As I work through a few ideas, these have percolated to the top, and I need them off my notice board.

Let’s dive in. Read close; there’s a challenge this week!

Magic Board Game

My God, I have no idea why this hasn’t happened yet. Whatever committee at Wizards is against it needs to be fully changed out with the interns who made it there from ambition and haven’t settled in yet. I always trust interns because they’re without bias and absolutely love risk. As a company that can do small print runs, with near unlimited marketing budgets, let’s just have a damn Magic board game made.

If it’s that hard, here are four ideas:

Steal a Dungeon & Dragons Designer for a Week

Give him or her a week of coffee, snacks, and a budget to brainstorm with freelance designers. After a week, start playtesting like hell. Board Game Geek would shut down from traffic if someone were to solicit folks there directly.

The Drizzt D&D concept, but for Magic

Why not use the mechanic, make a small print run at a convention, and test it out? If people are pissed, you make more. If people don’t like it, make it expensive, and still make $5 per unit to at least be revenue-neutral. Market tests that make money are absurd. I don’t know why they don’t do tests like this more often.

Dark Tower 2.0 . . . with Magic

Take one of the fifteen towers from Magic—say, Urza's Tower—and make a game on it.

Doing it on The Brother’s War just writes itself, doesn’t it?

Outsource to Fantasy Flight Games to Make a Talisman-inspired Magic Game

They did it with Talisman to make a revised version and made Relic from Warhammer 40K. Why couldn’t they do it with Magic? Wizards already outsources Nexus Ops to FFG, and from what I can tell, it worked out well.

MTG MATCH (Comically, It’s Not a Dating Service)

A friend and I were discussing that playtesting is crazy-difficult. We can find stores to play with formats, but the social networking of players died on the vine with Gleemax, the Magic social networking site.

Here’s the issue: To find people for playtesting, you set up a time, and every time, it’s the players for whom you know all their tells, and the actual practice really isn’t that great. Now, I’m not talking for the organized teams that dominated Grands Prix and Pro Tours. For the everyman who’s going to a Grand Prix and wants to at least shake some rust off or fine-tune, why don’t we a have something to find people?

Let’s go from strategy to tactic.

Here’s the strategy: Make an app that would allow people to plug in formats they play and their play styles and then search for opponents by zip code.

Here’s the tactic: Make a small team that creates a concept with images. The rubber hits the road when a simple messaging app could do that and confirm that people are real through Magic’s favorite new medium: Twitter.

God knows I’d check it out a few times when I’m looking for the sixth or eighth player when I’m home drafting.

Daarken at WotC

So, Daarken, a.k.a. Mike Lim, was on a concept-art push at Wizards of the Coast.

What does that mean for future sets? Well, it means digital art is still going to be a push, and that’s about it. He’s so damn versatile that it’s hard to tell.

Opening up the Style Guides

I have a few style guides, giving concept art, historical background, and worldbuilding info on new Magic sets and planes. Our own MJ Scott and Brendan Weiskotten have a few, too. They are frickin’ awesome and change your views on the set entirely. New Phyrexia is so much more flavorful knowing all the things behind the Praetors.

These are highly controlled and posted only in snippets on DailyMTG.com.

Also true is that some artists have kept some of their concepts and sold them at conventions.

Our game has hit twenty years old this year, and in that feat, we have twenty years of history. Magic may never have a museum, but how can we release these to the public while maintaining non-disclosure agreements and using them to a revenue benefit?

If Wizards were to make old style guides available, perhaps ones that are four or more years old, how would a business release or offer them to the public? Give me your best ideas.

Best ideas win a free booster pack . . . from me . . . for real. Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Odd Tokens Need Printing

There exist a pretty small number of tokens that aren’t available in print yet. While a From the Vault: Tokens set would be ludicrous, perhaps a convention could make them as a specialty item. How cool would an art convention with a lot of Magic artists be with alternate-art tokens?

While Stangg’s Stangg Twin (pictured as his Vanguard online card to the right) and Hazezon Tamar’s Sand Warrior tokens would be nice in print, maybe in foil, I’m looking more at the Magic Online tokens that somehow still haven’t been made in print. From Magic Librarities, a third-party group at Rugrat Productions made the bottom two faux tokens, but we could use some 2013 art with the modern frame, right?

As a personal example, I play Spawning Bed in my Melira, Sylvok Outcast combo Commander deck. It currently has no physical token. Online, it makes 2/2 Spawn tokens that looks like this:

This would be a fantastic R&D intern duty. It forces them to learn more about obscure cards and really look at tokens and what is needed. There are always ways to put them into print. Think of Shards of Alara. It didn’t have emblems, yet Elspeth, Knight-Errant got hers recently in Modern Masters. Wizards notices there are needs when it comes to these, but Commander is coming up, and only cards included have tokens. We won’t be seeing random tokens in there. This might be a crusade for Twitter and Tumblr to mobilize folks to make a list and then poke Mark Rosewater with a stick about it.

Magic Original Art Update

Here’s a quick update on a few things:

• We had a sweet spot of about a year, when art was just elevating in price, seemingly every week with new pickups. A lot of “minor” works have been sold as collectors are upgrading and focusing their collections. Here’s a snippet on minor-versus-major in an older article I wrote.
• Original Magic art collectors congregate at TheManaDrain.com’s forums, post their art on OriginalMagicArt.com, discuss art on Twitter using #mtgart, and attend Spectrum Live in Kansas City and Illuxcon in Allentown, PA as their main conventions. They also are in a bunch of rare/misprint Facebook groups.
• Artists are starting to understand that every time they touch something, it increases its value. There’s a reason PSA-graded card cases are signed now. Signatures are slowly gaining acceptance as something people need to pay for. Print runs are becoming more solidified, with hand signatures being sold for slightly more money. Collectors also becoming angrier when seriously low-ball offers come to them on art from “market research” that is a guess at best. Don’t be that guy or gal. It really pisses them off and aggravates other collectors a lot. It’s disrespectful at best and is douchetastic as worst.
• Limited Edition Alpha original artworks had a floor of $1,000, then $2,000, and now it’s right north of $3,000 . . . as a starting minimum price for any artwork used in the Alpha/Beta sets. If you see an Alpha piece for less than $3,000, buy it immediately without delay. Retail pricing can vary widely with more “iconic” cards across rarities. For example, Chaoslace is a rare, but Craw Wurm, a common, was used a lot by twelve-year-old players.
• People are helping others get into art a lot now. Chris Pikula was helped to get his invitational artwork and likeness on Meddling Mage, and that’s the iceberg tip. I heard Alex Bertoncini picked up a piece recently, too.

Judges have been helping each other on this for years, seeing art up close at conventions, but collectors and even artists are doing this. Though in the artist case, they trade for other works.

Team-Building

My high school team was the Melrose Dutchmen. We were originally the Deutschmen, being a German town, and people were proud of their immigrant heritages. When World War II broke out, being German wasn’t so cool anymore. We then became Dutch, complete with a wonderful M purple and yellow logo. Even our jerseys, across all sports, basically just had our name on it. It was hard to become excited about a nonteam name. Looking back, I’m happy we weren’t just another set of bears, eagles, or warriors, but having something to dress up as and rally behind has serious benefits.

Not all colleges should have sports, but those that do have a central focus to rally behind. Schools in Germany, for example, really have a transaction taking place not unlike a law school. (It’s why law students don’t donate back to their schools—they paid for a service, so why should they donate?) In most countries without high school sports, you arrive to learn and then go home. It’s more of a job you don’t care about than a place where you connect to on a deeper level. Perhaps a central brand is what makes us American. We name everything from every softball league to cliques of friends. I kid you not; some girls I know in college called themselves “The Clique,” as though they were in a 1990s angsty movie, with them being the evil, popular kids. It was comical.

As for Magic, we are starting—through the Vorthos lens of art, culture, and story—to send our brands and logos out into the community. What’s next is enormously important for the community-relations department of Hasbro. While Wizards doesn’t really have a foundation or a team of community-relations officers, with near-zero effort, they could.

Imagine if a high school team had a Native American name like the Braves or Chiefs and decided to change it. (Side note: An awesome team name in MN is Blooming Prairie Awesome Blossoms.) What if they changed it to the Archons, Hellkites, or Nacatls? Would Wizards help them with branding it? That’s a big question, and probably, it’s too far.

Let’s focus in on a smaller project. Imagine you’re on a softball team and want to call yourself the Golgari Swarm. Can you call up Wizards to ask for a vector image, used in Adobe Illustrator, to use on your screen-printed tee shirts? Would Wizards sponsor your team? Would they offer you a free booster box to draft at the end of the season for thinking of them and offering a ton of free advertising for the company? Sports might also be too far.

Let’s focus in on the realistic. Maybe you’re a mathlete, a quiz bowler, or something of the sort. If you want a Magic-themed creature to represent you, do you ignore copyright and just do it, or is there a way to make it official where everyone wins? If I didn’t just play pick-up basketball and ultimate Frisbee, I’d seriously look into this. If you’re making a winter league in any such activity, look into it!

And can I just buy my dachshunds some Ravnica-themed clothing? Is that too hard to ask?

- Mike