Inventor's Fair: My Best Designs

This page is a catalogue of my best performing designs for the weekly Inventor's Fair Magic: The Gathering custom card contest— mostly those that are put in the winner's circle or those that are runners-up. For each design, I'll give the card itself, the judge's comments, and a sketch of the underlying concept and the thought process that got me to the final design. I'll also add a note on any revisions that it underwent thanks to critiques on the Inventor's Fair discord server, as well as any notes on why I think this design was stronger than other designs that haven't faired so well.

Entries are presented in reverse chronological order (i.e. newest to oldest). The links below can take you directly to any entry.

Enduring Legacy (Winner—All That Remains)

Enduring Legacy 2w

Enchantment—Aura

---

Enchant creature

When enchanted creature dies, you may search your library for a creature card with mana value 3 or less. Put that card onto the battlefield, then shuffle your library. Return Enduring Legacy to the battlefield attached to that creature at the beginning of the next end step.

Art by Woody Woodward

The prompt for this week was to design a card that, flavorfully and/or mechanically, utilizes the concept of HOPE..

I found this week a very difficult one to get started on. The prompt was vague, and flavour-first at that, which meant building a mechanical identity for the card from the ground up. My first couple of ideas (some kind of anti-poison protection spell and a green sweeper broadly evoking the theme of standing alone against a tide of monsters) both felt 'off' somehow, and once they got whittled down further by feedback on the Discord they just didn't really 'spark joy'. I was actually very close to just submitting the sweeper and phoning it in for this week, but one last idea was niggling at the back of my mind so I thought I should at least give it a go.

The concept was to lean into the idea of legacy—the hope that comes from carrying the torch for those that came before and handing it on to the next generation. It's a topic I've been thinking about a lot, recently. Reckoning with my baby siblings getting their first jobs and going off to uni has got me thinking about my hopes and fears for them and the world they find themselves in, which is in many ways even harsher than it was when I was going through the same things. It's also got me thinking about how I can be a good older sibling to them—how I can be there for them in the way that I would've wanted. I wanted to create a card that captures something of this bitter-sweetness.

Once I had this theme laid down, the initial design came quite quickly. My first draft was as follows:

I always wanted the card to be in white, a colour which has tradition, hope, and community as key themes. Looking to Ranger-Captain of Eos , Ranger of Eos and Recruiter of the Guard , I noted that while white can tutor for creatures, it usually requires the tutored creature to be appropriately small—tutoring for creatures of any size is pretty firmly green. As such, I added altered the condition to be 'search your library for a creature card with mana value 3 or less and with lesser mana value than that creature '.

This was the version of the card I took to the Discord for review. @MyojinOfNightsReach pointed out that the mana cost was probably too restrictive for what it does, and that I should probably consider having the aura return on end step like Gift of Immortality to prevent abuse with a sac outlet. He also suggested that at 3 mana and returning on the end step, I could probably drop the 'lesser mana' restriction. I liked this change from a flavour perspective as well—the original flavour of the 'lesser mana value' clause was one of fading glory the further one gets from the heroic ancestor, a pretty common fantasy trope but one that is inherently both somewhat reactionary (strong 'retvrn' energy) and not especially hopeful. Allowing the descendents to potentially 'outshine' the predescessor (by searching for a 3-drop after placing this enchantment on a 2-drop, for example), the theme became much more reminiscent of the ebb and flow of wisdom across generations, which felt both more true to life and more in line with the theme of hope. Applying all these changes got me to the final design, shown above.

The judge gave the following feedback:

All told, these feedback feels more like patting on the back than anything—it highlights the key themes and, indeed, play patterns I was hoping to evoke. (Well, not quite the same on the play patterns—I was more imagining this as a tool for aggro white weeny decks to maintain tempo than as a way to cycle through hate bears, but the the main idea that it allows you to have a sort of pseudo-protection and/or toolbox was there.) This admittedly means I don't have much to go on when it comes to improving for future submissions, but honestly I feel like this is one case of just a really nice, tight design, and so I am happy to more or less leave it at that.

Anointed Paladin (Winner—Tricks of the Grave)

Anointed Paladin 2w

Creature—Human Knight

---

When Anointed Paladin enters or dies, create a 1/1 white Soldier creature token with lifelink.

Afterglow 3ww (3ww, Exile this card from your graveyard: Create a token that's a copy of it, except it's a 1/1 blue Illusion with no mana cost and it has “When this creature becomes the target of a spell, sacrifice it.” Activate only as a sorcery.)

[2/1]

Art by Casondra Logan

The prompt for this week was to design a card with an activated ability that can't be activated on the battlefield.

I've recently been enjoying brewing with Timeless Witness in Commander, and I really enjoy how Eternalize allows you to use her effect twice, once in the early-mid game and again at a second, later point. As such, I thought this prompt would be a great opportunity to explore this kind of design space more by creating my own Embalm/Eternalize-type ability.

I've also been a big fan of Dream Strix and the Illusion ability (as is now—I believe this effect used to be tied to the Spirit type but was moved to Illusions by R&D). By forcing the creature to sacrifice itself when targetted by a spell, the Illusion ability creates a very interesting and open-ended design space—it can be used as a strength of the card, as in Dream Strix, allowing you to get a death trigger without depending on finding a sac outlet or using an opponent's board or actions; or it can be used as a drawback that makes an otherwise scary creature more manageable, as is the case with Phantasmal Dreadmaw , a terrifying 6/6 for 4 with Trample which uses the Illusion ability as a built-in vulnerability that justifies its hyper-competitive rate.

Putting these two ideas together gave me the concept for Afterglow, an Embalm/Eternalize variant that returns the creature as a 1/1 Illusion copy with the Illusion ability. The flavour here is intended to be a memory or legacy made manifest, rather than a literal haunting spirit.

This led to two main questions—

1. On a mechanical side, what kind of abilities would synergise well with an ability that creates a more vulnerable token copy of the creature?
2. On the flavour side, what kind of character would inspire a memory or legacy?

My first thought for the first question was some kind of hate bear or stax piece. In this case, the Afterglow ability would allow you to recycle back your hate bear while ensuring that the returned copy is much easier for your opponent to remove, acting as a kind of counter-balance to the inherent pressure that recycling an oppressive stax piece poses. While I still think this presents an interesting direction to take the mechanic, I felt that it didn't really capture what originally made me excited about an Embalm/Eternalize-derived mechanic—i.e., the possibility of repeating a powerful ETB effect.

I then spent some time looking at white ETB effects that would fit this space, and briefly considered a Banisher Priest -type effect. I actually really liked this idea, as it seemed to marry the two underlying concepts I was playing with quite well—on the one hand, getting two Banisher Priests for one scratched that 'doing the cool thing twice' itch quite nicely; on the other hand, this made good use of the vulnerability of the Illusion token, allowing your opponent to more easily remove the removal and get their creature back by targeting the token with any spell. Unfortunately, while toying with different flavour ideas, I came across Angel of Sanctions , which does this exact concept using Embalm. The overlap here was just a little too much, and I didn't want another of my designs to be read as too derivative, so I decided to shelve this version of the design.

All this conceptualising brought me back to Dream Strix and its on-death trigger. I realised that there are several creatures—such as Ashen Rider and Patron of the Arts —that have abilities that trigger on both e.t.b. and death, and that this kind of effect would also synergise very well with my Afterglow concept. Having an effect on both e.t.b. and death with Afterglow allows you to get the effect four times—original e.t.b., death of the original, e.t.b. of the token, and death of the token. With the token's self-sacrifice ability, you effectively have access to the final death trigger at any point when you have a spell that targets available.

This idea, alongside my answer to the flavour question, brought me to the final design for Anointed Paladin—a holy paladin whose feats of heroism inspire others to rise up in defence of the cause. Their memory returns as an Illusion to inspire again, allowing you to gain four tokens across the game.

This design actually underwent less development through the Discord than most of my entries—I was advised to drop the rarity from Rare to Uncommon, but other than that the feedback focussed on my other design for this week (a cycling card), which I ultimately decided was just a weaker entry than this one.

So, with the concept out the way, let's have a look at the judge's comments:

Overall, I'm very happy with this feedback—it caught the key appeal of the concept, and gave it a fair shakedown. I'm glad the judge was also an Embalm enjoyer, as I risk otherwise I might have caught some flack for being too derivative again, although I stand by the claim that any such criticism would be unjustified for exactly the reasons the judge's comments indicate.

Lessons learned. So, what can I learn from the success of this design? I would say there are two main take-aways:

1. Push the boat out. This design was a little more risky than some of my previous designs, and in this case I feel like it worked really well. Sometimes I get too focussed on sticking within the space of what's been done in Magic, and forget that the point of designing new cards is to push those boundaries one way or another.
2. Don't just go with your first design. My first thought for this week was a cycling card, which I ultimately abandoned. As you can see from the design discussion above, even once I focussed in on this idea it went through several iterations, and this really helped nail down a final design that was much stronger than any of the iterations running up to it.