this card is practically identical to Outlaw Shooter. I think there should be more Alchemists, especially since there's enough artwork to support it, maybe redesign the card with pressure counters?

Since it needs to be pointed out again, this card isn't "in" the set. Check out the skeleton. It has the cards that are "in" the set. The rest of the cards in the file are ideas being bounced around.

Also, I don't believe that the art should dictate card design. Any steampunk/cowpunk art we might find on the internet wouldn't have anything to do with our flavor at best and would be disjointed and chaotic at worst. I highly doubt we'll find many, if any, artworks that are appropriate for the set.

Is there some way that myself and the main Design group can discuss this live over the weekend? We would need to determine what the actual end goal of the set is. If we want a completed .mse set with full flavor text and pictures, then we need to allow flexibility with artwork dictating card design. If the goal is to stay true to the card's design and with the flavor/story/species/characters, then honestly I'm not needed because there simply does not exist artwork that perfectly matches Archester. There are hardly any pictures of Steampunk Canids/wolves, no ogres, hardly any trolls, all the insects are mechanical. I'd prefer having a finished set with artwork so people can print them and play for fun but I'd like to discuss because after finding artwork for this project for 2+ years there's a lot of things I've learned and a lot of cards from the old set that I was able to tweak slightly to make the card work with a piece of artwork I had found.

I'm going to be busy most of this weekend, I'll have time to drop in off and on again here or over on mtgs but I won't be able to do a "sit down" skype call or anything like that.

This weekend is not a good time for me either to do a live Skype call. Like Raptor, I can and will leave comments whenever I am available. Talk to MOON-E about this.

We can make a thread about it on MTGS, doubt we'll get a good live meeting time (I too am incredibly busy).

FWIW, I think we're definitely willing to change some flavor things to match where appropriate, but we're going for game design over flavor fist and foremost (at least that's how I feel about it). Personally if I'm going to play a custom magic set I want to have an awesome play experience, and that experience will be mostly based on design (with art playing an important but smaller role). Personally I don't a problem with having some art that fits perfectly and other art that's not as good. But if you don't think you'd be satisfied with that, then obviously I don't want you to put in a bunch of effort for something you don't see as being worthwhile personally.

Is there any reason we can't do both?

I mean, I know I (and my play group) would prefer text Art descriptions and I know some other people would prefer art (even if it doesn't match perfectly) so why not do both? Yes, it's a little extra work but I think it'll have a great impact on our set and broaden its appeal to those on both sides of the Artwork/Art descriptions debate.

That might be a good idea Raptor, so long as we can keep things under control (that is to say, avoid wasting lots of time arguing back and forth about both the real art and the art descriptions).