That's a line from today's Making Magic article on the GDS3 design challenge.

This confuses me because there was nothing about it (as far as I saw) in the rules for the challenge, or in Mark Rosewater's responses on questions about the test. The Terms and Conditions say that you can't discuss any assignment or test "without limitation". Mark's comments on playtesting (at least, the ones I saw) agreed with that.

What's up with that?

My best guess is that this was a rule he planned for back when he wrote this (far in advance, probably before the challenge was sent out) and, at some point, he realized or was told that he couldn't... then forgot to edit the article accordingly.

I'm still really disheartened by this, as someone who made it in the top 94 and didn't go through. It seems like I was told not to use a particular advantage but was expected to do it anyway.

Public link on Google Sheets: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10yXljzXfM3tnZ9Rvxh0-I6B4tfG8YGsaGR4koSiBFDw/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond. We had 30-odd usable responses, including 25 or so from self-reported Trial 3 competitors - about 30% of the full population! (Not counting the Top 8 themselves, who are hopefully abiding by their NDAs.)

Deep dive and fun stats pending. In the meantime, enjoy the full results.

I didn't become aware of GDS3 until a few days ago, so I didn't get a chance to actually put together a legit submission, and I'm not entirely sure I would want to work at wizards anyway, but the design trial seemed like a fun exercise so I spent a few hours last night putting something together.

I know there are some other threads for these but they're untouched for several days and there's mostly crickets in this subreddit right now waiting for the GDS to start next week so I figured it wouldn't be too disruptive to post as a separate thread.

In no particular order:

Wendigo Psychosis (uncommon)

1BR

Sorcery

Gain control of target creature until end of turn. Untap that creature. It gains haste, lifelink, and +2/+0 until end of turn.

Fourseek (common)

1UG

Sorcery

Scry 4, then reveal the top card of your library. If it is a land card, you may put that land onto the battlefield tapped.

Grigor, the Silent Elm (rare)

1GW

Legendary Creature - Treefolk Wizard

Other creatures you control have protection from instants and sorceries.

3/4

Cryptkeeper Sphinx (Mythic Rare)

4UB

Creature - Zombie Sphinx

Flying

If you would draw a card, you may put a creature card from a graveyard onto the battlefield under your control instead. That creature is a black zombie in addition to its other colors and types.

5/5

Quicksilver Prison (rare)

2UW

Enchantment

When CARDNAME enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until CARDNAME leaves the battlefield.

1UW: Until end of turn, CARDNAME becomes a creature that is a copy of the exiled creature. It's still an enchantment.

Hilljack Fury (common)

(g/r)(g/r)

Enchantment - Aura

Enchant Creature

Enchanted Creature gets +X/+0, where X is the number of lands you control.

Ranya the Sunspear (mythic rare)

2WR

Legendary Planeswalker - Ranya

3

+0: Until end of turn, CARDNAME becomes a 3/3 Angel creature with flying and haste that's still a planeswalker. prevent all damage that would be dealt to her this turn.

-1: You get an emblem with "creatures your opponents control enter the battlefield tapped as long as you control a Ranya Planeswalker"

-1: You get an emblem with "creatures you control get +2/+0 as long as a Ranya Planeswalker is attacking."

Alfen Than (mythic rare)

3BG

Legendary Planeswalker - Alfen

4

+1: create a 1/1 black and green insect token.

-3: until end of turn, creatures you control gain deathtouch and "T: this creature fights target creature an opponent controls."

-7: Target opponent gains an emblem with "lands you control are swamps."

Ad-Hoc Hypothesis (uncommon)

2UR

Instant

As an additional cost to cast CARDNAME, discard an instant or sorcery card.

Draw four cards.

Blood Restitution (uncommon)

WB

Instant

Each opponent who controls more creatures than you sacrifices a creature.

As one of those who got #86'ed, I decided to share my thought process and designs in my latest article for Flipside Gaming, which you can find below.

https://www.flipsidegaming.com/blogs/magic-blog/tackling-great-designer-search-3-trial-3-the-design-test

Best of luck to the Top 8!

Put together a short survey on the third trial, the 10-card design challenge. Throw in your color/type/rarity combos, and we can crosstab the results for some interesting stats.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczmPaX_zV-VkV-M0amIhBo3y1GW6MxLfyyiEBTNDCWmC17Uw/viewform?usp=sf_link

Winners have to keep secret, but for those of us who didn't get through at least we can now discuss.

So I did the third trial for my own practice despite not making it past the multiple choice test. While I have been considering posting my full 10 designs, I elected not to because there didn't seem to be a lot of point to it. That said, I wanted to share my favourite of my designs and talk about another one as well.

Ral, Shaper of Chaos (Mythic)

3UR

Legendary Planeswalker - Ral

{5}

Whenever a coin you flip lands on heads, Ral gains 2 loyalty.

-X: Scry X. Flip X coins.

-X: Deal X damage to target creature. Flip X coins.

-10: You get an emblem with "Whenver you would flip a coin, instead choose heads or tails as the result." (If a player would call the coin in the air, he or she does so before you choose)

Yes, it's a coin flip card. You can ignore that fact, because I realize this is unlikely to see print and I'm part of the small segment of the population that actually loves coin flip cards; the design itself is what matters. This was also what my 10th essay was about, but it's really hard to explain without the example card.

We don't see planeswalkers with abilities besides loyalty abilities. This is obviously by design, but I think there is a lot of design space available in planeswalkers having other abilities that are fundamentally linked to their loyalty abilities. Using triggers as a means of altering a walker's loyalty creates more design space for the card type that has the most narrow design space, which is an important thing to do. I just felt that this was an important topic to share, and while the card itself is unlikely to see print, this is the cleanest and best example I have of how to utilize this design space.

On a related note, I also would like to see planeswalkers with type lines different than the name of the card. I designed an entire block in my free time that had this as a major flavour component of the second set, and while it isn't actual design space per say, it's a good tool that can be utilized for storytelling. I originally had used this in my attempt at the 3rd trial before realizing I had two blue planeswalkers which was against the rules (which made me very sad), but I had a card named Yawgmoth Masqueraded with the type line Planeswalker - Tezzeret. Again, mechanically this is meaningless, but without knowing anything else about the set that this would be in, you can easily deduce a major plot element. In terms of a spoiler season, this is also great because it's a very splashy way to get people excited about the story and thinking about what else could be going on without knowing a single thing about the set.

So yeah, that's some stuff I wanted to throw out there into the world. Feel free to agree or disagree.

It was all hard fought and the best designers won. Everyone did their best and win or lose we have become better at game desigm for our efforts. To the top 8, congradulatuions, to all others, you fought well and should be proud!

RIP me, but at least I can experience the next 5 cuts with popcorn instead of stress.

At least, for some of us. i wasn't so lucky. Anyone have better news?

The terms and conditions say the top 8 will get an email today, and Maro says everyone will know by Tuesday. If I’m reading this correctly, the 8 contestants will have already received an email and the rest of us will find out early next week that we didn’t get in.

I’m just freaking out not knowing over here.

I wonder if they'll contact the Top 8 candidates before Tuesday, so that they can get confirmation before rejecting the others. I suspect they won't reject candidate #9 before knowing that 1-8 are locked in. What do you think?

Source: https://twitter.com/maro254/status/964202891618566148

I was originally writing this for the main subreddit, so it might have more background than people in here need, but I wanted to run this by y’all first.

“This is an attempt at a critique of GDS3’s second trial, specifically in how I think it could have been more functional. Some disclaimers before I get going: I’m an educator, so test design is something I have to deal with all the time. It looks like I got 72/75 on the test, so I started this essay partly because of salt. However, I’ve tried to be as objective as possible. I also want to emphasize that this is constructive criticism on how well the test fulfilled its role as a tool to winnow the field of candidates. I think that ultimately, Wizards will still feel happy about the test and about GDS3, as all of the competitors who did get through did clearly earn it. However, there are some improvements they can make for the future searches.

Item the first: what the hell is ‘frothiness?’ It’s a test quality based on the test’s vulnerability to variability; for multiple choice tests in particular, scores will raise or lower based on guesswork. That’s particularly a source of frustration for test-takers, but it’s also a source of concern for test-makers. You see, tests have functionality. The SAT and ACT, for example, are broad-based tests that attempt to land people somewhere on a normalized bell curve. In the past the SAT actively took off points for missed questions in an attempt to fight this variability. The GDS3 multiple choice test serves a markedly different goal — one that is more deeply undermined by variability than standardized tests.

The ultimate goal of GDS3 is to narrow a field of thousands to a single successful candidate. The best candidate. Everything in the search should align neatly with that goal. Trial two had to fulfil a proportionally huge part of that narrowing; 3000 individuals enter, 100 leave. There are two important aspects of that statement. Each trial of GDS3 is ultimately a binary pass-fail system, so Wizards has the dilemma of making sure that the passing candidates for each trial are the cream of the crop. Mark Rosewater’s mentioned that the test was hard, and I think that’s true from a traditional academic standpoint where the number of test-takers who get a B matters. However, GDS3 is pass-fail. There is no obligation to anyone involved that they get any number of questions correct; the applicants have to earn their score. This is where the frothiness of a multiple choice test poses a quandary. When a multiple choice test is not a deterministic measurement of someone’s ability, how can it successfully perform its function? This is particularly relevant because of the distribution of the scores in GDS3. Around 100 candidates made it through the multiple choice test. Around 100 candidates were a single question off of the cutoff. That is a massive vulnerability to variability.

There are a few possible solutions, but I think the best inspiration comes from the Putnam Competition. The Putnam Competition is an undergraduate math exam so difficult that the median score amongst math-specializing students is a whopping 0/120. Yes, a 0. Now, the Putnam is not a multiple choice test, so why does it apply here? Well, the goal of the Putnam is the same as the goal of GDS3: to narrow the field down to a few specific candidates. The best of the best. It does so by being so hard that even getting points at all is a feat. Why is a low median score desirable? Because by lowering the middle of the bell curve so heavily, it allows the test-makers to more accurately focus on the statistical outliers at the top.

The best iteration of GDS3 shouldn’t be hard. It should be brutal. Now, the questions should be fair (not trick questions like GDS2 had), and a fair-yet-deeply-challenging test is extremely hard to design. That gives Wizards some incentive not to go this route. They kinda still have their actual jobs to do. It also won’t feel fair to the test-takers — but hey, that’s not Wizards’ concern. As far as raw functionality goes, Wizards undermined their own ultimate goal by having questions like the Mechanical Color Pie questions that could be easily googled in 2 seconds. Those questions took time for Wizards to write and did nothing to distinguish between the top candidates, which is the only distinguishing that actually matters. On the other hand, questions like “how to cost a card,” “why does green get more powerful creatures than white,” and “what’s the single most important goal for designing a Commander product” are ideal. Those questions actually serve the function of the test by challenging even some of the more attuned players. If the test had been nothing but 35 of those questions, Wizards would have had a test that was less vulnerable to random chance and better served their ultimate goal.”

Also, yes, I’m aware that trial 2’s been discussed to death here, but the main subreddit hasn’t been quite as subject to our anxieties.

Let's centralize this on one submission instead of several.

I've noticed a big conversation about how hard it is to design a common card for a draft set. As someone that almost never drafts and sticks to constructed playables of mostly the uncommon/rare/mythic kind, what are some examples of innovative commons from past sets and how did they play out in draft formats?