Lush Portico
Magic the Gathering illustration
Set: Murders at Karlov Manor
Art Director: Deborah Garcia

This image is a part of a puzzle, made out of 10 illustrations I was requested to paint. Together they create a code that plays into detective narrative of the game

#MTGKarlov #wotcstaff Those of you familiar with Magic set structures know that we usually do a cycle of two-color cards at uncommon to show what the Limited archetypes are. MKM is no different

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Jeremy Geist (@ofsaintdraft) · Jan 28
However, MKM actually has two multicolor cycles at uncommon! Since we're on Ravnica, @Murk_Lurker also added a cycle of "Lightning Helixes" – clean, elegant two-color cards that work well in any strategy. Unsurprisingly, Helix is in this cycle

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Jeremy Geist (@ofsaintdraft) · Jan 28
While I think all these cards are cool, my personal favorite is Buried in the Garden, which was a Great Designer Search 3 card from Jay Treat originally called "Bought the Farm"

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Jeremy Geist (@ofsaintdraft) · Jan 28
Coerced to Kill is also a GDS design (mine), but it changed a lot over the course of the design process

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Jeremy Geist (@ofsaintdraft) · Jan 28
MKM was one of the first sets I worked on so the GDS was still fresh in my mind and I brought up this card when we were working on this cycle. I'm glad we were able to pay tribute to everyone's hard work in a way that doesn't involve a BG Serra Angel

While I think all these cards are cool, my personal favorite is Buried in the Garden, which was a Great Designer Search 3 card from Jay Treat originally called "Bought the Farm"

Jay Treat's Design Test Submission
(These Tests are being backdated for administrative purposes. They were not disclosed to nor published on this site prior to their publication on the mothership.)
[...]
Design 10

Bought the Farm (uncommon)
1GW
Enchantment — Aura
Enchant land you control
When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.
Enchanted land has T: Add GW to your mana pool.

The GDS3 Design Test I Didn't Submit
Months ago now, I walked through the 10 cards that I submitted for the Design Test and my process. Today, I'd like to share with you my alternate set. The group I compared with the one I did submit and just barely decided against.
[...]
The reason I made so many hot-glue gun cards is because those are staples of gold design and when you can find one that feels right, it really clicks. Poisonous Overgrowth is pretty 'meh.' Bought the Farm wasn't great but it was better.

How I Approached the Design Test
[Bought the Farm picture]
Several of my cards were under-costed. Oops.

R&D tried numerous times to recapture the feel of Plague Rats, usually choosing to make the creatures bigger based on all your Rats.

Then during Fifth Dawn, we tried a new approach. What if the card just let you include as many copies as you wanted to play? [...] Once we had the "a deck may have any number" technology, we used it, although sparingly, on other cards. In the beginning, it was just used in black, although not always on Rats.

Ravnica Allegiance introduced the ability to blue, and Throne of Eldraine and Strixhaven would give it to red. The Council of Colors have talked about this. We've determined that, as long as the card fits into its color, any color can have access to "a deck may have any number" text.


In Throne of Eldraine, I wanted to capture the flavor of the seven dwarves. My original plan was to have exactly seven Dwarf cards in the set, but it took up too much space and was a little too much of a constraint on card concepting. My solution was to make one card called Seven Dwarves and then make a variant of the Relentless Rats template. Instead of letting you have any number, the card lets you have up to a specific number. In this case, seven.

We used that technology again in The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth. We knew we wanted to have Nazgûl. They're one of the big villains in the story, but like the seven dwarves, we didn't have space to do nine. Luckily, we'd solved the problem already. Nazgûl uses the Seven Dwarves technology and becomes the first card where you can have up to nine copies in your deck.

To appreciate the story of [Hare Apparent]'s design, we'll also begin this tale all the way back during Alpha design in August of 1993.


When Magic first came out, there was only one deck-construction rule: your deck had to be a minimum of 40 cards. Yes, 40 cards. Constructed decks being 60 cards wouldn't happen until Wizards formed the DCI (Duelists' Convocation International), and thus sanctioned play, in early 1994. The 40-card limit was kept for Limited play.

The lack of rules meant there weren't any card restrictions. A deck could have as many copies of a card as it wanted. Plague Rats was clearly designed with this in mind. One of the popular early decks had only three unique cards in it: Swamp , Dark Ritual , and Plague Rats.

Inspired by the popularity of Plague Rats , R&D kept making more Rats, and many of them got more powerful the more Rats you controlled.


During Fifth Dawn design, we decided it was time to redo Plague Rats as originally intended. We made three small changes. First, this card would be a 2/2 instead of a 1/1. Second, it'd cost 1BB instead of 2B. Third, we added "A deck can have any number of cards named CARDNAME." This would allow you to play as many as you wanted regardless of the restriction of the format you were playing.


R&D nicknamed the ability "relentless" after Relentless Rats . We used it sparingly. [...]