Happy Birthday, Out of Cards! We're celebrating one year of being on the Internet in various ways, and here is no exception. Feel free to assume that this is so late because of all the celebrating I've been doing, and not just because I overslept... again...
Conversation this week is all about the party!
Gnarly, Dude
Of course, we first have to congratulate Tox, who won the WCDC with their Gnarlroot!
We look forward to their exciting theme ideas for next week!
Years Go By
It's Out of Cards Birthday! Well, not really - pretty sure that was late last week sometime - but we're celebrating all week anyway.
We've done a lot of things on the site over the year it's been live - let's look at some of the Fan Creations related projects!
The dreaded set of R3xxar
Technically pre-OoC, "War of the Dark" was an April Fools joke article I wrote during the initial testing of the site.
Parodying the MtG set War of the Spark, it claimed that the third expansion of the Year of the Dragon would center around Hero Cards, with 36 of them in total, one per rarity per class! While not accurate at all, we did end up getting the Galakrond cards as major players in the expansion, so I'll claim that as a victory.
Spotted it! It's right there in the title!
Demonxz95 started off their Fan Community Spotlight series a little over 9 months ago now, looking at various expansions, classes and Core Set reworks from community members and interviewing them about their design process.
I love this series - getting to see so many massive projects from people is always exciting, and hearing more about how they went about designing something helps me when I'm doing my own projects. It's also just fun to see behind the scenes on how some cards came to be, stories you often wouldn't hear otherwise.
Hey guess, welcome to my podcast...
And of course, I started up my own series once the WCDC got underway, Card Design Conversation! It's my chance to promote the next WCDC, congratulate the winner and take a look at anything else going on in the Fan Creations world - or even just go off on a little design rant sometimes.
Yes, that is an actual picture of me sitting down at my desk to dictate these articles, obviously.
Celestial Celabration
We're doing two competitions for the price of one this week! To celebrate OoC's birthday, we're asking you to create some celebratory cards. Click the banner to find out more, including what prizes are available to finalists!
In addition to that, we also have our regular competition on the go! It's also a celebration; SpaceX had a successful launch this week, so we're looking for some space-themed cards from you. Click the banner to head on over.
Comments
"I love this series"
I love this series too, Shadows. They're always very enjoyable things to read after each competition.
No offense to Tox, but Gnarlroot was my least favorite of the finalists. Compared to The Forest's Aid or Tending Tauren it is just bad. I have to ask, what about this card was so good?
Personally I really like the flavour of it as a card, and it fits perfectly with the mechanics they were trying for Druid in The Witchwood.
Plus, I like to imagine it taking the place of Duskfallen Aviana, which would be nice.
It's close to being The Forest's Aid but with a 5/5 body on the board.
Play it right and for 7 mana you'd have 17 damage on board (and something that can survive an explosive trap / minor board clear ) rather than 10 damage for 8 mana with Forest's Aid
If you get all 5 Treants onto the field then it is a lot better than The Forest's Aid, but you have to have 10 cards in hand to do that. If you are playing a token deck and you end up with 10 cards in hand by turn 7, you probably have been playing super slow. So getting above average stats for 7 mana may not be enough to get you ahead.
If people liked it then I guess it is a well designed card and I can't really argue otherwise. I guess I am partly just disappointed because I thought my card had a pretty good chance of winning this time around.
It actually is not possible to summon all 5 Treants because you'll always have at least one empty space in your hand when you play it.