Would You Like to See Another "You Make the Card" Contest?
General forum
Posted on April 6, 2025, 9:54 p.m. by DemonDragonJ
In this post, Mark Rosewater stated that You Make the Card contests can be very difficult to run, so I am wondering why that is, and if anyone else here would like to see another YMtC contest.
What dos everyone else say, about this? Are you interested in seeing another You Make the Card contest, and why are they so difficult to manage?
One thing I miss about base sets was back in the day they would let us vote online for some cards to be in them.
I guess looking back it's good we had them reprint Glorious anthem over crusade LOL
April 7, 2025 9:14 a.m.
Building on legendofa’s post, consider this: The first of these took 11 months, the second 10 months, the third 12 months. That is a substantial chunk of time where you do not know the final shape of a card… which means you do not know the final shape of the limited environment or the standard or other meta environment. That means you cannot fully playtest and annot fully cement what abilities are present - and possibly not just for the set the card comes out in, but for other surrounding sets in development as well.
That is a whole lot being tied up for quite some time, simply waiting on a single card.
April 7, 2025 4:46 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #6
Caerwyn, anything that allows the players to have direct input in the creation process is worth the time and effort, from my perspective, because I absolutely cannot stand how separated the players of the game are from its makers.
April 7, 2025 9:22 p.m.
DemonDragonJ Given its size and structure, I think M:tG's creative department is incredibly open and accessible. Other parts of WotC and Hasbro definitely have some communication and transparency issues, but the creative department is one of the better ones I've seen. Are there other companies of comparable size that have a similar level of communication between creative and consumer?
What sort of programs or policies would you like to see to reduce separation between the makers and the players?
April 7, 2025 9:49 p.m.
DemonDragonJ says... #8
legendofa, the level of transparency that WotC has is very impressive, and I definitely appreciate that, but I do wish that WotC would allow players to submit their own card designs as a normal and accepted part of designing sets, since I have many designs that I wish to see be made into actual cards, and I am certain that other players do, as well.
April 7, 2025 10:30 p.m.
wallisface says... #9
DemonDragonJ I would absolutely hate for Wotc to do that. Players are notoriously terrible at card design, usually being terrible with templating, colour-pie understanding, power-level, mana costs, rules interactions, and basically everything at every conceivable stage of the game.
Generally speaking, the people who would be most capable of designing a magic card are those same people that’ve seen the travesties the public have created, and know full-well the public should have no creative input in card design.
Even excusing player design capabilities, the sheer amount of resource and time it would take to allow for public submissions would be absurd. There’s nothing the company has to gain from the venture, and they’re guaranteed to lose money from trying it.
April 7, 2025 10:55 p.m.
DemonDragonJ Would you consider making a custom cube draft set? Proxy or print all your created cards that you think would be fun and balanced. Add cards to get up to +/- 360 total, and get some people together to draft your cards. Show them off and get feedback.
I have several dozen of my cards from the Card creation challenge thread saved here, and of course I would like to see them officially made. But if one hundred people submit fifty card ideas each, and five hundred people submit two card ideas each, that's six thousand cards, and my gut says that's an extreme low-ball estimate. Even if they all pass the quality control that wallisface mentions, that's something like a year and a half worth of cards that have no particular synergy, or interact in weird ways, or whatever else playtesting catches. Also, how do you release them? There's no consistent world building, and the themes and mechanics will be all over the place, so making a formal set will be hard. Releasing them as a mass of unconnected cards, or as several sets' worth of unconnected cards, will turn off the people who are invested in the stories.
It's a fun idea, but I don't see any practical way to make it work. The closest you'll get is to do it yourself.
April 7, 2025 11:39 p.m.
DemonDragonJ - It is not really a “time and effort” issue - the problem is a that the entire rest of development is held hostage while a single card is created. I think it would be fun to vote on a card design also… but not at the expense of keeping the developers in limbo for a full year, unable to fully playtest the set.
As for why Wizards will not allow players to submit card designs, the reasons for that are twofold. First, there are legal issues - they do not want people to claim that their card idea was “stolen” (even if just a coincidence) and that Wizards had notice of the player’s card. That opens up some increased risk under copyright law.
Second, for every good player designed card, there are countless bad ones - you don’t have to spend very long on TappedOut’s card creation thread to find some truly unbalanced or simply nonfunctional cards. Sorting through thousands of submissions to try and filter the wheat from the chaff would be a full time job, and a huge misuse of a game designer’s time.
Wizards has other ways for players to get involved in creation - they do plenty of polls and other data collection tools to ensure players can provide feedback and shape direction of future game design. That is better than most games give, certainly games this size.
April 8, 2025 8:55 a.m.
Instead of voting on a specific card, WOTC could have an open submission forum like the one on TO and occasionally scan there if they have the time. If they see a concept they like, they can test it out. Odds are that <1% of card concepts will be used, but it could work.
April 8, 2025 5:36 p.m.
Bookrook Again, that has the problems of quality control and resource availability.
How many people would it take to skim through hundreds to thousands of amateur designs a week, sorting out the good, the almost good, and the not good? Is there a limit to how many cards a user can submit at a time, and how do they enforce that?
It sounds like you're thinking about something less formal, but then that expects the various creative teams to want to do that. And I'm sure a few people would be very interested, but not all of them.
Plus, if two people submit mechanics that are very similar to each each other, but both need minor tweaking, who do you credit? Both, since the idea came from from two submissions? Neither, since neither submission could be a finalized card? Whichever person got closest to the final product, and turn down the other person?
Any system that introduces official fan-made content needs to be highly regulated, or it'll end in chaos. I don't know if the "no fan-submitted content" is the best possible policy, but it's the one that's worked for decades with minimal problems, and spontaneously changing it will only make a mess.
April 8, 2025 6:35 p.m.
Magwaff they've had them again for quite a few years now. Faerie Mastermind and Duelist of the Mind are the two most recent ones
April 14, 2025 10:09 a.m.
DeinoStinkus says... #15
wallisface that's why they would be reviewed before being put in. There are plenty of custom card creators that regularly create well-balanced cards, and even the ones that don't regularly do that are still capable of creating some every once in a while.
That being said, it'd be a very rough process and I'd be curious as to how that idea would actually work in practice.
legendofa says... #2
I'd like to see one, but I don't expect it to happen.
The first hurdle is that they're very time consuming. Each facet of the card, from type, to abilities, to cost, to stats has to be voted on, and it apparently took around twenty rounds of voting to make a production-ready card. Assuming each voting period is open for, say, four days, that would take almost three months of curating submissions, tallying votes, and working out the kinks of a single card, with no guarantee it's going to be functional or relevant in whatever set it ends up in.
That leads to another point, in that without generic-setting sets like Core Sets, the created card has to avoid any direct references to existing planes or story events. It could possibly fit into a Modern Horizons set or something similar, but then it has to be balanced against the rest of the set.
Basically, it takes a lot of time and resources and directs it all to creating a single card of unpredictable quality.
April 6, 2025 10:52 p.m.