Subject: [MISC] Would you like to design your own expansion Date: Sun, 02 Aug 1998 00:09:41 +0800 From: Michael & Adriana To: fkusumot@ix.netcom.com --------------------------------------------- Have your ever thought that you could design cards better than WotC? Have you ever complained about 'colour balance' of expansions or the card base? Have you ever wished the WotC could use your card design? Have you ever wanted to understand the process of expansion design? Well this post may be of interest to you! I have been playing Magic on and off now for about 18 months, no tournament wins, play for the fun, a scrub by all accounts. Aside from Magic I also enjoy Linux. Linux is a full featured operating system with advanced networking capabilities available for many different computers. This powerful operating system was designed by users and released under a special license know and GPL or copyleft that allows the system to modified, redistributed and tailored to suit your own needs. This places a significant amount of power in the hands of users. So what has Linux got to do with magic? Imagine a license exists, like GPL for Linux, for Magic cards that allowed your card designs to be incorporated into the card base. Imagine playing in a tournament using a deck with cards designed by you! Why stop at designing cards, why not design a base set. Why stop there why not design a couple of expansions. Imagine if the players of magic could design their own base set and a couple of expansions! Imagine if this 'player designed block' was sanctioned for tournament use. Perhaps initially WotC (or some other company) could release these player designed cards similar to portal, able to be played with other magic cards but not tournament legal. Imagine that if the set was eventually included in tournaments, perhaps initially in its own format say Type X (Player Designed). I am amazed, that given the popularity of Magic , that another company has not started to produce expansions sets that are playable with existing Magic cards. Similar to when non-TSR modules were produced for AD&D. I can only assume that there exist some legal reason why this has not happened. I believe that people who produce a potential card design and post them (or send them to WotC) on the net prevent WotC from using these cards due to copyright laws. What if a license could be used such that a card could be designed and released under that license which did not prevent use of the design by WotC? I do not claim to be a expansion designer, but I accept that incorporating individual cards into a expansion that WotC are designing would be difficult for WotC. So why send them individual cards. If we the players could design enough cards we could design an entire basic set. What if this basic set was then supplied to WotC, under a suitable license, that allowed them to publish the set. Could this work? Would WotC publish the cards? Given the current environment, for cards to be tournament sanctioned they would have to be published by WotC. Given that WotC might be that they are able to save development time and money they might accept the idea, which might in turn make the cards cheaper for us. Is this the ideal win/win situation? Is it viable? I do not know, but would like to give it a try. I am not pretending that this would be an easy task. Clearly there would need to be some sort of headquarters, say a web site. Maybe even an existing Magic site might want to sponsor the project (maybe even WotC might host it - would they influence it too much?) We would need some card designers, rules lawyers, artist for the art work, theme designers, team leaders for the different phases of the project, and play testers to test the cards. I am sure that a lot more is needed but this would best be sorted out early on in the project. What is in it for me you might be asking. Why should I give my time toward a project like this? Well you would gain insight into the how a expansion is designed, get to feel like you can do something rather than complain about expansions, or you perhaps like the idea of having a card you designed being used in Magic. Even if WotC don't want to publish the expansion and for legal reasons no other company or organisation can publish perhaps the set it could be used for iMagic (Internet Magic) using iCards (Internet Cards) based of iRules (Internet Rules) all based around Magic (This would certainly be cheaper than buy expansion cards :) but then this is getting into another issue.). Now I hear that some of you are saying that project like this could not work. How could a bunch of people do something that a commercial company does? Well there have been many successful project based on a similar development model. See E.S Raymond article, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which explains why this type of development model can work. Other successful software projects, based on this open development model, include the GNU Project, Perl , Fetchmail, and Linux. Even Netscape are now using this development model for their browser Netscape Navigator. So is their an existing license that could be used. The four most common, that may be suitable ofr a project like this are: the GNU General Public License (GPL), Artistic License ( used by Perl), BSD Style License, and the Modified BSD Style License. Most of these licenses have been used for documentation as well as software, which is why I think they may of use for designing Magic cards. Is the Magic community mature enough for such a project? Is the magic community big enough for such a project? Do enough of us have access to the web to achieve this? Would WotC allow a project like this get off the ground? If their is a project like this already underway please let me know. I hope this post has raised some questions. Let me know what you think. I'm done Michael. mborck@bigfoot.com