Robot Viking’s readers can do with [...]