Let The Great Egg Hunt Begin!

The Great Egg Hunt has arrived!

The time for 'Gunters is now!

In The Oasis, 'Gunters search for Halliday's Easter Egg. On MTG Cardsmith we've managed to hide not just one, but quite a few Easter Eggs for you all to search for! With the help of some of your favorite Cardsmiths, and with your help as well, April is going to be our most adventurous month ever!

Right now there are no less than NINE Cardsmith accounts with up to three hidden Easter Eggs each. You job will be to sniff out those Cardsmiths and post the hidden challenges, as well as the cards you make for them, to the April 2021 thread, which is linked below. We will be awarding points to our Hunters and our Hiders throughout the month. Anyone can make cards for the discovered challenges, not just the person who uncovered it.

The rules of the hunt!

-Each person can hide up to three challenges they come up with in their cards. (Example: https://mtgcardsmith.com/view/eyeball-juggler) This is an example card and not part of the hunt. Check out the Featured Comment on the card for instructions on how to hide your challenges.

-If you are a premium member, you may hide your challenges in your cards made before April 1st. If you do, send us(@Corwinnn or @Tomigon) a message and let us know how many challenges you hid (Up to 3).

-People may post challenges they find to this thread->[Click] with cards made for those challenges. Some of those cards will be featured.

-A person who posts a newly found challenge gets 1 point, and the person who hid that challenge also gets 1 point. If the challenge was hidden in an old card by premium member, that member gets 2 points and the finder gets 3 points instead.

-At the end of the April, top three winners will be announced. 

Prizes:

1st Place- 1 month of Premium membership and one featured card of your choice

2nd Place- One featured card of your choice

3rd Place- One featured card of your choice

Something for your egg basket!

If you haven't seen it, an amazing Egg Set Symbol has been made available to use on your cards!

All participants who post their themed cards will also earn the incredible Egg Avatar as seen below!

The top three will also receive the highly coveted Golden Egg Avatar!

2,000,000 Cards

It seems like just yesterday that the 1,000,000th card was created. Last month we surpassed 2,000,000 cards made on MTG Cardsmith. And while every card created isn't the perfect card ever made, that number is a testament to just how much MTG Cardsmith truly is the best interactive card creator online, and how much you enjoy being a part of this community. Thank you to everyone who made a card over the years and helped us become one of your favorite online destinations!

If you're curious to see it, here is Card 2,000,000!

Featured Cardsmiths

This month we gathered up two more incredible Cardsmiths to feature... ThePhantomJoker & IanLowenthal!

A prolific Cardsmith, ThePhantomJoker has already filled up his main account and has started making more cards on his secondary account, TheSecondJoker!  Check out the custom work this Featured Cardsmith has crafted, including custom planes, abilities, and mechanics. Don't forget to check out the five below and drop some favorites on them!

Long time Cardsmith, IanLowenthal has been crafting custom cards since 2015. Check out all of the fun sets over on his main page while you peruse the craftsmanship of this Featured Cardsmith, My favorite is the Bob set! We put a few cards below for you to check out and add favorites to.

Each month we're excited to highlight a few Cardsmiths that have helped make MTGCardsmith the best interactive online Card Creator. We hope you'll take some time to check out their creations!

CCC: Once Upon a Future

I’m gonna be honest with you, Time Spiral Remastered might be the set I’ve been the most hyped for in a while. I wasn’t playing at the time when Time Spiral was released, but the block had some of my favorite themes and cards I’ve ever seen in Magic. The idea of Futureshifting and Colorshifting cards is just so cool to me! If I had the cash, I’d be swimming in Time Spiral Remastered.
 
Alas, with no funds to blow on my cardboard vice, I have instead decided to inject my love for it into this article! Today let’s talk about the Timeshifted and Colorshifted cards from Time Spiral block and what lessons we, as designers, can take from them!
 
Let’s start with the Colorshifts since they’re the easier of the two to understand at face level. Each of these 45 cards is, in most cases, straight-up reprints of older cards with the color, well, shifted. Each one is switched to a color where the mechanics still fit, sometimes even more than the original printing. I’ve chosen one of each color to briefly go over, just to highlight what I mean. 
 

Mesa Enchantress

A white version of Verduran Enchantress. Both white and green are colors that both deal heavily in enchantments. 
 

Gossamer Phantasm

A blue version of Skulking Ghost. The original card had the “If targeted, sacrifice this creature” ability that we commonly see today on Illusion creatures, making this a very good shift in terms of flavor and function. 
 

Damnation

A black version of Wrath of God. This card clearly illustrates the bridge between black’s kill spells and white’s mass removal abilities. 
 

Prodigal Pyromancer

A red version of Prodigal Sorcerer. Back in the old days of Magic, pinging was a blue ability, but these days that sort of direct damage is a very red thing to do. This card bridged that gap. 
 

Essence Warden

A green version of Soul Warden. This shows that both white and green care about creatures and life gain.

As people who design cards, even as just fans, it’s important to think about this when making a card. Just because you’ve designed it to be a certain color, does that mean it has to be? What other colors could that card possibly represent and would it be a better fit there? These are all questions that you must ask yourself when assigning designs to colors and vice versa. Remember that the color pie does not have real separation and often has certain mechanics bleed into other colors over time.

Next up is perhaps the more interesting batch of cards to me, the Futureshifted designs. This group of 93 cards was printed as hints at future sets, planes, and events. Each one featured some kind of mechanic or place we’d never seen and had to look forward to! As of this writing, we’ve seen a bunch of them reprinted, but only nine of them have been reprinted in sets that tie them to a plane. (I actually have a scrapped article where I go one by one through them and discuss where they might be from.) 

Now design-wise you might say that there’s not a whole lot to go into here, but that’s where you’re wrong, dear reader! You see a lot of these cards have incredibly interesting designs, with some even featuring mechanics that we still have yet to see. I think that if you’re ever stumped on what card to make next, take a look through the Futureshifted cards and pick one of these mechanics, then make a card featuring it! This can be an exciting way to get some fresh ideas in your head. Or even better why not design a whole set around these mechanics and planes from Future Sight? Hell, you could even create a whole set just to fit in one of these cards that has never seen a real reprint!

THE POSSIBILITIES ARE ENDLESS!!!!!!

But y’know, maybe that’s just me.  
 
Let me know what you think about Colorshifting and Futureshifting in the comments below, especially if you have any designs in mind! You can also find me on Twitter @East2Westmtg or email me at East2westmtg@gmail.com.  

As always I’ve been East2West, your resident time traveler and color pie anarchist, and I’ll see you guys on the battlefield!

It's That Time Again

It's Time To MARCH!

A lot of times we'll give you a Theme of the Month, and then feature some cards with that theme, and this month is no exception! In March, we'll be on the lookout for cards that... well... March! Newly forged cards with the word "March" in their title could find themselves in a Featured spot. Be sure to hustle on over to the Forums to submit your creations!

Now we'd like you to make your way down and check out the awesome featured Cardsmiths for March 2021... KorandAngels & mmm3creator!

Hailing from Tarkir itself, KorandAngels is one of the few Cardsmiths whose start date on the Forums is prior to their first card creation! KorandAngels has been around since 2018 and is a huge contributor to the Colonisers series in the Saga category. If you haven't seen it by now, you really should check it out! While you're at it, check out some of KorandAngels cards and drop some favorites on the ones you like!

    

Here's a bit of mmm3creator trivia that you might not have known... While we were busy sleeping, this Cardsmith has hand forged over 3000 cards on MTGCS alone! That's quite an accomplishment! We've gathered a handful of them here for you to check out and drop some favorites on!

     

Each month we're excited to highlight a few Cardsmiths that have helped make MTGCardsmith the best interactive online Card Creator. We hope you'll take some time to check out their creations!

CCC: Kaldheim

Okay, so this is a bit of a weird article for me. I don’t tend to write about specific sets but Kaldheim has kind of caught my attention, for reasons both good and bad. 

I went into this set mostly blind with only a few spoilers that had shown up on my Twitter feed. I sat down on release day and played an amazing draft, one of the most fun I’ve ever had. It was a Mardu deck chock full of removal and late-game Angels and Giants. Every play felt tight and powerful, every card had its time to shine! After totally crushing it there I thought “Wow, with cards this strong I can’t wait to see how it shakes up Standard!” But here we are, about a week later, and the metagame is pretty much the exact same. Some decks have slotted in one or two new additions from Kaldheim, but most haven’t needed to make any adjustments at all to keep up. So today I want to dive into Kaldheim, specifically its limited environment and impact on other formats, most specifically Standard.

Let’s start off with the good news, Kaldheim is an amazing limited experience. I’ve spent a lot of gold on Arena hopping into drafts for Kaldheim and they all feel really fun! The cards are strong enough to make every match feel kind of explosive and exciting. Oddly, the built-in archetypes have actually been the weakest for me. I didn’t drop a single game with the Mardu Midrange deck but in other drafts, I ended up losing out pretty badly while piloting Azorius Foretell and Golgari Elves. Still, even those losses felt more like bad rng and pilot skill. Kaldheim has a high power ceiling, but enough answers to make the limited format feel fair, fun, and clean to play.

The real meat here, though, is its impact on Standard. To me, Kaldheim fits into the same category as sets such as Kamigawa and Amonkhet. All three are objectively fun sets that entered Standard at a time when it was dominated by cards and archetypes from the previous sets. All three also did next to nothing in terms of answering the broken decks from those sets. The difference is Kaldheim’s sheer power level. On paper, Kaldheim should be kicking absolute ass right now. It’s a set that has cards that double damage output, search up any card in your deck on attack, enable wild new combos, and even double your Treasure mana. Sure some of those cards are seeing play, but mostly just to enable already existing decks. As of this writing, the metagame page for Standard on MTGGoldfish remains dominated by Eldraine strategies that have slotted in maybe a few Kaldheim cards at most. 

Despite that, there is hope. On that same metagame page, we do see a few new contenders cropping up that seem to use Kaldheims power to their advantage. Azorius Snow, a variant of Dimir Control, and even some Vorinclex decks. All that’s nice, but unless we see a lot more shake-ups, I fear that Kaldheim will be left by the wayside of Standard.

Before we end, I do want to take a minute to talk about Commander and Brawl. Brawl is the main way I play Magic these days and Kaldheim has genuinely ruined it. All I see are Tergrid sacrifice and discard decks (which suck to play against), Esika/Prismatic Bridge decks that are just unbeatable unless you have enchantment removal, and Koma decks which are just a whole other breed of annoying. In my opinion, formats like Brawl shouldn’t have a meta, they’re more about fun and self-expression. The fact that it’s starting to feel like you either play one of these decks or you lose is exactly what I don’t like about other formats in Magic. And this worry extends to commander. I am a little less worried there, both because of the social contract and other factors, but still I have my concerns.

Well that about wraps up my feelings on Kaldheim. If you have the time and gold, I highly recommend hopping into some drafts, I hope to see you there. Let me know what you think about Kaldheim in the comments below. You can also find me on Twitter @East2Westmtg or email me at East2westmtg@gmail.com.

As always I’ve been East2West, your resident Brawl defender and snow lover, and I’ll see you guys on the battlefield.

CCC: Diversify

2020 was a weird one for Magic. With all close proximity interaction being dangerous, one of the most important parts of Magic was lost -- the gathering. Some of us migrated to places like Spelltable for our social fix and others swapped to Arena as a means of filling the time.

Others still made what is arguably a wiser decision and decided to take a break from the game. I was talking recently with a friend of mine who took that path and they told me something that got my gears turning. They told me that they’d actually been able to measure how much time out of their day Magic was taking, and it was honestly more than I expected. This person is by no means a casual player, but they’re nowhere near the level of immersion into the game as I am. Still, it turns out they were spending anywhere from 5-6 hours a day on Magic. Whether it was brewing, playing, reading articles, etc Magic had become a major time sink. So I took a page out of their book and set Magic aside for a bit and honestly…. It felt really good. So I come to you here today with something of a palette cleanser for those who have sunken into the Magic rabbit hole. Below I will provide you with my personal top five pieces of non-Magic related media (in no particular order) to ring in the New Year on a clean note. 

5. Night in the Woods

Night in the Woods is the greatest video game of all time and I will die on this hill. I played it for the first time in early August last year during a time when everything was kind of falling apart. I was living with my partner and their family for the summer due to covid and I felt almost separated from reality. When I started playing this game it gripped me. The characters felt real, the choices held weight, and the story flowed effortlessly from humor to heartbreak to eldritch. I very fondly and vividly remember crying after finishing the game because I felt an overwhelming sense of sadness that I'd never get to experience for the first time again. I genuinely can’t recommend this game enough.

4. Gwenpool

Comics have always been a sort of haven for me, lore to study and absorb. It was only natural that with my lifelong comics obsession I ended up working at a local comic shop for a few months back in high school. It was a sweet gig. I could read anything I wanted all day as long as it didn’t keep me from the customers. It was during a slow afternoon that Gwenpool issue #1 was quite literally dropped into my lap. My boss had thrown it at me and said, “Hey check it out, she’s basically you.” From the second I opened those pages my life was never the same. Gwenpool is a love letter to comics and comics nerds everywhere. It’s a series full of emotion, action, and humor. Gwenpool genuinely has influenced my life more than almost any other piece of writing, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

3. The Night is Long, Walk on Girl

So there’s this animation studio, Science Saru, that as far as I’m concerned is the next Studio Ghibli. The Night is Long, Walk on Girl is one of only two movies they’ve released so far and holy hell is it a treat. It tells a whimsical story that manages to stay grounded and feel real despite its fantastical elements. The closest comparison would be to stories such as Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. It’s a beautifully animated pseudo fairy tale that I haven’t really seen anything like it before. It’s the perfect movie for a cold night in with those you love or even something to just kick back and vibe with. Everything from the soundtrack to the visuals combine to create an experience that needs to be seen first hand.

2. Alice in Borderland

I watched Alice in Borderland on a call with friends and it was one of the best experiences I’ve had in quarantine. It’s the kind of episodic show where having a group to watch with will enhance it tenfold. Alice is sort of like Saw if Saw had incredible character writing, a unique aesthetic, and an actually gripping story. I don’t want to go too in-depth here as it’s hard to say much about the series beyond this without spoiling it, but I promise you it is an incredible piece of media and well worth the time. It’s only 8 episodes long atm and season two is in development.

1.The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter

I first picked up The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter at a train station in my hometown. There’s a small book carousel where people can put books they don’t need so that readers can grab something for the train. Its classic fantasy art cover stood out from the usual stock of self-help and parenting books, so I picked it up. I started it then and there and was fully absorbed. The Sheepfarmer’s Daughter is the most grounded piece of fantasy I’ve ever read. It’s realistically human, featuring believable and relatable characters, yet still features classic fantasy elements. The whole book is an emotional ride, making me feel more than any other piece of fiction since. I went from laughter to tears within minutes. Every chapter is a perfectly crafted bite of the story that urges you to keep going, to see where it all ends. I love this book, and if you haven’t read it or even heard of it, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Well, that’s all for this month folks. Sorry for the delay, life’s been a bit hectic. Regular article timing and subject matter should resume next month. What’s your favorite piece of non-Magic media? Let me know in the comments below, You can also find me on Twitter @East2Westmtg or email me at East2westmtg@gmail.com.

As always I’ve been East2West, your resident radical reader and part-time planeswalker. I’ll see you guys on the battlefield.