TwistedSpoon Studio

      Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week we'll continue our series on FUR, the custom Magic set about a beast-folk festival , with some riveting math! Get hyped!     Okay, you think I'm being facetious, but this really is the exciting part. Making the mechanics, building the world, all of that stuff-- that's fun, and it's compelling, but that isn't a Magic set. A Magic set is cards. A lot of cards. Over two-hundred cards. When you're making that much content, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. The important thing to remember is that Magic is statistics. How likely are you to draw the card you need to win? Well, that depends on how many are in your deck. And in Limited, that depends on how many you drafted. And that depends on how many are in the pool, which depends on the ASFAN, which depends on the number of that kind of card in the set.     Are you with me so far?     That's the basic methodology. With the mechanics and archetypes in mind,

      Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week continues our series on FUR, the custom Magic set celebrating art, culture, and furries . In the last design article, our set skeleton(s) weren't up to snuff, so we brainstormed ways to improve. In the last Creative article we introduced five more tribes and associated them with mechanics and color pairs. In this week's article, we're going to analyze our archetypes and their game plans.  Let's hop in!   Wolf Knights      The White/Black archetype emphasizes Tradition with a grindy midrange plan that hopes to accrue incremental advantage over the course of a long game. Efficient creatures enable a sturdy defensive stance, while removal opens the path for attackers and dispatches evasive threats. Hand attack and grave retrieval add resilience against enemy removal. A tribal subtheme adds power and flavor.   Dancing Foxes      The Blue/Red archetype bridges Vibrant and Crafting. Its tempo strategy relies on cheap red cr

      Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! Week by week, we've been designing a custom Magic set: FUR, the festival of beast-folk. We've spent a lot of time talking about the beast-folk, but not so much the Festival. That changes today!     Setting is about more than just the place-- it's also about the time. Diehard would be a very different movie if it took place on Palm Sunday instead of Christmas Eve. War of the Spark would just be another Ravnica set without the eponymous war. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt without the festival would be... wait, wait, wait. Midnight Hunt has a festival? But that's our thing! Ugh, I hate it when Wizards does this.     My old college roommate and I have a joke that R&D listens to our private conversations. When Kaladesh came out, we conspired to create our own artifacts-matter set based on a novel he was writing. Originally, it was full of thopters. One day I said "You know what? No one's going to get damage through if there&#

 Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! Last week, we looked at the first set skeleton and card file for FUR, the furry custom Magic set . This week, we're taking another pass at the creative elements.     The last time we discussed FUR's world, we created a world based on the different cultures of Earth circa 600 AD, with some fantasy flair.   If 600 AD seems arbitrary, it might pay off to look at the last worldbuilding article here. Long story short, that century overlooks the Tang Dynasty of China, the early Medieval period of Europe, the end of the Greek classical age, and the fall of Rome as an empire, among other things. It was a time when the cultures represented in the set could feasibly have interacted (though not at the scale that they will in FUR).  The tribes that we have so far are the Wolf, Fox, Dog, Cat, and Scale folk; they were the Big Five, because they're the most popular fursona species (according to  FurScience.com ). This time, we're going to retouc

      Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! We're back to FUR, the custom Magic set about anthropomorphic beast folk celebrating art and culture. Last time, we laid out the basic set structure. This week, we're going to debut the first set skeleton!    [TwistedSpoon Studio: FUR]     I always like to think positive, but it would be disingenuous not to cover  the mistakes I made here. There's nothing wrong with making mistakes-- it's how you learn, after all-- but they need to be addressed if they are to be valuable.     Right off the bat, you'll probably notice a couple of things. First off, there are two  set skeletons. What I realized was that putting the tribes into four colors actually made the colors feel very same-y; except for a few cards, they all basically have just a slew of the Big Five. Secondly, the tribes are all over the place mechanically, with different colors associating different mechanics with different tribes. Thirdly, there's no real sense o

     Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! This week, we're taking a break from custom Magic and instead debuting a new game. Secrets within Secrets  is a tabletop RPG powered by the apocalypse set in a dark folklore-inspired world where everyone has secrets. Today we're going to talk about the inspirations for the game, it's mechanical origins, and its current state of design.     It starts with another roleplaying game: the OG, DnD (specifically 5e, you see). Not in the sense that Dungeons and Dragons is the progenitor of modern Western tabletop role-playing games and the wider genre of RPGs altogether, although that is also true; no, our story actually starts with an actual play podcast. You know, one where they actually play DnD. It's one you might have heard of.      If you're not familiar, The Adventure Zone  features the McElroy brothers-- three funny boys from West Virginia who also do another show called My Brother, My Brother, and Me -- and their dad. Over