What makes a really great Magic card design? A lot of players' intuitions are so poor that they boil it down to tournament viability only, but it goes way beyond that.

The ideal Magic card design is one that tells multiple stories: one for the interactions it implies at all levels (player vs. other player, player vs. their own conflicting ideas about what to do, and so on), one for the narrative the creative forces behind the set are trying to tell (stories, characters, and so on), one for all the inspirations that went into its original inception spark in one person's mind and through the processes that vet such an idea (references to famous non-Magic ideas, references to other cards, everyday life experiences, and so on).

We don't pay attention to a huge portion of the forces that go on in the time between being any kind of thing at all and being a physical cardboard card with words and a picture and numbers that we look at online or hold or sleeve or use to interact with other cards that had other interesting journeys toward existing.

The more "good stories" a card is telling with the least amount of effort, the better its design. It's that damn simple.

Elegance and relevance. Creativity and cohesion. Cards without these aspects can be many things: oddities, failures, irrelevant; but they can't be great.

Those great ones are the cards I want to focus on for the next couple of articles. We should research the parties responsible for all these. They did Magic proud.

Join me on a journey through 75 of Magic's greatest communications from the Multiverse, to us. To the best of my ability, the attached image for each entry will be the original printing to give further context to its place in history.

Flash in Plug!

Check out Arena Craft Podcast this coming Monday where I'll likely be appearing in audio form, discussing Magic in the time of quarantine. That is if I don't ruin the audio for them or whatever. I'm a Rascal, I tell ya!

So yeah, draw them a bunch of interest and clicks so I look like a big ol' deal. Or just sit in silence in your house a few more months, I don't care.

Where was I? Oh, right!

Anyway, here are some Magic cards that went above and beyond:

75. Star of Extinction

As Magic entered the Arena era a few years ago, there was a big gap in the transition to comfortable, accessible digital Magic and the paper experience where a lot of the Dinosaur and Pirate cards were overly simplistic for veteran players. The Limited format was mined and solved in the opening week.

But it was probably a worthy investment because assuredly, there are a number of players that saw a card like Star of Extinction, which in addition to having a blatantly fun and powerful effect at a high rarity, told an entire story with no effort whatsoever. It's a resonant card that has the capacity to "teach" new players about the joy of the Magic experience in the span of seconds. There's no better first card to start this series with as a smashing example of design excellence.

74. Banishing Light

The most interesting things about this card aren't even about this card. They're about Oblivion Ring.

Oblivion Ring was the go-to design for white permanent removal at the time planeswalkers suddenly made it matter way more. The only issue is that the card has a significant development failure in its timing. I sat through multiple judge calls in Standard Grand Prix of the day waiting for a judge to explain how Oblivion Ring "works" to a puzzled opponent. And I didn't even go to many Grand Prix!

Anyway, it's amazing it took us as long as we did to get the fixed version - though, truthfully, I imagine advanced players prefer Oblivion Ring for the additional but unintuitive patterns that show up around it. Nevertheless, this card is going to exist for a long time. Necessarily.

73. Lich's Mirror

Shards of Alara ushered in mythic rarity, and with it, the anxiety around it. The coolest card of the batch to quell some of the fears (that never went away) was this one. It encapsulates an elegant but unique game situation that's more interesting than competitive but that makes for great stories, bizarre but goofily fair gameplay, and all the other things you'd prefer niche Magic cards be. It doesn't ever do the things you think it will on first preview, but that's part of the sad journey of a clever card that shows what could've been rather than what is.

A delightful if unsung Magic card that will grant experiences few if any other cards do. This effect may never again be so elegantly done.

72.Censor

Upon release, this was such a difficult card to evaluate without seeing it in the context of every single matchup it was involved in. You couldn't just know how good this card was.

As fate would have it, the format it was most involved in was homogenous, meaning that the implications of every decision around every copy of it magnified out exponentially. The play patterns are subtle and "mathy" when a card like Censor is live, but they're there, and the better players are spending brain power on them.

The final proof in the pudding is the conceptual simplicity. While we'll probably never get back a word like "zap," the word "censor" is in fine hands.

71. Stuffy Doll

The usual reprints of note now involve recurring characters, and for all the fault in how unappealing Time Spiral could be to new Magic eyes, it did have some clever homages to the era before it without overplaying the gimmick, even though that's what the set gimmick was. None of the tributes was better or more clever than the poor little doll from Black Vise, The Rack, et al. getting tortured in the most enjoyable way yet. The player choice text appears much more often after Stuffy than before, informing Curse and multiplayer design that we now take for granted.

That Dave Allsop's reinterpretation of Richard Thomas's tragic guinea pig is so creepy makes it all the greater. Hats off.

70. Phyrexian Dreadnought

When you first open a booster pack, what do you do?

Do you go to the back for the rare? What if you didn't know what the rarity was because the expansion symbols were all the same color? You'd better know where it is or you'll have to figure out on card text alone.

Keep reading. Faster! Faster! No, not that one. That can't be it.

Keep reading!

What if you suddenly realized you knew what the rare was because the first glance statistics on the corner of the card were so stupid that you just had to find out what it would cost you to get what is obviously too good to be true? What would you trade for that rate? Your creatures? Your deck slots? Your dignity?

Cards like this are inspiring because they exploit the living hell out of knowing how we read Magic cards when we first see them. Different players do different things, but few just read from left to right the way we read a book. In fact, recent science shows that people are entirely determined in how they analyze a new environment upon immediate first instinct: They do whatever they do when they read. We generally go from left to right in my part of the world, but that's not universal in the least.

All of this is also true for Magic cards: We look at them differently, depending on who we are and how we think. The thing is though, there is no way to look at Phyrexian Dreadnought without a giant flood of involuntary questions appearing in your mind. No matter which corner or bit of text you go with, you're about to get a dopamine hit.

How do I circumvent this? Can it be done? What's the best way?

Drip.

Wow, that is addictive.

Designing Women

You know, it's not a relevant pun or anything beyond the word "design," but I just wanted to say that I once referenced a Delta Burke and Dixie Carter television vehicle for a game design article I was compensated for.

So being that I ate up a bunch of text on the intro, the podcast plug (listen to it, you), and the Designing Women nod - haha, remember that show? - we didn't get through as many cards today as you probably wanted.

But that's part of my plan, see? You're coming back to CoolStuffInc every day, hoping to see more commentary on Magic design greatness. A good designer owns their audience.

I own you! (And by that, I mean, you don't have anything else to do. #QUARANTEAM.)

Here's a preview of some cards from the next big batch:

(~_^)

The Rascal

The Indestructible Danny West