Category: Magic: The Gathering

Editor’s Note: Since yesterday was an American holiday (Labor Day), Mark Rosewater decided to take the day off. Fine, it wasn’t him, Wizard’s website doesn’t really update on holidays, so he didn’t have to write a new article. Lucky him. So, I don’t have anything to write after him. I could be like him and take the day off, but he has tons more readers, and I need to get back on track. (Yes, he came out and talked about the rules of Planeswalkers, but we won’t touch on them until we see the set to find out the interactions they’ll have on the game).

It was announced that magazine InQuest Gamer is being discontinued after 150 issues. This leave a little whole in my gaming heart. While I haven’t picked up the magazine in over 2 years, it still saddens me that we’re losing a long time staple in gaming. While this doesn’t seem like design news at all, it really isn’t completely, though it will tie in later.

Continue reading “InQuest Gamer Goes the Way of the DoDo…”

Editor’s Note: This should have appeared yesterday, but thanks to computer issues it appears today. Hopefully 1’s and 0’s won’t give me problems next time.

Welcome to the first of 5 (maybe more) posts of The Color Pie Identity Project. Today, the most selfish of the colors gets to go first, or the one that’s first alphabetically; either or, it works, right?

So, I’ll take a look at Black as a color, what it does, what it can’t so, etc, etc. Before I get threatening e-mails, yes this is based off of MaRo’s take on each color. But this is a healthy exercise because sometimes you’re too far in the forest to see the trees. Not saying they don’t know what they’re doing (because they do), but it’s good to hear what an outsider thinks of what a color is by it’s cards, not by what R&D says.

Continue reading “The Color Pie Identity Project – Black”

Yes, today’s post was not yesterday, but I’ve been working on the first one of my series of the Color Pie Identity Project, and I was wait for the new Banned and Restricted list. For those of you who haven’t seen it, click here.

Personally, I don’t care about Online formats (sorry MTGO players) since I don’t play online. But the one big change for the B&R list this quarter was for the eternal formats with the banning of Shahrazad. What the DCI just said, it doesn’t like three things:

• I creates too much space to keep having sub-games.
• Sub-games create longer than normal games and in tournaments you run out of time.
• DCI hates that Shahrazad/Fork combo as much as you do.

Continue reading “What Banned and Restricted Lists Tells Us about Design – September”

The key to designing good cards is to know where they go in the Color Pie.

Color Pie? I’ve mentioned it around a million times. Hey, even the title of this blog is M:tG Color Pie. What is this Color Pie that I keep mentioning then?

The Color Pie is a term invented by Wizards of the Coast (either Wizards or WotC) for Magic for the identity of the five colors of Magic. Each of the colors have a flavor of what they can and cannot do with their spells, and those restrictions are what the Color Pie is about (I personally capitalize Color Pie because I believe it’s a proper noun). You can’t have a Green discard spell, and you can’t have a Red gain life spell according to the color pie, and you’re find out why.

Continue reading “The Color Pie Identity Project – Introduction”