Focused Study - Card Design Competition Discussion Thread

Competition Theme: Focused Study

It's time to really narrow your area of expertise this week - make sure you School everyone at it!

• You must create a minion which has an effect when all spells in your deck are the same School
  • We're looking for specific Schools here - "If all spells in your deck are Fire", for example

MathU is back again with another prompt - and this one is asking you to really hit those books!

As always, I can be reached through Discord or here on the site via PM if you have any issues to report.

Competition Phases

Here are the phases of this card design competition

• Submission Phase: Starts on Mon, Jun 14 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sat, Jun 19 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Voting Phase: Starts on Sat, Jun 19 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Sun, Jun 20 16:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Finalist Phase: Starts on Sun, Jun 20 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400). Runs until Mon, Jun 21 17:00 EDT (GMT -0400)
• Winner Selected: After finalist voting concludes and we validate votes.

Discussion Thread Rules

No thread rules were added to this season. Please populate and manually edit this thread with them.

Wow, anchorm4n, I swear I didn't see your cards before making mines, but they both go the same route (even if the execution isn't exactly the same).

EDIT: Changed the cards because previous wording was confusing.

Couple of ideas this time around. I think the design for the 2nd one is better, but I feel the token needs to be cleared up a bit somehow (do enemies freeze when they attack? after? etc.) The first one better supports the direction Blizzard is taking Frost Mage however.

EDIT: As much as I like the name Zro K'lvin (Zero Kelvin), the name Shiva might be more appropriate with the Shiva's Guard weapon.

Feedback:

Feedback a bit later.

Quote From Wailor

Wow, anchorm4n, I swear I didn't see your cards before making mines, but they both go the same route (even if the execution isn't exactly the same).

The Legendary is never going to activate because it's not a Shadow Spell itself. Not sure if you can make a 30 Shadow Spell deck anyway...

Quote From TheHoax91

Quote From Wailor

Wow, anchorm4n, I swear I didn't see your cards before making mines, but they both go the same route (even if the execution isn't exactly the same).

The Legendary is never going to activate because it's not a Shadow Spell itself. Not sure if you can make a 30 Shadow Spell deck anyway...

It's a wording issue. I intended it to work if all your spells belong to the Shadow school.

I see now that the wording I picked is not the most clear, but it makes grammatical sense (in the same way that "if your house only has brown chairs" allows your house to have, I don't know, red tables).

In any case, I edited my original post to use a less confusing wording.

As there are only very few arcane druid spells but a lot of them can be used in combo and meme decks.  So this card should help with some early survival.

It's been some time since I tried to enter another contest, but here I am. I think this is eligible, because this edition requires all spells to be of one spell School, but did not specify that the card needed to tell you of which. So this is just a nice, flexible card, akin to Dungeoneers.

Feedback time:

anchorm4n

Lundy

Demonxz95

linkblade91

R

Elfensilver

Neoguli

Cards that work with this effect are: Devour Mind, Thoughtsteal, Seance, Madame Lazul, Shifting Shade, Drakonid Operative, Archbishop Benedictus, Mind Vision, Psionic Probe, and probably others i forgot.

No more Mind Blast otks!

Neoguli

Elfensilver

anchorm4n

My second attempt. Now it mentions a specific school, but I gave myself a leeway to include more than one school in the text. Don't be confused, though, because all your spells need to be either Shadow or Fel - not both at once.

It's better late than never. Feedback.

Quote From linkblade91

That's the hypothetical I'm proposing. I wanted to create a card that bucks against the established class/school combinations, and see how well that did.

...I'm guessing not well.

I understand it. I also wanted to make that. But some classes lack of spell schools. And its hard to imagine how it would be if there will be some spells of this school. So I made a paladin holy card. Your card is cool btw.

Quote From linkblade91

Quote From R

linkblade91

Can you imagine warrior without classic spells like Brawl? This card need a lot of good fire spells to see play.

I would argue the first part is a lack of imagination, frankly, but yes: the Warrior would need some solid Fire spells for Grimlo to work out. That's the hypothetical I'm proposing. I wanted to create a card that bucks against the established class/school combinations, and see how well that did.

...I'm guessing not well.

This is the only issue I have with these comps compared to the ones we used to have back in Hearthpwn. Not sure if it's the voting system or that people here are more conservative (in card design, I mean, in the political sense it's quite the opposite xd), but I have the feeling that innovation is usually punished in OoC comps.

It's kinda funny, because my taste has also evolved to adapt this more "strict" environment.

Don't get me wrong, I still prefer what we have here, but I kinda miss submitting a wild idea while not having the feeling that I'm shooting my foot.

Quote From linkblade91

Warlock minion - "Start of Game: If all spells in your deck are Holy, draw them." It's just Renounce Darkness, so now you can play one on turn-2 every time lol

I'm wondering how much I can get away with a School+class combination that doesn't exist. Like a Warrior card that says "If all spells in your deck are Fire". If I put it in a custom expansion, can people imagine the rest? Probably not :(

For what it's worth, there are some Warrior Fire spells - Molten Breath and Ironforge Portal are both Fire spells. They also have a single Nature spell with Sudden Genesis. (I'm omitting the dual class cards here, which include Holy and Nature spells, but those tags obviously derive from Paladin and Rogue class identities.)

On the one hand, I think Warrior is a poor choice because they're not expected to get much in the way of spell schools - most of their spells represent physical things to mesh with their class identity/WoW abilities. On the other hand, this templating presumably implies that if your deck has no spells, the trigger is activated (akin to the "no duplicates" rules when your deck has zero cards). In that view, your Fire Warrior spell template would be totally valid, but you'd basically be making a card that reads "If your deck contains no spells."

Personally, I like the idea of pushing those boundaries, but I think your ask for people to "imagine the rest" demonstrates where that really belongs: in a Custom Hearthstone Expansion design competition. (Card competitions, I think, ask the designers and judges to imagine a new card added in isolation.) Maybe Out of Cards should try doing something like that once a year, or once competition season, etc. to give people room to play with bigger concepts that require multi-card support.

Or maybe there's room for something smaller in scope that would satisfy this - something like a "Build a custom class package" competition where you'd design something like six cards to support some new archetype. Then we can all see if we can come up with anything better than Freeze Shaman lol.

Making a full new hero or expansion takes a lot of time. Mini archetype package is great idea.

Edit: Thoughts about this inspired me and I'm already making a Toad Shaman archetype lul.

Can't believe I am not among them. Now I remember why I don't participate often, it's because I feel upset not being able to advance further.

I was victim of that one Hearthpwn contest where my and other cards on the same page were tied for 13th, which led to some discussion about changing their contest's rules.

Quote From Neoguli

Can't believe I am not among them. Now I remember why I don't participate often, it's because I feel upset not being able to advance further.

I was victim of that one Hearthpwn contest where my and other cards on the same page were tied for 13th, which led to some discussion about changing their contest's rules.

I think the main problem with your card is that it doesn't really do what the prompt said it should do. You didn't focus on the theme of a single Spell School, but went with both Fel and Shadow. Fel doesn't have anything to do with Soul Fragments first of all, it's always demon related. Then secondly, Fel and Shadow are almost the only spell schools Warlock and Demon Hunter have. Barely a restriction in the deck building process, like asking priest to have Shadow and Holy spells.

Beyond that... what's the reward supposed to be? Healing? Because any other Soul Shard synergy is actually anti synergy, as stuff like Void Drinker and Soulshard Lapidary will DESTROY the spells you made into Soul Fragments. Why would you want that? If you wanted to just have the soul fragments drawn to heal, then why use soul fragments at all if their thing is getting burnt for benefits?

Quote From anchorm4n

Sorry R! :(

:[

Quote From anchorm4n

I'm super suprised that R's Combat Dominie didn't make it. Maybe I won't be as straight forward with my feedback in the future, looks like it might paint a target on people's back if their cards are labeled as a potential winner (and I wasn't the only one who said so). Sorry R! :(

I gave it a low score because it was OP. 1 mana draw a card and it's a 2/1 Divine Shield. Argent Squire, Novice Engineer

And Paladin with just Holy spells is very easy to do, not much of a restriction.

Quote From BasilAnguis

Quote From anchorm4n

I'm super suprised that R's Combat Dominie didn't make it. Maybe I won't be as straight forward with my feedback in the future, looks like it might paint a target on people's back if their cards are labeled as a potential winner (and I wasn't the only one who said so). Sorry R! :(

I gave it a low score because it was OP. 1 mana draw a card and it's a 2/1 Divine Shield. Argent Squire, Novice Engineer

And Paladin with just Holy spells is very easy to do, not much of a restriction.

I checked, and there are really only like 2-4 paladin spells across all of hearthstone that aren't holy that you might actually want to play, aside from Oh My Yogg! there is virtually no deck building restrictions. And on top of that, the reward isn't terribly interesting. You get a strong 1-drop, but that is it. In theory, if I am going to build my deck around a single theme, I would like the payoff to be more than just a good turn 1 play.

Quote From Neoguli

Can't believe I am not among them. Now I remember why I don't participate often, it's because I feel upset not being able to advance further.

 

I think one of the main reasons your card might have done bad is because you tried to do something too unique. Aside from the card from the adventure that you had mentioned, there was no precedents for an ability that stored one card inside of another card. It just felt weird. If you had restricted it to a single school instead of doubling up (which kind of defeated the purpose of the competition in the first place) and also just had it shuffle in 10 soul fragments instead of attaching them to cards (which would have mathematically worked out virtually the same way, except it wouldn't have anti-synergy with other soul fragment cards) then you likely would have done better.

So... it's not about being totally unique, but just solid enough to garner attention. A little sadge for me, as I do like to be somewhat flashy with designs.

@Neoguli I dunno, your card was actualy my favourite (except mine of course), and I realy thought you gonna make it.

Thanks linkblade and anchorm4n!

Well done on the Shadowpriest prediction Wailor, Darkbishop Benedictus is almost exactly Shadow Priestess Shai!

blizz hire me pls