NaGaDeMon #01 — Scope

There’s a storm brewing.
Writers may be familiar with National Novel Writing Month, where the typical goal is to write 50,000 words in a month. A lofty target meant to get writers writing during November.
Similarly, National Game Design Month is a riff off of this during the same month of November. The goal for NaGaDeMon is to create a working prototype of a game of any kind and have it playtested at least once.
I’ve participated in the past to help me “level up” in Magic: The Gathering and general card game design. Other times, it was to help me achieve a specific goal in this realm. This year, I’m participating once again.
So what’s my goal this year?
Design a Magic: The Gathering Core Set and do a sealed playtest by the end of November.
Sounds crazy? That’s OK. If it’s a lofty goal, that’s great. It needs to be hard. And I expect to fail. But I’ll try my damndest not to.
Here’s why I chose to do this specific project:
- I still haven’t finished the design of a single custom Magic: The Gathering set. While I feel confident I strongly know some fundamentals of what makes for a great set design, I don’t have any proof. Let’s change that.
- With this short of a time frame designing a set on my own, I need to just shoot for the most minimum, viable product of a set. Core Sets don’t have new mechanics — this makes the project less complex than a Standard set release.
OK, so where to start? The first stroke of the paintbrush on a blank canvas is never wrong. Yet can be the hardest step.
Here’s my approach — with the recent focus of Core Sets being on a single planeswalker (Core Set 2020’s is Chandra, and Core Set 2021’s is Teferi), I figured I’d start with the planeswalker. Or, rather, the five planeswalkers headlining each color in a Core Set.
I gave priority to choosing planeswalkers to ones that haven’t had the spotlight on them in a Core Set or, at least, recently. Additionally, I chose ones I personally love to work with for each color. So, here they are:
White — Kaya
Blue — Ral
Black — Angrath
Red — Koth
Green — Arlinn
With this list, I wanted to pick a face planeswalker. What that means, modeling off of Core Set 2020, is an uncommon and rare version of that planeswalker. With an additional few cards relevant to the character.
I felt Ral Zarek is the one I’m most confident in executing on. Besides, I’m a big fan of the Izzet League, and I’d love to see a monoblue execution of the storm mage.
The stage is set. Now let’s light it up.


