Dastardly Designs #1: Nautical Nonsense

Card Design

SwaggyMcSwagglepants

21 May 2018

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Hello and welcome to Dastardly Designs! My name is Swaggy, and today, I’m going to introduce you to my new article series in which I complete the Great Designer Search Challenges given to the contestants and then share my design process with the community!

Before I go in too deep, I’d just like to apologize for my lack of knowledge on formatting the article – there are some aesthetics like headers, bolded text, and accordions I would have liked to incorporate to make the reading process smoother, but unlike in the decklists here, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. So bear with me in this article while I learn!

I’ve been playing Magic for 9 years, and while I love playing the game, I don’t think there’s a realistic opportunity for me at my skill level to make it professionally. However, I also enjoy designing Magic cards, and there’s probably a bigger chance of making it in the game design field in general than becoming a Magic pro. I couldn’t compete in the GDS since I’m a few months too young, but since I enjoy game design and love Magic, I wanted to still complete all the challenges and learn about my abilities as a designer.

After all the contestants passed the first three trials and made it to the Top 8, they were given their first design challenge (see full article here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/feature/great-designer-search-3-challenge-1-2018-05-17):

Tribal themes (cards that mechanically care about one or more creature types) have been popular since Limited Edition (Alpha). For this challenge, we want you to choose a creature type, ideally one that hasn't seen a lot of love in Magic's history, and design eight cards. As this is a design challenge, there are few requirements you'll have to meet:

The creature type must be unique from the other designers. We'll be taking requests first come, first served. Each designer will be using a different creature type. The creature type must be one that already exists in Magic and we strongly urge you avoid ones that have had a lot of previous tribal designs.

All the creatures should be designed as if they were from the same set. Assume the set is a Standard-legal set.

All eight cards must mechanically care about the creature type. They should not simply be the creature type.

Two cards must be designed in each rarity (common, uncommon, rare, and mythic rare).

At least two different colors must be used. The colors must thematically fit the creature type in question. Multicolor designs are not required but are allowed.

You must have at least one artifact, one creature, one enchantment, one instant, one land, and one sorcery among your cards. (The remaining cards can be whatever you'd like.)

For named keyword mechanics, you are allowed access to all evergreen mechanics and up to two non-evergreen mechanics (keywords and/or ability words). Note that there is no requirement to use named mechanics. Please do not create any new named keyword mechanics.

Comments: You will have up to 250 words to say whatever you want about your design. You are free to talk about individual cards, but I would suggest spending some of your words explaining holistically what you were up to with your overall design.

Before I started the challenge, I looked at all the submissions previously entered, as well as listened to Chris Mooney’s YouTube video describing his design process for the Ooze tribe just because I was interested and hadn’t decided that I was going to attempt this challenge. This kind of invalidates my designs, since I had access to lots of templates, ideas, and criticism to design my tribe from, but oh well. For the next challenge (which I have already designed cards for) I did not look at any submissions by the actual contestants, since they hadn’t come out yet, so I’ll have a more legitimate group of cards to compare to the contestants.

When it came to pick my tribe, I didn’t think I could pick a cool creature type to really narrow in on and dig in mechanically. However, when thinking about all the possible tribes I could choose, I thought of one underappreciated creature type and instantly fell in love.

Crabs.

I don’t know why, but ever since I was young, I’ve loved crabs. Maybe its just because I found so many shore crabs underneath rocks, maybe its because I’ve grown up in the Pacific Northwest and crabs are just more prevalent here, maybe its just because they look cool. But once I thought of it, I couldn’t let my mind drift anywhere else. I was going to design crabs or fail trying.

Realistically, if I was competing in the challenge, I wouldn’t pick crabs as my tribe. Crabs aren’t a tribe that can just be a prevalent force on a given plane; for example, rogues can exist on almost any plane across the Multiverse. For crabs to be on a plane, they first would have to fit in the setting of the plane. Like on Ravnica, it’s hard to imagine crabs outside the Simic Combine. Then, after it’s established that crabs exist on the plane, there must be a significant reason for them to be an iconic force on that plane. For a creature type to be tribal, they must be part of what defines that plane. On Ixalan, there are four tribes, all with their unique characteristics. Now imagine, hypothetically, that there just was Crab Tribal in the set as well. Crabs aren’t on the same level of status as tribes like Vampires and Dinosaurs are on. Because of that, it’s unlikely Crab Tribal would see print. But, being as this is hypothetical and just for fun, I designed crabs because I thought it would be fun.

My first step to designing crabs was to figure out what made crabs, well, crabs. I did a quick search in Gatherer for all the crabs printed in Magic and tried to pick out the similarities. Some of them milled (Hedron Crab), some of them Griptided (King Crab), and some of them gained hexproof (Skittering Crustacean). However, the first two crabs on the Gatherer page, Ancient Crab and Armored Cancrix stuck out to me the most. Even though they’re vanilla creatures, they shared a common trait that fitted perfectly with crabs: high toughness.

Just as birds are known for flying and rhinos are known for their horns, crabs are known for their hard shells. And the easiest way to represent the strength of their shells is through high toughness. So, after I decided that having a high toughness (or at least greater toughness that power) was a crab’s trait, I designed crabs to have a greatest toughness theme.

In addition, both Ancient Crab and Armored Cancrix had low powers for their CMC. When someone is drafting a Crab deck, it wouldn’t seem very fun to attack an opponent with a bunch of low power high toughness creatures and have them bounce off each other every turn. But as soon as I thought of a problem, a solution presented itself in my head: skulk.

Skulk is a mechanic that fits perfectly with the flavor of crabs and shores up one of their gameplay weaknesses (no pun intended). Lots of crabs reside on the seafloor, crawling around the bottom feeding off dead fish and other wildlife. Skulk also presented a good second color to my blue crabs: black. While the blue crabs mostly live on the shore or in the higher parts of the ocean, the black crabs dwell on the seafloor and are hardened scavengers surviving in one of the most treacherous parts of the ocean.

Finally, the way I mechanically represented the more black side of the crabs was through exiling creatures from graveyards, since crabs eat dead stuff from the ocean floor. Exiling creature cards from graveyards fit very well with black on the color pie and also fit the flavor of crabs.

Card Designs and 250 word Intro:

One tribe that probably gets the least time in the spotlight is Crabs. While obviously not the most powerful or resonant tribe, crabs have a lot of inherent untapped design space that creates a lot of interesting cards.

Crabs have been based almost entirely in blue in the past, but I decided to expand crabs to black as well. The blue crabs dwell near the shore and the upper levels of the ocean, while the black crabs reside on the sea floor and scavenge whatever meat they can find, whether alive or dead.

The most defining features of crabs printed previously are their high toughness and low power, so I decided to give crabs a strong toughness matters theme where bonuses are given based on controlling the creature with the greatest toughness (which will often be a Crab you control). While not all Crabs need to have power much lower than their toughness, every crab should have a power equal to or lower than its toughness.

Since the black crabs are bottom-dwelling scavengers, some black Crab cards exile creatures from the graveyard as a cost for an ability to represent the crabs scavenging the corpses to survive the treacherous depths.

Finally, it doesn’t seem fun to not have crabs attacking at all, so some of the crabs have skulk as a keyword mechanic to have them be able to get in and deal damage instead of bouncing off opposing creatures.

Frothing Bottomfeeder

Creature – Crab (uncommon)

Deathtouch

Other Crabs you control with toughness 3 or greater have deathtouch

1/4

My chief inspiration for this card was Ukud Cobra. Ukud Cobra is the perfect example of a card that utilizes high toughness powerfully. Since crabs are a tribe that cares about high toughness, I thought having an uncommon crab Lord (a creature that cares about other creatures that share its creature type) that benefitted crabs with high toughness was a clever design rather than just a lord that pumped all your crabs. This card might just be too busted for uncommon and not be fun to play against, but I don’t think it’s quite on the power level of a rare. However, I could certainly see it as a rare if it was a three drop.

Hardened Carapace

Instant (Common)

Target creature you control gets +0/+3 and hexproof until end of turn. If that creature is a Crab, draw a card.

This card is very similar to Dive Down, just with a Crab rider. I thought about having this card be only a single blue mana, since that way it could see play in a typical Limited deck instead of just Limited Crab decks, but the problem is that fizzling a removal spell with this on a high-toughness crab and drawing a card is a really big swing for a common card. I also wanted to make a Dive Down variant because of the obvious toughness matters theme.

The Crustacean Abomination

Legendary Creature – Crab (mythic)

Crabs you control have skulk

Whenever a Crab you control deals combat damage to a player, you may draw a card. If you do, discard a card.

, Exile two creature cards from any graveyard: Scry 1, then put a +1/+1 counter on each Crab you control.

3/6

Originally, this card started as

Sea’s Sustenance

Enchantment (uncommon)

Whenever a Crab you control deals combat damage to a player, you may draw a card and discard a card.

, Exile two creature cards from any graveyard: Put a +1/+1 counter on each Crab you control.

When I first looked at this, I thought “this is a cool uncommon enchantment for crabs, like Stensia Masquerade”. Then I took a step back, and decided that this card was really good and bumped it to rare and added Scry 1 to the activated ability. However, as I designed more cards, I realized that both my rare slots were filled, and one of those slots was filled by an enchantment that I thought was designed better. As I realized my mythic slot wasn’t yet filled, I decided to make this the marquee card of the tribe and turned it into a legendary creature so people who wanted to build a Crab commander deck (I’d call them lunatics except I’d totally do that) have a sweet General.

I think that while all the abilities are cool on this card, it probably isn’t one of my best designed cards of the set because it might just be too scatterbrained and it might just do too much.

Crushing Claws

Sorcery (uncommon)

Return target creature you don’t control to its opponents hand. If you control the creature with the greatest toughness, put that creature on top of its owner’s library instead.

This design is an amalgamation of Compelling Deterrence and Griptide. The Griptide element of the card is especially flavorful since King Crab griptides opposing green creatures.

Rock Scraper

Creature – Crab (common)

When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, if you control the creature with the greatest toughness, draw a card, then discard a card.

2/3

In the common creature slot, I originally had

Shore Crab

Creature – Crab (common)

CARDNAME gets +1/+1 as long as you control the creature with the greatest toughness.

0/3

However, I scrapped Shore Crab for two reasons. The first reason is that for most of the early game, it’s just a 1/4 and is a pain in the butt to stare down as an aggressive opponent and could really hamper the aggressive limited decks in a format. The other reason is that I wanted to show that while crabs should have low power and high toughness more often than not, there should still be crabs with more regular power and toughness combinations like 2/3 rather than 1/5 or the likes.

Additionally, Rock Scraper just drew a card instead of looted once, but because of the exiling creatures from a graveyard theme, I changed it to looting to show ways in which that theme is supported in the common rarity.

Crawling Grounds

Land (Rare)

: Add to your mana pool.

: Add or to your mana pool. Spend this mana only to cast Crab creature spells.

,: Put target creature an opponent controls that doesn’t have or isn’t tied for the greatest toughness on top of its opponent’s library.

Originally, this land had an activated ability of , Exile X target creature cards from your graveyard: Create X 1/2 Blue Crab creature tokens, but this ability closely resembled the ability of a card I designed later, so I swapped it to the Griptide ability since that shifted the balance of cards with a Griptide ability from one to two and the cards that exiled cards from graveyards from three to two. I deliberated on whether this land should enter the battlefield tapped or not, but I figured the only casting Crabs rider made it so this wasn’t just a powerful dual land and that if you just drew this card late game and couldn’t activate it it would just feel really bad. Overall, I think this is one of my less well designed card because I think I might have made it too strong and not have given it appropriate drawbacks, but I don’t think I was too far off the right numbers.

Tidal Totem

Legendary Artifact (Mythic)

At the beginning of your main phase, remove all tide counters from CARDNAME. If a counter was removed from CARDNAME, return target creature an opponent controls to their hand. Otherwise, put a tide counter on CARDNAME and put a +1/+1 counter on each Crab, Fish, Kraken, Octopus, Squid, and Starfish you control. They become unblockable until end of turn.

When looking through the other designer’s submissions, I noticed that some designers crossed over into more than one tribe in some of their designs, and I found that to be really cool and smart, so I decided I wanted to design a card that cared about multiple tribes. When coming up for the basis of this card, I decided I wanted to design it around the tide. While Bident of Thassa is one representation of the tide in Magic, I thought Bounty of the Luxa was a much more flavorful and dutiful representation of the tide in Magic. Then, I gave abilities to each part of the tide – the ebb and the flow.

I represented the ebb through the Unsummon ability, since the water recedes off the beach and all the sea critters that don’t make it to the ocean are stranded. Originally, it Griptided opposing creatures, but it seemed really unfun for the opponent to never be able to go through their deck and find an answer to the Totem because every other turn they’re drawing a creature the Totem bounced. Additionally, the Totem is legendary because just having multiples of this card bouncing the opponent’s best creature isn’t fun to play against.

I represented the flow ability through the +1/+1 counter and unblockable ability to marine life since the tide goes up and the sea critters have more area they can swim around and find food to eat in. Originally, I didn’t have the unblockable rider, but just having creatures gaining +1/+1 counters over time and not having a way to kill your opponent drags the game out for a long time and even though it’s obvious who will likely win, the player doesn’t actually win for several turns. While unblockablility pushes the card a bit, it reduces the amount of long-drawn Limited games where one player is waiting for their 0/3 and 2/5 Crabs to have 5 or 6 power to swing in.

Seafloor Feast

Enchantment (Rare)

At the beginning of your end step, exile target creature card from a graveyard. Create X 1/2 Blue Crab creature tokens, where X is the toughness of the exiled creature card.

I think this is one of my more well designed cards from a mechanical standpoint, since it takes on the flavor of Crabs well while putting it in a simple textbox. However, I think this card would have the potential to be criticized by the judges for three main reasons: One, its incidental graveyard hate and it might not be printed just because there’s a graveyard set and Wizards doesn’t want powerful graveyard hate available. Two, while I stated exiling cards from my graveyard is a theme, I might have not shown that there was enough support for that theme to make a rare enchantment solely based around that mechanic. Three, although this card incorporates a theme I used and involves Crabs, it might not be enough of a Crab Tribal card to warrant credit. It’s just a decent standalone card; you don’t have to build a Crab deck to make it work. Therefore, it might not fit the criteria given. Besides these three criticisms, I really like the design on this card and think that it’s a well-designed card that suffers from not quite meeting the criteria of the challenge.

Overall, I think that my designs in this challenge were pretty solid all around. I think what I accomplished well is designing commons and uncommons that fit their rarity, finding mechanics that defined a tribe that had little material to be based from, and made cards that were fun to play with. I think what I could improve on is making rares and mythics that are at appropriate costs to their abilities and refining my vision into less mechanics. I probably didn’t need to include all three of the main mechanics I built Crabs around and could’ve made this more singular and refined if I cut a mechanic. I think the obvious mechanic to get cut is skulk, since I only utilized it on one of my card designs and didn’t really need to state that it was a theme of the set.

Compared to the other designers’ work, I think I came out in the upper half. I think all my cards were synergistic, had support, played out in a fair and fun play pattern, and were close to being appropriately costed. Then again, I also had all their designs to be inspired by, so my designs aren’t as original as theirs, and I likely would’ve done worse without looking at their designs.

Alright, that’s all I have for this week. If you have any comments, ideas, criticism, or just want to say hi, please comment below and let me know! I’m excited to hear any feedback, whether it be on my designs, my evaluation, or even my writing in general. You can also tweet me at @Dustydeckbox at Twitter if you got something you want to discuss or say. Tune in next time when I go over my top-down designs for the circus plane, Bigtopia!

(p.s. if anybody knows how to include headers, bolded text, etc. in articles, please give me a shout! I tried using the same methods as decklists and they wouldn’t show up when I previewed the article)