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.

Warden of the Witchlight (Winner—Garbage Day)

Warden of the Witchlight 3b

Creature—Shade Warlock

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Pitiless Bargain (You may sacrifice an artifact, enchantment, or token as you cast this spell. You may repeat this process any number of times.)

Whenever this creature enters or you bargain a spell, you draw a card and you lose 1 life for each time that spell was bargained.

[2/4]

Art by Cay West

The prompt this week was to design a card that can sacrifice a noncreature permanent type.

I knew right away that I wanted to do something with Bargain, a WOE mechanic that I absolutely love and which has seem some continued support with the enchantment sacrifice subtheme in DSK. In particular, I wanted to mess around in the design space of a "multibargain" effect—that is, the multikicker to Bargain's kicker. My initial draft for this card just cared about how many times it itself was bargained, but feedback on the discord pointed out that this seeemed a little close to Malevolent Witchkite . As the main reason I wanted this effect to be a Bargain variant (and not an unkeyworded ability like Malevolent Witchkite's) was because I wanted to facilitate Bargain support cards that cared about both this new mechanic and the original Bargain, I opted to rework the card into one of those bargain support cards that I was imagining. Thus, I decided to tweak the draw effect to check for both its own bargaining and for any other bargains you might make while you control it.

With that, all we needed was a flavourful keyword to express the idea of ruthless bargaining away your entire board for a modicum of power—Pitiless Bargain seemed a good fit—we were ready to submit. Now let's take a look at what the judges said:

All told, that's pretty much what I was aiming for, so a good solid result for a good solid entry!

The Notorious Snatcher (Runner Up—But No Cigar)

The Notorious Snatcher 1b

Creature—Rat

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When The Notorious Snatcher enters, look at target opponent's hand. You may exile a nonland card from it until The Notorious Snatcher leaves the battlefield.

Afterglow 2w (2w, 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 or ability, sacrifice it.” Activate only as a sorcery.)

[1/2]

Art by Tom Lopez

The prompt this week was to design a card that creates a copy with modified attributes.

I toyed with a couple of ideas for this week but quickly felt pulled back to the Afterglow mechanic I developed for the Anointed Paladin card from a few weeks ago. I had really enjoyed playing around with that mechanic, and while I felt that the Anointed Paladin gave a good initial showing, I felt there was a richer design space here to explore.

I mentioned in my discussion on Anointed Paladin that my original idea for that first card was a Banisher Priest -type effect, but that I opted not to follow that design route after finding Angel of Sanctions . While I still didn't want to just make Angel of Sanctions II, I felt that if I was going to double-dip in Afterglow, it would make most sense to explore the other half of the design—Anointed Paladin explored using the Illusion ability to help you get a creature that you want to die off your board, so this week I wanted to explore the space of using the Illusion ability as a weakness that helps your opponent get an Annoying Bastard off your board. Banisher Priest-like effects were out for now, and I wanted to try and explore a different colour space for the design as well, so these constraints together eventually led me to Kitesail Freebooter / Deep-Cavern Bat effects.

With a mechanical concept in place, it was just a matter of finding a flavour to match. Afterglow was intened to evoke the idea of legacies and memories—that even once the creature has passed, its memory may go on to inspire new generations. I played this straight for Anointed Paladin and so I wanted to be a little subversive this time—what instead of inspiring generations to come, we had a memory that tormented generations; not fame, but infamy. This eventually lead me to the idea of folk monsters, and in particular, the idea of a rat that keeps stealing food from the pantry; but is it just one exceptionally talented rat-thief, or is it just an infestation of rats that resembles the antics of a single, talented pilferer?

I called the card The Notorious Snatcher, intending to evoke the idea of a legacy of rats stealing food, and took the idea to the Discord for feedback. Particularly helpeful in developing this design was feedback from @3smuth++, who pointed out that there was a weird conflict between my choice to use the new Illusion mechanic (seen in Dream Strix ), which only sacrifices the creature if its targeted by a spell, with the way that this kind of card interacts with card advantage: forcing players to spend a card to remove a threat which did not cost a card to put out is always going to result in a 'feels bad' moment, even if the illusion effect allowed non-removal spells (such as buff spells) to flex into that slot. Their advice was to try and find some other ability that could lead to more interesting re-evaluations of the original card, but advised that if I was committed to the Illusion ability (which I was), I should think about using the old Illusion ability seen on cards like Gossamer Phantasm , which would at least allow the token to be removed by spare abilities that might not cost anything at all.

I liked this idea, and so I revised the design to the final version seen above. (Note: I consider this an errata of the text of the Afterglow ability, so please do read the Anointed Paladin using the new text as well!)

This was my first runner-up result, so I was excited to see what feedback the judge would provided. This is what I got:

To which I can only say: yeah, fair.

On the first point, you'll notice that in my concept I had this idea of a bit of a puzzle or mystery, is this just one really successful rat or is it a legacy of generations of rat pulling off ratty heists? You will also notice that literally nothing of this concept made it onto the final card, neither in art nor flavour text. So while this is where the 'The' in the title of a non-legendary came from, it doesn't really make sense in the final design, and I should've committed one way or the other—either ditching the 'The' or making it a Legend (probably the former!).

Regarding colours, I genuinely did not even consider that you might try to run this in a deck that could not play it out of hand on the off-chance you could dump it in grave with a mill or discard and then get its graveyard effect, but honestly, I know the Reanimator archetype, so that's very much a use case I should have thought of. To remedy this, I think I would change the cost of the second ability to 1wb. I want to keep the white in there, because I also wanted this idea to play with using Afterglow as a reward for dipping into a second colour (effectively allowing you to double up on one of your key removal pieces if you did so), but I definitely don't want this to be available to mono-white graveyard decks, so having both feels like a good compromises—as well as doing a better job of sign-posting that the white pips are supposed to encourage multi-colour play.

Enduring Legacy (Winner—All That Remains)

Enduring Legacy 2w

Enchantment—Aura

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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

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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.