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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 19:58:39)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 19:58:39)
Blue feels more flying, imo. And green is so much more fundamentally anti-flying than any other color/mechanic combination. This is in no way official, but I bet there's still a subconscious bias
I thought W and U got flying equally, is blue still better?
I think that's basically the case, but I'm not sure the official description of the colour pie includes colours having negative abilities. Are there any other examples? BW gets Enchantment destruction for instance
I think green has so many negative flying points, that only blue has enough flying points to get it positive again
Huh. OK, I noticed something interesting. UG gold cards in modern often DO get flying. But WG ones basically never do. I wonder why that is?
The problem is, they will never print a BG flying vigilance creature. Black is third at flying, they can't reasonably use it to grant flying; likewise with green, it's a distant second at vigilance, it's unreasonable to get vigilance from it.
I suppose they used an example that requires understanding the underlying principle rather than searching a card database for a similar card, so they use a combination that has not occured.
As an aside: You also seem to be unaware or ignoring that there were five options to choose from and green-blue was not one of those options - though it would certainly otherwise fit.
Woah, that's hard. I used to design individual cards a lot, but now I usually focus on mechanics or sets, it's really hard to design an individual card that says "I'm such a good designer".
I'm almost glad I didn't have to try this.
And the combination is hard as well, although a good idea: fulfilling weird combinations of requirements shows off a breadth and depth of design skills.
I would have been tempted to randomly choose a valid combination of colours and rarities and types, and then design ten cards to fit that, rather that constantly trying to rejig stuff.
Sure the answer is easy, but only as a trivia question. The conflict is that the answer is so far apart from the practice, that the question is misleading for future designs.
In all of Modern, there is exactly 1
flying. In all of Modern, there is exactly 0 
vigilance. So the chances of 
flying vigilance is near 0.
So how is this a good lesson for future designers to adhere?
Following that link makes things much clearer "2 of each card type" would have been a much harder task.
Well, with two planeswalkers given you don't really have to worry about the mythic rare slot - which would be a blessing for me, personally, as I tend towards making commons.
I actually am confident that making good planeswalkers would be the restriction I would worry most about. I expect some designers to go all out with some of the more experimental design ideas there, too. While WotC has by now made the box a lot larger with four-ability walkers,
casting costs, no plus-abilities etc. There are still some weird ones out there.
Yeah, so the first 3-4 cards are pretty open-ended, so you can pick your best designs first and use those, but then you pretty quickly get locked in on what your other cards need to be. Although the two flex slots in rarity were pretty nice.
It was a really enjoyable challenge.
Okay, how is the question confusing? The first sentence can be easily read: "We avoid making white- cards if the card could also just be done as monocolor white card. Repeat for each other color."
So knowing that for each color combination offered as an option you ask yourself two questions:
You want to pick the color combination that is "yes" to 1. and "no" to 2.
You are supposed to be aware of 1. already and they give you the hint to take 2. into consideration as well for this task (hence "Given that").
Note that this is something they "try to avoid" not a hard rule.
I also wouldn't be surprised if the explanation given was a simplification that is missing an "only" or "exactly" e. g. "flying, vigilance" in white-blue or green-white would be bad, but "flying, lifelink" in white-black would be decent.
So, what I'm getting at is that they probably still employ the "Chinese Menu" method and the "Venn Diagram" method, but want to avoid cards like Rhox War Monk where colors are not equally represented in the abilities (or not at all).
Third trial's been made public: http://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/170588778208/the-great-designer-search-3-trial-3-the-design
Tldr: 10 cards, 2 of each 2-color pair, 2 of each card type (other than artifact), at least 2 of each rarity
Trial 3 was due on Sunday. We're not supposed to share details about it yet. The results of that will be announced March 9; hopefully we will hear back privately before then.
So... I had a scheduled lack of access to the web for a while...
Will somebody fill me in on whether this is still in progress?
@jmgariepy: Thanks, Coach Z! I'm excited.
@Tahazzar: True that. I don't think I'm exactly wrong about Cloudchaser Eagle. It just wasn't the best choice out of the five.
It occurs to me that I did look that question up on Gatherer, now that I think about it. But I framed my search as a search for commons with these specific etb abiliites. Neither CE or GD ability is in common in Standard. After that point, I used what I thought was a logical answer. It didn't occur to me to look up the card Gravedigger specifically. That would have the solved the problem immediately.
@Phopus: Hey! Good jorb! It's easy to get lost dwelling over one's mistakes in contest as involved as this one, so I almost missed that you're still in. Go knock 'em dead!
Ouch, bad luck :( Looking back at the 0/0 creature one, I am a little annoyed that for THAT one (and a few others) you're supposed to take the text as printed, even though it clearly SHOULD be "as ETB" not "when ETB". But for some other questions (like "when this deals damage" not "when this deals combat damage") you're supposed to answer as if it says what it obviously should say.
I think I got those right through "guessing what they wanted" techniques, but they tripped up some very very good designers who weren't exactly wrong.
I'm not surprised some of that slipped through, avoiding it is really hard. Overall I'd say the test is v good. But that kind of thing is v aggravating when you're post-morteming.
Opponent having an enchantment is less likely than you having a dude or two in the grave.
You know, for what's it's worth, I learned my lesson from the GDS2 and did a ton of research for every question I saw. Kind of funny that I failed this test because I evidently didn't look up Gravedigger to find that it's been an uncommon the last two times it was printed.
Also I must have missed by one. Got dinged on the Gravedigger not being a common anymore. I chose Cloudchaser Eagle instead because it's a more direct two-for-one, and Wizards doesn't like to print that at common (Gravedigger takes more time to resolve its two-for-one, and is closer to a Divination than to an Nekrataal effect.) But digger gets digger. I can see where they'd think that's more important.
wow , great jobs everyone! you probably did better on these tests than i did on my exams this year xD
The issue with these questions is there is a huge disconnect with what they think they want and what they actually allow to print.
But change my answer to UG. Fact is, vigilance is no longer part of blue. No blue creatures with vigilance since Alara. So you can't print this in monoblue (any more.)
So pair blue for flying and green for vigilance, this would be a blue green card that might actually be printed. Contrary, this would never be printed as Black green.
Yeah, I was off by one too. It's a shame, but I made some stupid mistakes (didn't catch that removing haste was the least likely thing to happen).
I got all of the harder questions correct as well, but I missed the obvious ones. Aside from the 4/4 flying vigilance question, which I definitely should have read into a bit more.
I'm still in it, I think with a score of 73.
Oh no! I'm so sorry. Off by one is so aggravating. I'm not exactly sure where I fell, I couldn't remember which answer I ended up giving for the ones where I wasn't sure, but I think I did worse than that :)
If the Reddit thread is correct I belove I indeed missed 3 questions. Sigh.
Ah, it was in my "promotions" folder. It was no, as I suspected.
Someone on Goblin Artisans linked to a reddit thread which has a fairly canonical version of the right answers (based on which people made the cut and which didn't). I should have looked to see reddit's opinion earlier.
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/7u1z18/comment/dtgz6bi
Of the suspicious questions, the answer seem to be:
What did I get wrong? The killing for sport one, the commander decks one, and I think I stuffed up a couple of the rarity questions as well.
Ironically, I think I got all of the harder questions correct, if I'd been willing to spend more time on it, I should have rechecked the questions I was a little bit uncertain about, not only the ones I was significantly uncertain about.
I got a "Bad luck, thank you, sorry, no" email, and everyone else seemed to be sure too; if you didn't I'd thoroughly check spam filter and if you still don't have anything, message Maro on twitter and ask him to check.
Did you get an email if it was a no? I haven't gotten an email either way, though when I looked over Jay's answers I remember thinking mine were very close. With my luck I probably missed just one too many. Lol