Monthly Archives: December 2011

Back in in the fall of 2004, which was roughly between the end of Mirrodin block and the beginning of Kamigawa block, Brian wanted to try his hand at set design.  So he created a set of 150 cards.  Other than a bit of templating work and updating to include new terminology and keywords, these cards exist exactly as Brian originally created them.  It’s an interesting look back at the way sets were designed back then, as well as the way Brian took the old design philosophies in his own direction. Chewie and Mike added some commentary just for good measure. You can also read the White, Blue, and Black cards.  We hope you enjoy this trip back as much as we do!

Next, we’ve got red’s cards.  Red’s themes here are pretty much what you would expect- burn and more burn.  A few uncommon and rare cards push toward red being more mono-centric than the other colors, rewarding having lots of Mountains in particular.  The Firespouter cycle was an attempt at making an interesting firebreathing variant, where the common and uncommon cards have a drawback and the rare has an upside.  Flaming Rat was a combination of  Spark Elemental and Viashino Sandstalker, intended to be a good one-drop common that would be quality even if drawn later, especially with creature pump.  Kitchen Fire is now infamous on the show just for the noise you have to make when you play it (WOOO!), but has some implication for forcing the opponent to make hard choices when played during their upkeep.  Magma Ritual was an attempt at making a “fixed” Dark Ritual in the “right” color- it’s one of those cards that I keep expecting to see printed in real Magic, but not yet.

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Way back in in the fall of 2004, which would be roughly between the end of the first Mirrodin block and the beginning of Kamigawa block, Brian decided he wanted to try his hand at set design.  So he created a set of 150 cards.  Other than a bit of templating work and updating to include new terminology and keywords, these cards exist exactly as Brian originally created them.  It’s an interesting look back at the way sets were designed back then, as well as the way Brian took the old design philosophies in his own direction. Chewie and Mike added some commentary just for good measure too. You can see the White and Blue cards too.  We hope you enjoy this trip back as much as we do!

On to black.  There’s a number of Rat cards here, largely because Kamigawa hadn’t been even spoiled yet and I had always liked cards like Plague Rats and Lab Rats.  Black has been through many signature small signature creature types like zombies (and more recently vampires), and I thought that the rats should have a shot.  A lot of black’s creatures here are into sacrifice, and cards like Death Contract and Body Exchange play off of this theme as well.  Consumer of Rot harkens back to drawbacks like Desecration Elemental, and may not belong at uncommon, but some of my cards were clearly designed with concept first and rarity consideration second (if at all).  One Hundred Blind Eyes is probably the card I would be most interested in seeing the art for in black, if not the whole set.  Slave to the Moon was my attempt at making a “good” werewolf ages before Innistrad.

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