WIZARDS VS SKELETON HOW TO
WIZARDS VS SKELETON SERIES

Which brings us to my thirteenth 'Nuts & Bolts' column. The second part focuses on building out themes for Limited play. Nuts & Bolts #12, Part 2: Limited (Themes) The first article focuses on making sure your mechanics work for Limited play.

WIZARDS VS SKELETON HOW TO

Both talk about how to make sure your set is working properly in Limited. This twelfth column got broken into two parts. Nuts & Bolts #12, Part 1: Limited (Mechanics) The eleventh column talks about the importance of using art in later playtests and how to incorporate it into your set. I then go into detail about how to handle names, creature types, and flavor text. It discusses both top-down (starting with the flavor) and bottom-up (starting with the mechanics) design. The tenth column discusses how you interweave your mechanical and creative elements into a cohesive set. The ninth column talks about how you can look at your set as a whole and figure out what fine-tuning it still needs. The eighth column answers a number of questions about common problems that can happen in the early-to-mid design stages. The seventh column explains the three different stages of design, walking you through how your priorities shift as the set evolves. The sixth column talks about the concept of iteration and how you can incrementally improve your set. The fifth column discusses how best to use playtesting to gather feedback and make improvements on your set. The fourth column talks about filling in all the other rarities. The third column talks about how you begin filling in your design skeleton, starting with the common cards. Nuts & Bolts #3: Filling in the Design Skeleton (It makes use of card codes, which is why that article came first.) The second column introduces the most important tool in designing a set, something called a design skeleton.

The first column is the most technical, explaining how we use a system to make sure everyone is always talking about the same card. Here's a recap of what I've written so far. Here are the previous twelve (thirteen if you count last year's two-part article): This is my thirteenth year doing a 'Nuts & Bolts' column.

WIZARDS VS SKELETON SERIES

The series is aimed at amateur Magic designers, but I hope it's interesting to everyone else as a means to peek behind the curtain and see how exactly we handle the minutiae of the job.

In the first quarter of every year, I write a series called 'Nuts & Bolts' where I talk about the nitty-gritty of how to make a Magic set.

Wizards vs skeleton