Moxtober 2023: Live-Designed Magic: The Gathering Cards

For this year’s Moxtober, I tried a couple of new things:

• Spreading Moxtober to yet another online platform: Twitch!
• Only designing the Magic cards while live on stream

For previous Moxtobers, here were projects:

• 2018, 2019, 2020: Design a new mechanic every day
• 2021: Jumpstart packets (For each day: 1 designed partner commander, and the rest of the packet is reprints to support the packet’s commander.)
• 2022: Chimera Challenge deck (For each day, design 1 Chimera Head and 1 Challenge Deck card)

For 2023, the theme was: design a lycanthrope every day:

• Every card is double-faced
• Every card has daybound & nightbound
• Whenever a creature type is used on a card, it can’t be used for any of the other 30 cards. (So, “Human” can only be used on a single card.)
• Try to keep each card design time spent averaging 20–30 minutes while live, including any breaks or pauses I take while streaming. This is to keep my streams short enough for each bundle of cards I designed (between 6 and 9 each stream).

I restricted myself to not iterate on a card after it has already been live-designed. I need to preserve the state I left them at after I ended the stream. Many of these designs would be reworked if given more time. :D

Here are the results:

As a gag, like with Moxtober 2021, I had the last card be some non-black-bordered reference to Moxtober itself. In this case, I was live-designing and co-streaming with Mark Confidant, where we passed back and forth sharing our screens. The front side references DFC (my project) while the back side references keywords (Markus’s project).

Because I wasn’t using art on my cards, I had every back-side mention “Were-” to help communicate that it’s a lycan on the back and what kind of specific type it is (what Bird or what Cat is it, etc.?).

There may be an overlapping creature type I missed. Or some rarities I forgot to update. A couple cards I did go back to tweak when I realized their used creature type was direly needed in another card. (Like “Human” for Day 31)

This was a great exercise of daybound/nightbound design and much fun exploring lycanthropes of various kinds, as a Werewolf fan.

See you in Moxtober 2024!