You’re a Designer, Harry! #13 – A Vanilla Lot, Eh?

Welcome to another installment of You’re a Designer, Harry!. I know last week that I said I was going to explore designs for legendary creatures (Read: four-color commanders) and planeswalkers. Even though I know it’s a good idea to get the mechanical identity along with most, if not all, of the mechanics designed before individual card designing began; I still wanted a fun break from the usual aspects of the set we were focusing on. Despite the possibility of time waste as well as having more difficulty designing without that mechanical backbone there, I believed that we could at least gain something from the effort, even if it’s not the most efficient way to go about designing the set in it’s current position.

So, it all sounded good in theory to go down this refreshing, not-so-efficient path; but once I got down to try to design some legendary creatures to fit into their respective factions, it felt wrong to decide on some set of abilities and for that to feel correct within the context of the whole set. Especially when I’m trying to determine what a legendary creature from a faction all about vanilla creatures would be like. And I’m not even sure which faction should be the vanilla creatures one (actually, I’m only a tiny bit not sure. Oh, right. Read on to learn what in tarnation’s going on here dealing with the “vanilla faction” thing I’m talking about).

From Outside the Game #5-Commanding my Past

I am hanging around in Toys From the Attic, my local game shop( LGS), waiting for a tournament to begin. I shop there fairly often and know the owner pretty well, but do not often attend tournaments and only know some of the other players by sight. I am killing time standing off by myself when two of the players pull out big decks and start shuffling. One of them notices me watching and says “We’re playing EDH, want to join in?” “Thanks but I have not gotten around to building a deck yet.” He smiles and goes back to the game while I stand by myself thinking. I know what EDH is, I read Bennie Smith’s article first thing every Friday, Sheldon Menery’s nearly as often and SwordstoPlow as well, yet I have never played a game. I started a deck once, but gave up after less than an hour. “That looks fun” I think as they play “why haven’t I built a deck yet?”

Thran Utopia #19: An idea Wort redoing