NaCaDeMo, part 3

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

They say border color doesn’t matter in Magic, or in the great Northern forests. They lie like dogs.
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…

Coalition Wedding WUBRG Sorcery If you control a white-bordered permanent, a black-bordered permanent, a permanent you don’t own, and a blue permanent, you gain life equal to target opponent’s life total and draw cards equal to the number of cards in that player’s hand. Art direction: The art should show a wedding party, posing for a photo, in tuxes and frilly dresses - the guy from Alpha Stone Rain, nervously watching the sky, a recognizable white female character from the most recent set, a centaur as depicted on Hunted Horror, and Azami, Lady of Scrolls. The happy couple could be Baron Sengir and Shauku.

Border Patrol 1WU 2/2 Creature - Chihuahua Warrior 1W: Target creature gains protection from black-bordered until end of turn. 1U: Target silver-bordered permanent’s border becomes the color of your choice until end of turn. (The border colors are black, white, silver, gold, and pink.) They say border color doesn’t matter in Magic, or in the great Northern forests. They lie like dogs. Art direction: It’s a Mountie… but it’s a chihuahua. Should be easy.

Look! A Monkey! 4GU Sorcery Remove your hand, library, and graveyard from the game. Shuffle another Magic: The Gathering™ deck you own, put it on top of your library, and put a number of cards from the top of your library into your hand equal to the number removed from your hand. Repeat this process for your graveyard. Art direction: Two mages are dueling. One is distracted by a monkey; the other one is pointing at the monkey with one hand and grabbing a spellbook from his bag with the other. A spellbook is lying open, face down, as if it’s been thrown, next to the pointing mage.

Edibility BG Enchantment - Aura Enchant creature you control If enchanted creature would go to a graveyard from play, instead imprint it on Edibility, then attach Edibility to a creature you control. Enchanted creature gets +X/+Y, where X is the total toughness of creatures imprinted on Edibility and Y is the total toughness of creatures inprinted on Edibility. BG: Target creature not enchanted by Edibility that you control gains “Sacrifice creature enchanted by Edibility: Regenerate this creature.” BG, sacrifice enchanted creature: Gain one life for each card imprinted on Edibility. (As implied by the original flavor text for Grey Ogre, of course.) Have you ever noticed how modern templating inflates intuitive card concepts into Russian novel-length text boxes? Art direction: A chihuahua is stalking a marshmallow bunny. But wait! It, in turn, is being stalked by the legendary Duckbunny! WHICH HAS THE SHADOW OF SOMETHING WITH SHARP TEETH FALLING ACROSS IT! This picture will have to be a little smaller than usual, with the bunny hanging down over the type bar and the shadow falling across the card name.

Duckbunny 2RW Legendary Creature - Bird Beast 3/3 Capering — Duckbunny has haste, flying, trample, first strike, vigilance, and protection from silver-bordered. (You may caper or prance whenever the mood takes you.) Art Direction: NOTE: PINK BORDER ON THIS CARD. Duckbunny is a duck bunny. That is, it’s a huge bunnylike duck-thing, made out of marshmallows (you can make one yourself with a supply of bunny and chick Peeps and some sculpting chops). Tiny pink candy bunnies and ducks should caper around it, or prance. It is too majestic to be funny.

Coalition Wedding has much of the fetch-quest flavor of Coalition Victory, but then you get all of your opponent’s resources instead of winning outright. It has to be WUBRG for that reason. Border Patrol is blue because of (border) color changing and white for protection, just as it would be in regular Magic if you changed border colors, which is of course kind of novel. Look! A Monkey! is blue and green for whatever reason Research is; this is a card I’ve been wanting for all of the ten years I’ve been playing Magic. Your opponent looks away, and suddenly you’re playing with a different deck, but nothing else has changed. Edibility is black and green because it is life-and-death flavored, and does regeneration, life gain, vampirism, and creature buffing, all while conferring immense card advantage and setting up a cute little ecosystem on your side of the board. And Duckbunny is red/white because he’s pink, darn it! Pink!

2 Comments

  1. entirely safe and fun » Blog Archive » NaCaDeMo, part 4:

    […] Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump. Photo credit: ancawonka NO SMOKING — Braids hates it […]

  2. entirely safe and fun » Blog Archive » NaCaDeMo, part 5:

    […] Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump. We’ll need a bigger boot. Photo credits: scubadive67, anon@wikipedia. […]

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