Qualifier 4 proves it’s not about the destination, it’s about the friends you make along the way. Or something like that. Let’s go through the challenge and then discuss the results.
Qualifier 4 – It’s Unbelievable!
Design a black border, non-acorn stamp, eternal legal card within an Unset environment (e.g Unglued, Unhinged, Unstable, Unfinity, or a yet-unreleased Unset.)
- One card submission.
- No rarity or card type restrictions.
- The submission should match the tone/levity expressed in the canonical Unsets.
- The submission should fall within normal black-border rules of MTG.
If you’d like to dive straight into the comments, you can click here.
Kayiu: This was another tough round to judge, lots of great entries. We hit a three-way tie (again, except last time was four.)
Qualifier 4- Runners Up
The Toymaker by MonoWhiteborder
Redbay: Love the ambition on this card. I am assuming that Converted and Transformed are the same and that this card actually works, but I’ve been wrong before. The WUBRG cost makes it difficult to break this and feel like exploiting the game mechanics. Fun casual buildaround. Interesting point– this card is better with the original Innistrad Werewolves than the Daybound/Nightbound ones, as the latter just ends up back on its front side.
Kayiu: This is a fun commander buildaround, and brings back around silver-border space that really has never been set space at all. I think 5c can sometimes be a crutch for commander designs, but I think it makes sense here given the breadth of cards it would likely want to incude, given the broad theme of “just transform cards, any and all of them.”
Fungeoneer 2 by Wobbles
Tim: Makes me curious! These bots collect cards in the draft phase and put them in a dungeon for later. The combination of draft-matters with deck playability ties up a weakness of some other draft phase cards. I might be somewhat skeptical of using both draft matters and dungeons in an Un-set but is a good execution of it.
Kayiu: This is a very clever design. I think it was a risk, leaving the details of what the Fungeon entails deliberately blank/up to reader interpretation, but I think it’s one that pays off. The reference to a “Prize Vault” gives us enough informtion to infer how the dungeon and card are likely to play. I also like the idea of being able to make additional black-border legal cards that play into dungeon space, but reducing the risk of them negatively impacting eternal formats by tying them to draft-matters synergies. Overall, I think this manages to be exciting and imply a lot about the environment it could be in, while only using broad strokes – great job.
And the winner is…
Qualifier 4 Winner:
Windmill Charger by platypeople
Tim: Flavor is old school Un to me with the cultural reference and donkeys. The stats feels appropriately brawny for a rare slot; I want to put this into a limited deck and I’m not too discouraged by the downside. Not a “fun” card per se, but def appealing to put into a limited deck.
Redbay: I’m loving the Don Quixote riff here. ‘Cyborg’ and ‘Donkey’ are both firmly entrenched in Un-territory. I appreciate giving this card a bit more of a body to improve the chance of it seeing some play outside of an Un-environment. I think we could have done without ‘CARDNAME,’ since that is more attached to Playtest cards now.
Kayiu: Clean and fun interpretation of Don Quixote, translated into an MTG context. The “Cyborg” creature type is a fun way to evoke an image of what he looks like in this iteration without needing to use any art description at all. I do have some concern about it being a 5/4 FS on attack normally, and being hard to deal with without removal could make it backbreaking for a deck aiming to leverage Contraptions.
Congratulations on the Qualifier win, Platypeople! You’ll be joining Northern Gun, Sage B, and Dillon in the Design League Season 2 Tournament!
Judge Vote Update
With three qualifiers left and a big win by Platypeople here in Qualifier 4, it really is anybody’s race for the 8th tournament slot.
| Designer | Judge Votes |
| perryk | 5 |
| LudosGD | 5 |
| MonoWhiteBorder | 5 |
| Craftedlavaistrue | 3 |
| GrrBear | 3 |
| CryptRat | 2 |
| Juliet | 2 |
| kuyashiiPlays | 2 |
| Wobbles | 2 |
| Bradley Rose | 1 |
| Larcent | 1 |
Good luck to all of our designers in the upcoming Qualifiers, and thanks to everyone for your participation so far!