Custom Magic And Power Creep

I’m fairly sure this is going to end up being the longest article I’ve ever written, and possibly will ever write, for Custom Magic Codex. The subject today, power creep, is a hot button issue in both canon and custom Magic. I’m not seeking to define power creep, or prove it as an inevitability for

Lessons From the Field

Field Test has been running for the past eight days, and already a lot has been gained from the process, even with a few days left in the event still. For my part, I made around 10-15 card changes in Animus Vox, and I know at least a couple other designers who have made comparable

How Not To Design Powerful Cards (ft. the Custom Magic Chatter podcast)

While I’ve loved writing articles here, I’ve been looking for new angles of how to explore other types of content creation for a while. As a result, I’ve created a podcast that will act as a companion to this blog, called Custom Magic Chatter. The podcast will be largely focused on magic theory while occasionally

Different Types of Custom Magic Projects

An issue that I think the Custom Magic community can often struggle with is the intense pressure that individuals experience to make projects that are bigger than a few cards. The general pipeline that I’ve seen is that people will join a community, start by designing individual cards, and slowly notice that most of the

Color Pie 101

The Color Pie is one of the most foundational concepts to Magic’s design as a game, and having a strong understanding of it is instrumental to designing cards well. While I think most players have a vague intuitive sense of it in some areas, if you haven’t put in the time to learn the more

Support Colors And Color Pairs (Part 1 of 2)

“If white is bad, why the hell did WU just win the world championship?” “Well, that doesn’t count, white was a support color.” I’ve gotten in a lot of stupid arguments about the balance of colors in Magic over the past few years, but very few of them have infuriated me as much as the

The Penelope Instinct

“Kill your darlings” is a very common piece of advice when it comes to writing or game design. Often you’ll have parts of your creation that you like, or that you remember working hard to create, but that are no longer serving their purpose, so you need to remove them for the health of the

Bogosort Designing: What and Why Not

Eventually I’ll get tired of clickbait titles, but today is not that day. For the many of you who are not familiar with Bogosort as a computer science/algorithm concept, I’ll drop an entirely unhelpful wikipedia link before giving it a basic summary: When writing sorting algorithms, there’s a lot of different ways you can optimize

Crafting A Common Skeleton

While everyone has different workflows that they prefer, I’ve noticed that for most new designers have more difficulty working on sets with less structure. It is really easy to get stuck, unsure what you need to design next or if you’ve made too many of a certain type of card. Typically, people will recommend the

The Power of Typed Nonbasics

For those unfamiliar with the term, a “typed nonbasic” is a nonbasic land that has one or more of the basic land types. This grants it the ability to tap for that land’s corresponding color of mana, which is not that powerful in its own right. Right? Honestly, that assessment is less wrong than my