Reckless Thinking is really cool. Good job. But it's more like an Uncommon because it's caring about the order in a way I can see newer players being confused by. It's also multicolored, which pushes you to Uncommon unless that was part of the challenge.

oh man I hope you didn't YMTC* it up this much.

I hope everyone made sure thier uncommons were interesting signpost uncommons.

I want to see 'em all.

*"To YMTC it up" means to design cards that have value mostly from a design perspective. i.e. you would put them in a case under glass in your living room and visitors could remark upon the wonderful design principles, with nobody ever worring if the cards are annoying/pointless/confusing in actual play

While it does have the ymtc element of combining blue looting with red rummaging, it's not that much harder to draw, discard, draw than to draw two and discard one or vice versa, and the difference is mechanically relevant enough to those two options that players would accept it. (Imagine casting it with only one other card in hand. Pure red gives you one choice about what gets discarded, pure blue gives you three choices).

The power level is good too. Cards that let you choose what to discard from your existing hand are stronger than ones that only let you choose from among new cards which is why Catalog has to cost more than Anticipate (and also graveyard synergy). We only recently got one at sorcery speed that actually uses the graveyard (Chart a Course, compare to See Beyond) even though such an effect wouldn't have been overpowered.

For the cost of being multicolored, this finally combines all four upsides: 2 cmc, instant, lets you choose from your hand not just the new cards, and uses the graveyard. It gives blue decks more incentive to splash red rather than black or white which are usually the stronger choices.

Maro's definition specifies that the primary color gets to push the power of the effect. In other words, if they want to make a Haste creature that is better than a normal Haste creature, that card will likely be red. What green gets to do is almost the opposite: they start with a card that is already powerful (or intended to be) and they push the card by adding Haste. That's the condition. Green gets Haste on a Tier 2 or Tier 1.5 creature, in the hopes that pushes it to Tier 1.

That feels like a distinction without a difference

yeah... again, I concede that MaRo said black is secondary in haste, and I concede that he has arguments for justifying that. my point is that those arguments require significant mental gymnastics and are inconsistent with his overall stated stances on the issue.

My biggest complaint regarding the whole thing was that the multiple choice test was more of a check of "have you read our blogs and listened to our podcasts" than truly being a check of "are you a good card designer". But also making a 75 point multiple choice test out of something so qualitative as MtG card design is a very hard problem and maybe this is the best anyone could do. The actual solution would be to not have a multiple choice section at all, but, lmao

to be fair, though, I think "have you been keeping up with our public discussions of our design philosophy" is a fair thing to test. you're gonna have to work with that design philosophy if you get hired, and they'd rather pick someone who already knows the ropes so they can get straight into actual design work.

Yeah for sure. But if you lose sight of one test criteria for the other, you get into situations like the one you're encountering: the internal dialogue regarding design decisions comes into conflict with what has been actually designed, developed, and shipped. What do you go off, in that instance? You got more answers right on this test if you had "Mechanical Color Pie 2017" open in another tab rather than, like, Gatherer. Which, like, word. Fair. But also gnarly

the actual solution involves them having to judge 3000 design submissions

ymtc contest holders already struggle with getting grades in on time with only like... 10 submissions. just imagine them dealing with 3000.

like i agree that in a perfect world there wouldn't need to be a multiple choice section

but that world will obviously never happen because as somebody who has struggled with grading contest entries in the past if you tell me I have to rank over a thousand entries im just going to pull 8 names out of a hat and call it a day

yeah dude same page

Grading on that scale is beyond the designer man hours available at WOTC. That's why they need to enlist RoboRosewater.

Distinguishing between card designs that started as completely different ideas seems to me like the most important kind of difference there is.

In reality, the problem was they had vastly more applicants than they expected. They wanted a much lower threshold of acceptance, and had that been true questions like this wouldn't have mattered nearly as much as they did.

I really don't think this is that bad, and there are a number of differences with YMTC. For one, they don't have to provide comments. For two, they can have a team of people doing it. For three, MTG is their job, so they don't have to find time on the weekends and/or evenings to grade.

I'd argue that distinguishing between card designs that end up as different things is orders of magnitude more important.

very true. if the threshold had been lower it'd be much less of a problem.

Not if you're working from the design end, where the ideas start. A final, published set (or even several sets) has had many, many inputs beyond just the basic design principles underlying it, so it's an incredibly noisy signal for inferring design principles. The clearest, cleanest signal for those is Maro's column.

Phrased another way, the only tab anyone should have had open while taking the test was the Mechanical Color Pie article.

Some info about the top 8. Three of them are from a blog called goblin artisans which formed around gds2. A few others are game designers / hobbyists and a lucky random or two

https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/a ... 2018-03-09

Any of you in there?

My two favorite submissions have been the ones by Scott Wilson - definitely the front runner for me - and Jeremy Geist.

The article said we'd get their essay answers but instead gave us their card designs

I might cheer for Alex Werner to give me a reason to follow this season (I haven't closely followed previous GDSs). He had the most out there designs , not stuff you would see on a forum like this