The GDS3 Finalists have been announced, and their Challenge 3 designs have been posted. Currently, the head judges for the main event haven’t posted critiques of these designs, and that presents me with a unique opportunity.

In an effort to get learn as a designer, I’m going to critique these designs in minute detail. The best cards from the best design candidates seem like a great venue to learn, to share my thoughts, and to think about design as much as possible.

Evolution from Below

BG

Instant

Choose target creature an opponent controls. Its controller may sacrifice it. If he or she does not, search your library for a creature card with the same or less converted mana cost, put it on the battlefield, then shuffle your library. Creature sacrifice is black, creature tutoring is green. Stitch them together and you have yourself a ‘chinese menu’ gold card. The best chinese menu cards shine because the two colors of effects combine to do something greater than the sum of their parts, preferably something that feels like a synthesis of the two colors. Recoil becomes an instant speed Vindicate when you’ve already destroyed your opponents hand, despite blue getting no destroy effects and black only being allowed to destroy creatures. By being a punisher card, this card has some difficulties reaching that level, but I think when you consider the two options your opponent can take it does so reasonably well. If your opponent sacrifices their creature, they’re letting their creature die because they’re afraid of what you might have. Green’s removal relies on creatures, but for this card the mere presence of creatures in your deck is enough to force your opponent to let their own creature die. Black is giving green something better than green can get on its own. I kinda wish the name appealed to the flavor of monsters lurking in the shadows and threatening to attack in various ways. If your opponent lets you tutor, the ‘green’ side of this doesn’t really get around a restriction that black has on its own. Black can tutor, and can at least somewhat put cards directly onto the battlefield. That’s one of the notable weaknesses of this card. The other issues with this card are ones of strength and validity of mode. If you have a creature that beats your opponent’s creature, this is almost always untyped removal. If you don’t, this is almost always a bad creature tutor. The only times it’s a good creature tutor are when your opponent incorrectly guesses the creatures in your library. I somewhat dislike the idea of a punisher card where one of the options doesn’t get to be used to the best of its abilities unless your opponent is a fool, but maybe there are some interesting mind games to getting away with forcing a sacrifice when you don’t actually have the silver bullet. Part of me wants this card to choose a nonland card to tutor, or to just straight up choose a creature to destroy without targeting at all. Either one would make a card that gives black an incentive to be green in the same way it gives green an incentive to be black.

Naila and Hrun, Fused (mythic rare)

2GGWW

Planeswalker — Naila-and-Hrun

2

+2: Find the lowest number greater than zero such that you control no creatures with that power. Create a green and white elemental creature token with power and toughness equal to that number. Then repeat this process.

-X: You may choose a Naila planeswalker card and a Hrun planeswalker card you own from outside the game. If you choose both, and their combined converted mana cost is X or less, put them onto the battlefield, then sacrifice CARDNAME. There are some pretty big issues with this card. First, the type Naila-and-Hrun is weird. It would be weirder with the old planeswalker uniqueness rule, but it’s still weird. Let’s ignore the fact that this wasn’t written as a legendary planeswalker, and ask what that weirdness means. If you had a card that had you choose a planeswalker type, Naila-and-Hrun would be a different type from Naila or Hrun. That typeline reads ‘no planeswalker tribal allowed.’ Also, the + ability is extremely complex. If you got the first sentence of it on the first read, you have more fortitude than me. Worse, it creates differently sized X/X tokens. Double worse, it creates differently sized X/X tokens in the same turn. One big X/X token per turn okay at higher rarities, but usually the things that do it guaranteed end the game after a couple of turns, or offer some simple checks as to what their size is, or just make tokens big enough that being off on their size might not matter. You can easily miss a bear on your side of the field and end up making a 2/2 and a 3/3 when you should’ve made a 3/3 and a 4/4, or have a 2/2 token die and then a turn later have no idea why your Nalia and Hrun made a 3/3 and a 4/4. This ability can be a challenge to play with from the moment you read it until the game ends As far as the ultimate is concerned, I’m uncertain what wishing is supposed to be here. Wishing is arguably in all colors, and recently has been in blue, black, and arguably colorless. Wishing for planeswalkers specifically might be white, because white is the color of duty and you can concept the idea of planeswalker cards as duty that those characters have to you, but this doesn’t really feel very gold, other than that assumedly you get a white Nailia and green Hrun. It’s also somewhat weird that we’re rooting for them to break up. A duo planeswalker that’s weaker together than its constituent parts doesn’t really make sense to me, unless we’re going for some ‘magically conjoined in an accidnet’ situation. It’s also strange that we’re playing an expensive planeswalker with the goal of laundering it into cheaper planeswalkers later in the game. Moreover, if this is constructed, how can those two planeswalkers we only get on our ultimate be worth the two sideboard slots if we aren’t already playing them maindeck? Are there going to be enough Nalia and Hrun planeswalkers for some sort of wish package? This asks a lot of questions it doesn’t really give good answers to, and I’m not sure that it does that in a Johnny/Jenny “you can build something crazy with this” sort of way. The thing that frustrates me most about this ultimate though is that leaning really heavily on cards Alex hasn’t designed and that don’t exist to justify its coolness. That feels kinda like it’s attacking the spirit of the challenge in a way to me.

Swiftblade Pikeman (common)

RW

Creature — Human Soldier

3/1

CARDNAME enters the battlefield with a blade counter on it.

Remove a blade counter from CARDNAME: CARDNAME gains first strike until end of turn. White gets this sort of body on its own, and both colors are allowed first strike. This, much like a blue white Serra Angel, a is a gold card that could be monocolor. There’s a key difference in that it could be monocolor in either color instead of just one, so there a reasonable argument for gold here. The ability is clever in that your opponent can exhaust the first strike by chumping with a 1/1, which means that in a format with easy access to 1/1s this goes from being ‘effectively first strike’ to ‘kill a 1/1 and either another 1/1 or a real creature’ on offense. That bit is very lenticular, and makes for a challenging limited consideration for an experienced player. The only rough thing about this card is that it uses a type of counter other than +1/+1 and -1/-1 at common. Blade counters would have to be essentially your only counters in the set. That might be worth the cost in some environments though.

Zyym, Mesmeric Lord (mythic rare)

1UBB

Legendary Creature — Vampire Wizard

3/4

Flying, deathtouch

When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, target opponent chooses an order for the cards in his or her hand, then reveals them one by one, until you say stop. That player then discards the most recently revealed card. The first thing to note here is metagamey. Alex went with a third mythic rare as one of his flex slots. Mythic rares are fun to design, and can allow you to show off design chops well. This card is blacker than it is blue, which shows up in the cost, but I kinda wish there were more to show this off as being blue. Blue black is one of the hardest color pairs to design for, because they have so much overlap, but putting flying on this card seems a little weak. The etb ability feels mono black to me, and the card feels like the idea for a clever etb came first and making it gold came later. That said, this game is very interesting. How they sort their hand is entirely dependent on trying to trick you into stopping on the wrong card, but their tricking you is dependent on them knowing when you will stop. There are some minor concerns related to forcing an opponent to discard lands, and to repeatedly flickering this on draw step, but I really do love the discard effect.

Goblin Guillotine (rare)

3BR

Sorcery

Destroy target creature. If a creature dies this way, create a token creature with the same colors and creature types as the dead creature. Flip a coin. If it comes up heads, your token is named Head and is a 1/1. Otherwise, your token is named Body and is the same power and toughness as the dead creature, minus one. Black gets destroy effects, red gets token production and randomness. Combine them and… get a mind control impression but without abilities that only works half the time? It’s reasonably flavorful, but to me at least it feels a little strange that the head is just a 1/1 with nothing else. Not quite Prized Elephant wearing Lightning Greaves levels of strange, but still odd. Maybe the head should get the abilities the creature had? Also, the creature isn’t turned into a zombie, it’s just an alive severed head or alive decapitated body. That kinda irks me. If it’s top down, why this implementation? Additionally, this card is very hard to parse. You flip a coin in the middle of the token creation process, and take a break from making the token before coming back and trying to figure out what you made. Any card that feels like it needs a flow chart to be understood is likely not well written. There’s also an unexplored question here of bullet point technology. We already use bullet points for modal spells, but they could easily help the legibility of a complex coinflip spell. Something like… Flip a coin —

• If you win the flip, do a thing.

• Otherwise, do a different thing. This card feels like a card from the 90’s in a bad, bad way.

Verdant Ingenuity (uncommon)

1GU

Sorcery

Reveal cards from the top of your library until the revealed cards include at least one land card and at least one non-land card. Put a land card from among them onto the battlefield. Put a non-land card from among them into your hand. Put the other revealed cards on the bottom of your library in any order. This reminds me of another blue green sorcery that a person who failed Challenge 3 submitted: I don’t remember the name (sorry)

1GU

Sorcery

Look at the top two cards of your library. You may reveal any number of land cards from among them and put them onto the battlefield tapped. Put the rest into your hand.

(Note: it might’ve been reveal instead of look at. Same difference) That other design had the potential to be a divinate, an explosive vegetation, or half and half, and had the interesting property of being two coiling oracles minus the bodies. Verdant Ingenuity demands always being exactly half and half, reducing variance substantially, and has some interesting implications besides that. The first notable thing is that the land doesn’t come in tapped. A cantripped pseudo-Beneath the Sands with a refund seems really powerful. That isn’t necessarily bad, especially considering as a gold card it’s much less likely to work as mana fixing, and that you can’t predict the colors the land will be able to produce, but it’s worth noting. The second is that you reveal until you hit. If you have no lands left in your deck, you can sort it, but that’s not often the case. More importantly, if you hit a couple of lands it becomes less ‘get a random land’ and more like a Farseek. In the same way, it stops being ‘draw a card’ and becomes baby-sized Peer Through Depths for nonlands as you draw nonlands. This puts a mild pressure on deckbuilding with this card to try and avoid a 50/50 land/spell split, because the further from 50/50 in either direction you are the more likely you are to get your pick of several cards. Also, as a free bonus, this lets you get a land without having to shuffle. I think Alex severely underrated this card. That said, the better wording would be “Reveal cards from the top of your library until you have revealed at least one land card and at least one non-land card.” Alex’s wordings are consistently very rough.

Astral Containment (rare)

2WU

Instant

Choose two target creatures. Exile the first creature until the second creature leaves the battlefield. Faith Unbroken, but it’s instant speed, can target any creature, and cares about the creature leaving instead of an aura leaving. This is an interesting riff, but has the cool effect of being usable in a lot of different ways. Some of my favorite cards in Magic are cards I like to call ‘implicitly modal.’ Basically, they’re autostereograms of Magic: the Gathering. Despite not having the phrase ‘choose one,’ this card is secretly a modal spell. Let’s look at the modes:

• Blink your own guy while chump blocking.

• Upgrade your guy into a Banisher Priest.

• Permanently exile a creature by sticking it under your hexproof guy or a guy of theirs you don’t care about

• Permanently exile a creature a player controls two copies of, the other copy gains weird sorta Persist.

• Abuse a bad ETB of an opponent’s creature.

• Kill a token.

• Exile an opponents creature for a few turns, and maybe convince them to trade another creature when they otherwise shouldn’t. Also, because of the way people shortcut Banishing Light effects, this doesn’t even create a memory issue, despite being a long lasting effect on an instant. Last time, I started on a meta note, so here I’ll end on one. Alex spent both of his flex slots on rare and mythic rare, giving none to common or uncommon. It’s very challenging to design commons that are good, interesting, novel, and simple. It can be very challenging to be certain that you’ve correctly classified an uncommon. It’s possible that he got points for choosing to show off flashy things when he had the venue to do so, kinda like a preview article for all the cards he’ll design if he’s hired, but I tend to think going entirely for rare and mythic would come off as a bad sign for your ability to design at low rarity.

Requiem for the Profane (uncommon)

WB

Enchantment

When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, target opponent loses two life and you gain two life.

Whenever a creature dies, you may return CARDNAME to its owner’s hand. An enchantment that essentially puts a slow extort on any creature dying. This rewards tokens, and it rewards aristocrats, without the death hadouken you usually see from those decks. This card is fine, but it’s not doing anything we haven’t seen before. Yes, both colors care about creatures dying. Yes, draining life is in the middle of the black white Venn diagram. This card is build around me, but it doesn’t feel interesting, which is a weird space to be in. This strikes me as the design of someone who didn’t have a lot of ideas. That makes sense to me, enchantments are a pain to design. Nonrare global enchantments even more so.

Blood of the Horde (common)

RG

Enchantment

Whenever you attack with one or more creatures, choose one of those attackers. It gets +1/+1 and gains trample until end of turn. In terms of raw functionality, this card is fine. It does a Gruul thing. It’s not particularly interesting, but common gold global enchantments are a narrow, narrow slice of design space. There’s a problem with this card in digital. In paper, you just pick a guy, but in digital you have clock consumptive trigger targeting that genuinely just saps the fun out of people. God forbid you have two of these, or other attack or beginning of combat triggers to manage, or only Korean Starcraft levels of click speed will make your life tolerable. Additionally, there’s a large complexity issue. Large enough to require this to be an uncommon. Usually, with this card, you want to pump your largest creature, but there are a small handful of cases in which it’s correct to pump your second largest creature. If you have a 3/3 and a 2/2, and your opponent has a 2/2, you want to pump your second largest creature to get through the extra 2 points of damage. So if you’re trying hard to win you end up checking if your largest creature can swing through while pumped, then if that one can swing through while not pumped, then if your second largest creature can swing through pumped, and so on. This may not sound awful on its own, but effects like these are how a long game of magic can end up awful, and you can end up mentally exhausted enough to die to on board tricks or miss lethal for several turn cycles. It’s tough to do that though, because ties exist. Combined with the digital issue, you get some weird wordings. “Creatures with the greatest power among creatures you control get +1/+1 and trample as long as they’re attacking” sounds like spaceman talk. Maybe something like “As long as the creature with the greatest power among creatures you control is attacking, that creature gets +1/+1 and trample.” These all sound weird and complicated, but I feel like there’s a fix to this somewhere. It’s entirely possible I’m wrong and there’s no way to make this into a card simple enough to be reasonably common. I’m wondering why Alex specifically went with two nonrare global enchantments as his enchantments. Both seem pretty bland, and one runs into substantial issues with realistically not being a common. They’re his second and third least favorite design, which seems to suggest something wrong with his practice of designing enchantments for this challenge.