How have you all been enjoying the new cards? They really renewed my interest in Duels, where I've been slowly working my way through the achievements for them. I find it more fun to take a bit of time with it rather than trying to build an optimal deck to complete them - at least for now. I think this reflects in my card design principles, where I'm more likely to create a card that amuses me, rather than the most balanced idea ever.

Conversation this week looks at an interesting method of designing cards.

Perfect Copy

Congratulations to the winner of the latest WCDC - MathU and their Vicious Wyvern!

Look forward to another suggestion from them for next week's competition!

Design By Committee

The Fan Community Spotlight takes a look at a very interesting set this week - one designed by over 40 people!

"Hearthphone" is a set that was designed in a manner reminiscent of the 'Telephone game', hence the name. The set was started by a group of five people, and then 13 teams of 3 took it in turns to add 10 cards to the set, seeing only the previous teams cards for reference. They'd have to try and interpret the set's overall themes, general mechanics and balance from only a small selection of cards, which leads to some very interesting miscommunications.

I think this is a wonderful example of community organisation, and I love to see people working together to create something. It's especially fun to see people working on something that by design isn't necessarily going to be perfect - the fun of it isn't coming from making sure you create the best expansion ever, but from discussing with your team how to interpret what you're given. It's very much a community-focused set.

What direction do you think an expansion might be heading, if you saw these cards?

I'd love to see more things like this done in the future. I'm normally too busy to be able to take part, but I loved seeing what came from this one and can only imagine what kind of strange ideas might happen if the initial prompt was something more obscure or harder to pin down.

Make sure you check out the interview - it's a long one, even only interviewing a selection of the participants - and the full set from there. It has a fantastic blend of ideas, and it's fun guessing what cards might have been made together or inspired by each other, and which ones definitely weren't.

At The Core

We're looking to bring some past favourites forward to the future in the current WCDC. Click the banner below to find out the Cost!