Hi! I’m Redbay, and I helped initiate and coordinate the first Beacon of Creation Design League, back in November 2022. With Design League Season 2 coming up quick, I thought it’d be beneficial to do a recap of Season 1 (S1).
What is Design League?
Design League is a competitive Design event held on the Beacon of Creation Discord. Each Designer creates a card to match the design prompt. Then, the cards are compared against each other. Finally, a winner is declared, and we move onto the next challenge.
Design League S1 was done in two parts. The first part was a series of Qualifiers, which created a pool of qualified participants. The second part was the Design Tournament, where those designers participated in three elimination rounds.
The Qualifiers
S1’s Qualifiers were a series of open participation, quick-hit, one-card prompts with public voting.
- Open Participation: Anybody was allowed to join, except the Design League Host, and only had to post a card design to enter.
- Quick Hit: Each Qualifier challenge lasted 2-3 days. When the qualifier window closed, 1-2 days were allotted for voting.
- One-card prompts: Each design prompt could only be met by creating a singular card, without description or explanation.
- Public voting: During the voting period for each Qualifier, everybody (participant, host, spectator) was allowed to vote on their favorite designs.
Wraidzel’s Qualifier 8 Winner
Prompt: Design a Mythic, Small, Black, Phyrexian Creature.
Juliet’s Qualifier 4 Winner
Prompt: Design a Spy-Themed with a combat damage ability.
3smuth’s Qualifier 1 Winner
Prompt: Design a Snow card that appeals to Johnny/Jenny.
The Tournament
After the Qualifiers concluded, we had our 8 participants for the S1’s Tournament:
- 3smuth
- BulkRare
- toasty
- Juliet
- Wobbles
- MonoWhiteBorder
- JBMannon
- Wraidzel
Unlike the Qualifier rounds, the tournament was our first set of judged challenges. For each submission, a judge evaluated the submission’s on Innovation, Mechanics, Fun, Flavor, and how it matched the Design Goal. Then, each Judge’s score would be totaled to establish the designer’s overall score for the round. The best 50% of scores would advance to the next round.
Additionally, the tournament rounds were the first where the participants were expected to submit more than one card. Lastly, the designers were also allowed to include a brief description with their submission.
Each set of submissions were gathered by the host privately, then shared with the judges for review. The Quarterfinal and Semifinal submissions can be found down below. As a special treat, you can do a live review of 3smuth and Wraidzel’s submissions alongside Tim and Kayiu by listening to their respective podcast episodes. You can head over to the #design-league channel on the Beacon of Creation discord to find their finals submissions.
Tournament Quarterfinal Submissions
Tournament Semifinal Submissions
Final Submission: Unpacking – Candy Land by 3smuth
Final Submission: Unpacking – Candymonium by Wraidzel
And the winner is…
Wraidzel!
You can see that Wraidzel has the much coveted pink name on the Beacon of Creation Discord. They also opted to add generic mana symbols as emotes to the Discord as part of their prize as winner of our inaugural Design League.
What Lies Ahead
We have some exciting changes in store for everybody in Season 2– so watch that Design League channel on May 21st for our announcement, and I hope to see all of you there!