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jackI followed in Alextfish's inadvertent lead and spent the last two weeks designing an original Magic:TG set entirely without intending too. I started with a couple of cute ideas for individual cards I'd had ages ago (Tiny Bunny), and came up with a string of other ideas for other natural animals, especially for other sorts of rabbit, and spent a weekend talking ideas over with Liv.
And then kept on getting more ideas, and ideas for how to put them together, until I'd put them together into a cohesive set of 250 cards common, uncommon and rare, and with a variety of themes.
You can see a random three cards each time you refresh at http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/random.php (Edit: Updated version)
And you can see a list of all the cards here: http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/all_img.html (or img&text listing). (Edit: Updated version)
Culturally, the world is based around very traditional, English, non-ostentatious fantasy:
1. Normal woodland animals, represented as magic cards.
2. Small humanoid forest dwellers, called Boggles by themselves, and Ouphes by people who talk fancily. They're something like Pratchett's gnome series -- tenacious, brave and goofy, rather than stupid, greedy/angry and goofy. They have little wars between tribes, have legendary heroes, and so on. They often ride animals into battle.
3. Boggle shamans, who do druid-like stuff, channeling-spirits-of-animals to magical effect, but not throwing fireballs.
4. Gentlemen-magicians, in a very Jonathan-Strange-like mould, except living in an England that was never deforested or industrialised. To some extent, the set is more from the view of the boggles, so humans are strange and exotic -- there are five magicians in the set, and only a couple of other humans servants.
5. Really weird stuff, hidden away in the forest, based a lot on a Carol's Jabberwocky-like feel, which feels it's leaking in from some other plane.
And then kept on getting more ideas, and ideas for how to put them together, until I'd put them together into a cohesive set of 250 cards common, uncommon and rare, and with a variety of themes.
You can see a random three cards each time you refresh at http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/random.php (Edit: Updated version)
And you can see a list of all the cards here: http://cartesian-heights.org/magic-gentlemanmagician/all_img.html (or img&text listing). (Edit: Updated version)
Culturally, the world is based around very traditional, English, non-ostentatious fantasy:
1. Normal woodland animals, represented as magic cards.
2. Small humanoid forest dwellers, called Boggles by themselves, and Ouphes by people who talk fancily. They're something like Pratchett's gnome series -- tenacious, brave and goofy, rather than stupid, greedy/angry and goofy. They have little wars between tribes, have legendary heroes, and so on. They often ride animals into battle.
3. Boggle shamans, who do druid-like stuff, channeling-spirits-of-animals to magical effect, but not throwing fireballs.
4. Gentlemen-magicians, in a very Jonathan-Strange-like mould, except living in an England that was never deforested or industrialised. To some extent, the set is more from the view of the boggles, so humans are strange and exotic -- there are five magicians in the set, and only a couple of other humans servants.
5. Really weird stuff, hidden away in the forest, based a lot on a Carol's Jabberwocky-like feel, which feels it's leaking in from some other plane.
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Date: 2010-07-10 09:19 am (UTC)What's the mechanism for game balance when designing a custom deck in this sort of way? Would you only use it to play against somebody using exactly the same deck? And if not, if you'd expect to play this deck against somebody using a deck of their choice, how do you ensure that one deck isn't hugely overpowered compared to the other? (As a trivial example, in the absence of any such mechanism, what would stop me designing a custom deck in which every card was labelled "Instantly kills the other player stone dead" or some near equivalent?)
In the absence of self-designed cards, I would have guessed that each card probably had some sort of cost value set by WotC and a player building their own deck had to arrange that its total cost was less than some fixed value, or matched that of the opponent's deck reasonably closely, or some such. (Bonus: this scheme also provides a natural handicap system.) But if you're designing cards of your own, that surely can't work unless WotC anticipated the idea and devised an extremely clever and general and yet unambiguous algorithm for deciding on the correct cost of card types that they hadn't specifically foreseen?
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Date: 2010-07-10 09:51 am (UTC)