The DCC Discussion Thread

[wizyard]

yeah that works fine, the reveal was my main concern

[bravelion83]

I think bravelion83 has yet another month in the bag. Void would have to score 9 more points than Leo today in order to steal it.

I wouldn't say "yet another"... It would be my fourth DCC win EVER and the first since 2022. I started playing in the DCC in 2015 and then took a break from the contest once but it was back when we were still on Salvation, here on MTGNexus I've participated continuously since the very beginning of the site except for the one single month that I've been in the hospital. I have only three victories in the DCC, one on Salvation (and tied, not even by myself) and two here, ever. An average of less than one win per year. I'm probably one of the people who has won this contest the least if you take into account a good six or seven years of overall constant playing. This is a very difficulty contest for me, I love it (I wouldn't host it otherwise), but it's very hard, for sure harder than the MCC to me. I've been very excited for this since I realized I was on top. I didn't even realize it as it happened! Only a few days later, which now is a few days ago, when I was looking at the cards up for voting and my eyes fell on the scoreboard, I went like: "Wait a minute! Am I winning this?" Well, apparently I am!

[folding_music]

i'm having trouble voting for the four-colour faction cards and feel like I've never understood the appeal of them; i'd love to understand the point! Definitely enjoying bravelion's lore updates but the actual cards are a bit scattershot, especially in charm form where there isn't enough deliberate omission of the fifth colour to feel distinct from rainbow magic. this isn't a challenge to change my mind or whatever (don't post the change my mind guy please x3) I'm just interested in the reasons creators have for attempting FCF designs! thanks for any replies on this

edit: i might just be an annoying fan of more old-school, highly mono-colour and/or artifact-based sets - Ice Age, Mirage, Masques, Tempest, skip a few, Darksteel & Amonkhet among my faves - who never took to alara, khans, capenna, a distinctly basic land-based player in the final analysis

[Rithaniel]

I can't necessarily speak for anyone else, but I always perceived WotC's approach towards certain regions of design as unnecessarily self-limiting. For example, there have been far more shard-colored factions than wedge-colored factions, and the first time they did wedge-colored factions (I don't count Apocalypse), they only really did it for one set before doing two sets of ally-colored factions, with only a few sprinkles of three-color-adjacent cards, like Soulfire Grand Master. But, even beyond things that they don't explore thoroughly enough, there are things that they just don't explore at all. For example, there is no mono-black card with a white-blue-black color identity, and while there isn't a reason that designs in that color space have to exist, the fact that they don't is astonishing, to me. There's just so much that could exist in the game, but which doesn't.

Four-color cards are a perfect example of this. Until recently, four-color cards were avoided as if there were something wrong with making them. Personally, I have never been persuaded by commentary on four-color cards that they are difficult to design, or that they "have to justify missing the color they are missing." As far as I'm concerned, a four-color card doesn't have to justify its existence any more than a two-color card does. The fact that we get four-colored cards so very rarely is uncool on the part of the game designers. This comes down to an idea that "four-colored cards are just cool in general," but that's a subset of the thought "cards with unusual color combinations are cool in general." (I made a cycle of "Dictum" sorceries, that had mana costs like . That's the kind of 'cool' I'm talking about.)

Sometimes I'll design a card with the mechanics in mind first, and then, when I'm trying to pick out a color, I find that the mechanics could be pulled from a total of four colors. So, I ask myself "why not just use all four colors?"