Anyone can make a Magic card, just like anyone can paint a picture. But, just like pictures, custom-made cards tend to run the gambit from fifth grader's fridge art to striking masterpieces. Sadly a vast majority of custom cards tend to be the former. Luckily a neutral eye quickly reveals how much thought has gone into a card's design. Take for instance these two strikingly different cards before we even go any further:

One is a low scoring entry from our Monthly Card Design Contest, the other is a winning entry. If you have a question about which is which, you'll definitely want to continue reading this lesson, as it should be evident. We'll be referring to these images throughout today's lesson as we attempt to take our custom card design to the next level, and in the process reveal the most basic elements of Magic design.

First thing's first, this is an entry level look at design. If it was shop class, we'd be building book ends, not using a lathe and trying to hammer out perfect dove joints to create a sophisticated end table. If you already well versed with design theory, maybe you'll learn something new, if you're not, hopefully afterwards you can recognize some flaws in your own design process and gain a new appreciation.

Above all, this is MTG Theory. I've never designed a printed card or even talked to a person who has. Luckily, much of this is coming straight from the horse's mouth (the horse in this case being Mark Rosewater) and translated into some questionably fun lessons. I may not be planted in the official WotC orchard, by my roots are drawing from it's water.

Is there truly a difference between innovation and invention? If you own a dictionary you should know there is, however for posterity's sake:

Innovation is doing something that's been done before in a new way.
Invention is doing something for the first time, ever.

Please, read and understand that statement before going further. There are subtle differences; while both are doing new things, innovation is built on a foundation, while invention attempts to create an entirely new foundation. You can definitely argue that inventors have far more notoriety than innovators, but you can also trace back countless inventors that died penniless after innovators bettered their product. In some cases (such as with the steam engine), the innovators improved so much on the initial design that they actually managed to steal credit for the invention. I'm looking at you James Watts, shame!

Where am I going with this? Good fundamental Magic design on the custom level is built off innovation not invention. Take familiar concepts, twist and change them to create new cards. By innovating rather than inventing you ensure you stay closer to the bounds of good Magic design, which trust me, can be very hard to stay in at times. Don't try to create a new wheel, simply ask yourself, "What can I d to make this wheel roll better?"

Exercises Part I:
Use the original two example cards again for these exercises.
#1) Which design uses innovative design?
#2) Can you identify a root card (similar existing Magic card) for either design?
#3) Is the second card more innovative or more inventive?

No, I'm not encouraging you to get up and leave your seat, then get down, or any such thing relating to rock and roll all night. So put away your make up, stop measuring how long your tongue is, and you shame on you! No one wants to be Catman, even Peter Criss. Back on track, the KISS School of Thought, simply states:

Keep it simple, stupid.

In my first year engineering class, a guest speaker once gave a three hour presentation on the most epic engineering failures in the world. From massive products mistakes to machines that randomly burst into flames, culminating with bridges and buildings that collapsed for seemingly no reason. One of the key concepts he presented was that many companies second product fails because of the "Bells and Whistles" syndrome. This is, quite simply, engineers attempt to do so much that they lose focus of their initial design. Too much emphasis is put on doing random added features, and not enough on the core intent of the product. In the end, a shoddy product is rushed through design and production. Sure it may do a lot of things, but it does a lot of things, really poorly.

This same concept can be applied to Magic design as well. If you find yourself going "and then" or "it also needs", simply stop. Akroma, Angel of Wrath to me is the perfect example of design to avoid. These powerhouse cards should be avoided by novices, who would do better sticking to fundamental design. We'll discuss two schools of thought on how to design later based on Vorthos and Melvin, but for now the major train of thought should be:

How can I innovatively create a new card as simply as possible?

A general rule of thumb for you Magic Set Editor users is to question your design choices every time the font decreases. My goal with a vast majority of the cards I make is to never have the font size decrease.

Exercises Part II:
Use the original two example cards again for these exercises.
#4) How many abilities does Withering Blast have?
#5) How many abilities would you need to cut to make Necronel acceptable?
#6) Could Withering Blast be improved by making it even more simple?

Syntax is boring. We won't be discussing it today beyond this simple lesson on how to word any card you can come up with: Copy, copy, copy! Simply go to Gatherer, find a similar card, note how that card handles the wording and you have found the best way to word your entry. If it has a comma after a mana symbol, you probably want that comma too.

Beyond syntax, when innovating (not "plagiarizing") you can see how abilities work and how you can build them into your card. Without knowing anything about a Magic card you can quickly look at other cards to find out stipulations and things you need to consider. If you need to know if a creature type still exists, put it into Gatherer. Want to know how many Red creatures can regenerate, put it into Gatherer. There is vast amounts of information to be gleaned from simple searches.

Exercises Part III:
You'll want to use Gatherer or another Magic Search Engine for this.
#7) You want to create a creature based on the Loch Ness monster, what existing tribes could you use?
#8) How would the following appear on an actual card: "Pay one mana to do a single damage to a creature?"
#9) You're designing a creature that makes an opponent discard. What phrase should you include in the conditions of that discard?

Magic has a distinct flavor that has changed and conformed into a giant entity over the years. Early on, there was a lot of confusion with Magic's flavor. Sets like Legends and Arabian Nights created conflicting views of the planescapes, and players often were left wondering why creatures with wings didn't fly. During The Dark and Fallen Empires era however, Jesper Myrfors led the art teams and helped to create a more unified vision (albiet not perfect). However the brief unity disappeared entirely creating an air of uncertanity until the Tempest block came around with an official style guide. The style guide helped to focus Magic's artists to create proper artworks and a general vision for each set.

It is important to realize that early Magic design was heavily skewed by the design team finding their footing. Take, for instance, all of Shadowmoor and how they handled Selkies, Merrow, Noggles, etc, and then compare that to the Arabian lore from Arabian Nights or Frankenstein's Monster. An even better example are Magic's two Lemure's: Hyalopterous Lemure and Viscid Lemures (Hyalopterously Yours is a fun read into this mishap that occurred before the Style Guide). Lemures are evil spirits, not lemurs from Madagascar for the short story. Magic design since Tempest in 1997 has taken a very unified approach, deviating only from plane to plane and era to era.

Why talk about all of this, in relation to custom card design and Magic design theory? Quite simply because when you're designing a custom card, you need to decide if you are making a fan card or a custom card. The difference between a fan and a custom card is that a custom card matches and fits into the design-space of Magic and its style guides; a fan card does not. Fan cards don't fit in the Magic universe such as Super Mario Brothers, Soccer players, or Final Fantasy.

Once you realize the difference between fan and custom cards, it may be easier to see if you are truly creating a custom card. The nice thing is Magic constantly is expanding its universe, making more and more things a reality within it. There is nothing wrong with fan cards, just realize that most people take them with a grain of salt.

Exercises Part IV:
Use the above image for this exercise:
#10) Which above the images could be translated into the Magic universe easily?
#11) Which of the above images could be made into both fan and custom cards?

Once a custom designer has gotten past the phase where they just pump out nothing but overpowered cards and fan cards, they arrive at what I call the core design phase. During this phase designers struggle with finding their design footing. Designers in this phase begin to deal with complex issues such as mana costs, syntax, balance, and most importantly color.

The first three issues are articles to themselves (probably very boring ones), but color appropriateness is vital to all levels of Magic design. I recommend delving heavily into the design articles of Mark Rosewater when discussing this as he has three great articles that address the color pie. His most famous rule is "Obey the Color Pie," in which he declares "Any rule may be broken if it is done for the right reason." While,I wholeheartedly agree that any Magic rule can be broken, I want to caution that if you break the color pie a majority of the time, maybe your reason isn't as good as you think.

Now bring on the pie!

I've seen a lot of color pies, but this one to me has always been the best and most inclusive of a color's true abilities. The graph even intentionally captures Red's refusal to cooperate and play the game straight by going in an opposite direction. The biggest thing though is how you view and treat the color pie. This pie hints at it, but the color pie has layers of how abilities and concepts fit into them. Here's two updated versions of Rosewater's Color Pie ideographs

Rosewater believes the first graph is how the average player sees the color pie. It's an absolute truth, an ability either is or isn't in a color pie. However, he presents the second color pie for how it truly exists.

I'll briefly describe the three layers. The core is the molten lava lifeblood of a color's abilities, much like lava, it is constantly shifting and pushing content up to the crust. The mantle is composed of a color's abilities, but ones that are used sparingly. These are things that just don't seem to fit, but make sense when you discover their niche in the grand design. The crust is the layer of possibilities and the boundaries of a color, mainly the things that could be done, but haven't been, or haven't been done in quite awhile.

Be you novice, amateur, or professional, a vast majority of your work should be done in the core of the color pie. It's the creamy nougat center. Determining what abilities lie in a color pie takes fairly extensive knowledge of the game and all it's eras, but as said before, Gatherer can help you quickly identify themes. For instance, a search for all Blue creatures with regenerate returns a mere seven creatures, and only three of them can do it without help from Black or Green Furthermore, those three are all very old in design, this is obviously a trait outside the core of Blue. Green however has forty-seven creatures that can regenerate, placing it well in it's core.

Recommended Reading List:

• American Pie - Mark Rosewater
• Any Time of Day is a Good Time for Pie - Matt Cavotta
• Chaos Theory - Mark Rosewater
• The Magic Style Guide (Part 1) - Matt Cavotta
• The Value of Pie - Mark Rosewater
• In the Black - Mark Rosewater
• True Blue - Mark Rosewater
• It's Not Easy Being Green - Mark Rosewater
• Seeing Red - Mark Rosewater
• The Great White Way - Mark Rosewater

Exercises Part V:
#12) The ability to gain life (in any manner) belongs to what three color's cores? Can life gain also be placed into any other color's mantle?
#13) White and Black, though polar opposites, often appear to be one in the same in their cards often mirroring each other, how does the color pie justify this? (ex. White & Black Knight, Damnation & Wrath of God)
#14) A creature has first strike and haste, what color is it most likely?

While on the topic of color, lets get a little more advanced and go slightly into multicolored. Like every lesson in this article this is a brief overview, not an in-depth look at its in's and out's. As such, our lesson here will be very short.

*Hybrid cards indicate an intersection of colors.
*Gold cards indicate a union of colors.

When designing a hybrid card you should look for areas where colors share similarities. Since you can play either X or Y mana for it, the card should be able to be played and make sense as strictly color X or color Y. When developing hybrid cards you may find yourself designing from one color pie's mantle to make it work. Gold colors however require both color X and Y, thus they can pull any ability from either color into the card. This unison of color creates some unique card combinations that break the normal molds of Magic design. Gold cards should stick to each color's core for this reason.

Also note that gold cards contain the same area of a pie where hybrid cards are entirely located. If it were math, when dealing with this area hybrid cards would be the correct simplified answer, although gold cards would be correct as well. Alara Reborn cracked this wide open by finally creating cards that were both gold and hybrid. The rules remain the same though, it just gets more complicated when you intersect a union rather than a single pie.

Recommended Reading:
Hybrid Flavor - Doug Beyer

Exercises Part V:
#15) Should a creature with first strike that is Red and Blue be created as a hybrid or gold card?
#16) Compare and contrast Simoon and Firespout.
#17) How are the Ravnica Guildmages still in scope of hybrid card design?

So, you want to know how to easily break the color pie, and stay in the bounds of Magic? What if I told you there are several very large group of cards that have their own pie (complete with crust, core, and mantle) that often act separate from their colors? These pies regularly break the color pie and no one questions a thing. They're called tribes.

Some tribes clearly are defined by the core of a color, for instance Green Elves, White Angels, Red Goblins, Black Zombies, Blue Wizards. Yet others leap and bound from color to color such as Beasts, Djinn, Slivers, Elementals, and Spirits, while others sway from one or two colors like Cats (White and Green) and Birds (White and Blue). Tribes while sometimes bound to a particular color, will often define themselves on their tribal characteristics, and not their color.

The defining aspect of tribes is usually dictated in the style guides, and changes from area to area, plane to plane, era to era, and often overrides the color pie. It's not normal for Green to have flying, but it might be normal for a Bird to have flying. So if you want a Green flier, find a way to make a Green Bird, maybe a Parrot or a Bird of Paradise. However, if you go more Green than Bird, it'll probably lose flight and you end up with a larger more predatory bird like a Moa or a Cassowary.

Color also tends to define creatures in tribes as well. We all know Dragons typically fly, breathe fire, and are really big. These are some of the most prevalent things in our Dragon tribal pie core. While typically Red and sometimes fully sentient and intelligent, maybe we could transform it by changing it's colors:

Could a Blue Dragon exist?
Could it breathe fire?
Could it breathe something else like Ice?
Would it still fly?
Could it fly if it was Green?

The biggest thing when designing your creatures in existing tribes (and please use existing tribes), is to make sure it still makes sense in your color. We'll talk about the two ways it might make sense in our next and final two lessons. Just don't go designing a 10/10 flying Green Parakeet of Death in the mean time. Unless it's an Unset.

Exercises Part VI:
#18) What are the defining characteristics of the tribe pie for Spider?
#19) How might a Dragon be different if it was mono-Black?
#20) Could an Angel be feasibly created in mono-Green, mono-Blue or mono-Red?
#21) What defines Elementals more their tribe or color?

The Melvin School of Design comes from the player archetype Melvin. Be it a Timmy, Johnny, or Spike card, common, uncommon or rare, the only thing that matters to Melvin is how the card comes together and how it works. Rosewater has used Firemaw Kavu and Mystic Speculation to illustrate Melvin cards. I'd like to offer my own example to illustrate Melvin behavior and card design.

The first is our example card from this article itself, Withering Blast, which is derived from not one, but two cards. Both horizontally (across colors) and vertically (across rarity). While simple, it is nice to see a custom card that actually makes itself part of a horizontal and vertical cycle. The horizontal translation being Lava Dart another one powered sacrifice flashback common. The vertical translation being the Black uncommon Cabal Therapy illustrating how perfectly the card scales in power and color changes. Melvins would appreciate the homage to both of these cards, while getting excited about how well the card plays. Melvin would also appreciate that the card screams Black and how intricately sacrifice, the graveyard, and Flashback are intertwined.

The Melvin School of Design is all about the Magic universe and Magic cards. It promotes form and function of all the parts. To Melvin, each card is like the gear of a clock and should help the clock keep perfect time. Melvin designers tend to be fanatical and will often start designing based on a theory or concept and translating it into the Magic universe, starting at the bottom and working their way up. Each piece should be molded perfectly to fit the last. Melvin designers live a tough life filled with OCD-levels of attention paid to each and every aspect of their card.

In stark comparison to the Melvin School of Design, is the free-spirited liberal arts college of the Vorthos School of Design. Vorthos players tend to favor the art, story, and flavor of a card rather than its form or function. A Vorthos' main concern with card design is that it matches their inspiration.

Vorthos starts at the top and works his way down. Take for instance Spiny Starfish a perfect example of Vorthos design. Starfish, for those not familiar, are little tiny ocean dwellers that spend their time of the ocean floor. Starfish don't move around a whole lot and don't mind being attacked since they can regenerate lost limbs. In fact, some species lost limbs will even grow into an entirely new starfish. With those facts, lets look at our Starfish card. Anytime it regenerates, the Spiny Starfish grows a new Starfish token. A Vorthos designer doesn't care that regeneration isn't a core ability of Blue, because a Starfish most definitely wouldn't be Green and definitely regenerates.

Early Magic design contained lots of wordy Vorthos based cards, that mimicked real life ideas, or classic concepts of creatures. Over the years, this has become less and less prevalent, and much of Vorthos-style design phased out from functional to the flavor aspect. Vorthos design is far from dead though, as unified flavor from the style guide and Magic novels has helped celebrate their cause. Most recently Coldsnap and Time Shift paid homage to Vorthos, highlighting some retro-concepts in design that have long been pushed to the mantle of Magic design. Vorthos design is still very much well and alive, Melvin just doesn't let him out of the box as often as he used to.

Exercises Part VII:
#22) Classify the following as Vorthos or Melvin style design: Narwhal, Norin the Wary, Ichor Slick, War Barge, Brass Herald
#23) What's more likely - a Vorthos designer creates a Melvin style card, or a Melvin designer creates a Vorthos style card?
#24) Use the Vorthos School of Design to create a Mummy card.
#25) Do you favor Melvin or Vorthos style design?

That wraps it up for the intro into Magic design. Hopefully you learned something that will help you finally win that Monthly Card Contest. Maybe not, regardless let me know what you think in the forum.

~Cashew~

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Articles Spotlights from 2009:
Magus of the Bazaar – Merchant Magic
Parasitism: The Devolution of Magic Players. - by Kozy
Mechanic Week: Kicking a Bad Habit - by Streetz
MTG Theory: Card Design 101 . - by Cashew
Potatobrain's Guide to Token Decks. - by Potatobrain
The Magic of Friday Night. - by hamsandwich
Memories of an Old Magic Player: Recrossing the River Jordan. - by Chris Newton
Mechanic Week: Offering Up Mechanic Week. - by Dan Wright (Drathro)