entirely safe and fun

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week’s challenge was to follow up on some designs deemed promising in previous challenges; the judges were trying to gauge applicants’ ability to build on existing work. We were given eight cards, and eight sets of designer notes (check out the article for the details) indicating the direction that a hypothetical development team would provide for additional cards. I’ll present my work in the order that the challenge asks for, and add my comments to each card in green. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 4’ »

The rainy season has finally gotten started in earnest here in California. Punam and I took a jaunt down the coast to Santa Cruz yesterday and were surprised at the fact that there were just a few people in the Burrell School tasting room, and no one at all on the wharf, in any of the restaurants. A small party of local teens rolled up to pick up some clam chowder, and that was it. We ate crabs in the cold rain, with no human presence other than two guys behind the counter, and Madden and Michaels on a tiny TV in the crab stand. M&M were describing the Doom That Came Upon Philadelphia. My fantasy team has Philadelphia as a defense, and I had carelessly left the victorious Colt’s Joseph Addai on my virtual bench as he had his best game to date, so the Doom was not pleasant company. But Punam is cute, the crab guys were nice enough, and the crab was fresh and tasty.

Despite the fact that it’s crab season, we had those tasty decapods entirely to ourselves because our neighbors couldn’t risk getting wet. Now, I will concede that rainy California is not as nice as sunny California. But an inch of rain and 60°F is hardly like the Yukon blizzard of “The Fatal Glass of Beer” (”It ain’t a fit night out, for man or beast! [blast of snow to face]“). Only one conclusion is available to this investigator: Californians are highly soluble.

I leave the investigation of their paradoxical, constant immersion in pools, hot tubs, and the Pacific to my collaborators.

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week, in the Great Designer Search, we’ve been challenged to create cards for the Un- sets — sets of humorous non-tournament-playable cards, traditionally in silver borders rather than the usual black or white, with fun, silly effects not usually available in regular Magic. They were to be multicolor rares, five of them, all with different color combinations but representing all five colors. Asking us to design non-regular cards is kind of like cheating. This is much harder than last week, certainly, and I don’t think I’ve succeeded on as many of my designs. That said, I’m very happy with a couple — Look! A Monkey! is a card I’ve wanted for years, and Edibility is my comment on the increasingly verbose nature of rules text for simple, intuitive operations (Un- sets are usually pretty meta, so this would be the place). I like the idea of the Border Patrol and of pink-bordered cards, but if it hadn’t been for the multicolor restriction placed on the designs, I’d totally have cracked open the “sixth color of Magic” design space for Pink, with bunnies and ducks and ponies and maybe elephants. There’s a little of that flavor in the pink-bordered Duckbunny, which is about the tenth swing I took at the problem of expressing Pinkness, but I’m still not really satisfied. The rules this week called for printable names, rather than development names, and art descriptions. The latter will be following each card’s text… Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 3’ »

The first installment of this series, in which I play along at home with the Great Designer Search, is here. Card designs are after the jump.

In this installment of the Great Designer Search, contestants were challenged to create ten cards to fill ten very specific holes in a set design. Furthermore, those designs had to work with art that had already been completed for the killed cards. The rules did permit designers to shuffle the art around among the cards. Fitting the designs to art was really hard, and I’m not sure that I did very well on it. To see each card with the art I selected, click the card’s name. I’ve saved my defense of some of my choices for the 150-word statement allowed the designers. In advance, I’d like to say that the Forms are my favorite two designs, and could be the seeds of a megacycle with old favorite Form of the Dragon. Form of the Child, in particular, is the result of a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time: how little mana can be charged for the effect “You win the game,” and how easy can the the concomitant requirements be? It is meant to be an ultimate high-wire act of deck design, and an homage to two great cards in Magic history, Form of the Dragon and Little Girl. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 2’ »

It looks like the scandal of incumbency, while still going strong, did take a stiff punch to the gut with today’s elections. To pick out three Senatorial elections that made me especially happy:

The people of Pennsylvania are double winners today, turning Beltway embarrassment Rick Santorum out onto the cold streets of the Capitol District in favor of the un-re-electable Bob Casey Jr. The second win for Mr Casey’s new constituents will come in six years, when they get another freshman. Kudos to the residents of the Keystone State! I can’t bring myself to congratulate Casey, as literally any warm body could have defeated Santorum this year. I do not think it a great exaggeration to say that even if the Pennsylvania Democratic party had exhumed the worm-gnawed corpse of the late, great (and wealthy beyond corruption) John Heinz and run it around the state, Weekend at Bernie’s-style, Santorum could not have beaten it.

The Senate is just like high school in many ways. For instance, frequently absent former Senator Mike DeWine, the Republican from Ohio, has incurred expulsion for his repeated offenses. Congratulations to the newly-promoted Congressman Sherrod Brown, apparently so diligent in DC that he hasn’t had time to get his website re-designed since about 1994.

My favorite story so far: Missourians have done themselves proud by booting Jim Talent after just four years! Most electorates are content to wait six or more, but the people of the Show Me State exhibited real industry in electing Democrat Claire McCaskill. McCaskill succeeds to a seat that Missourians wanted, just four short years ago, to see occupied by Zombie Mel Carnahan. Well played, Ms McCaskill!

The American people would gladly have paid to see Senatorial proceedings involving Zombie Mel Carnahan and the corpse of the late, great John Heinz, by the way. Could be one way to fund Social Security for a few more years, just sayin’.

As for me, well, I’ve blogged before about my feeling of disenfranchisement at not having a viable alternative candidate to the strongly statist senior Senator Dianne Feinstein. As expected, she’ll be heading back to Washington — looking a little better in my eyes for not being her opponent, the alternately risible and terrifying Dick Mountjoy — along with the… mostly unobjectionable… Anna Eshoo, Silicon Valley’s Congresswoman. My only objection to Eshoo, besides antics like enlarging the power of the executive, is her decade and a half of incumbency. For a variety of reasons, I think that objection is fatal, but things could be worse. She could be entrenched and objectionable, right?

Update 8 Nov 2006: Freshman Mania is spreading! It’s not just for elected politicians anymore – Donald Rumsfeld is being turned out too. Way to serve your country, Mr Rumsfeld! I can finally salute you.

(card designs after the jump)

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and while I’d love to participate, I have this job, which takes up about half of my day each day, yadda yadda. It’s not like I have a novel that’s bursting out of me at this point. And anyway, what I admire most about NaNoWriMo isn’t the torrent of mostly cruddy books that result – it’s the expansion of the do-it-yourself ethos to media of which we normally consider ourselves mere consumers. As an old punk, I can hardly stand against the DIY tide as it rises to its annual peak. My outlet: The Great Designer Search, being held by the Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: The Gathering. In brief: The most ingenious feature of Magic is that new cards are released about three times a year, guaranteeing Wizards a generous stream of income and satisfying players by giving them effectively a new game to play every few months. Designing so many new cards that are fun is very difficult, and a position on the Magic design team is widely regarded among those who follow games as wildly desirable, a pinnacle of the profession. So, it’s not a Tom Sawyer fence-painting thing if they offer a design job as a prize in a contest. They’ve done so, and fifteen people are in the finals. The competition among them is playing out on the Web for our enjoyment, with a new design task being assigned to the candidates every week or two. Given the level of passion many players develop for the game, and given the high number of smart people who follow it, the Great Designer Search has attracted a large number of people who are playing along at home in a sort of National Card Design Month. I’m in! By the way, if you’ve given this a shot and want to put your results up somewhere, and they won’t fit into a comment, let me know (in a comment); I’ll host anything reasonable. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo’ »