By the Ancients!

First off, a few random comments:

Doug must be really enjoying his stint as the Arderial card designer for Exodus Flight. He's already finished his first draft of his cards while some others haven't yet started. Here's a preview:



Conscript Vemment
Arderial Dream Creature
[4]
Power - Pull Down: Discard 1 energy from Conscript Vemment to discard 2 energy from all opposing creatures with less energy then the number of Vemments you have in play.
"Come on down!" - Koriko
Art by: Vega/Nov
Card by: Brown/Nov

It's an OK card I think. Somewhere along the way though, I realised that working with Doug was just way too much hassle than was worth it and at the end of the day, I don't think I will be using him to design cards for future expansions, even if he gets his spell-checker to work!

Secondly, I still haven't received a reply from nightlight as to whether I could use his image for the custom cards, so rather than waiting, I think I'll have to change the image. I found one of Whyrl's earlier artwork (shown below) and will be using that instead of the really cool one that she did for nightlight.


So once that is templated, it would mean that all 150 cards have been templated for Exodus Flight.

Third, I have been so caught up with the card design process for Exodus Flight that I'm semi out of the hiatus and have been designing cards alongside the rest of the designers. I've completed one region, but there's still many more for me to go. It has been enjoyable designing the cards though and they should be going up for public review in a couple of month's time.

Fourth, Project Second Chance is still ongoing. Not many people have been posting though. We've already moved through Cald and Arderial. There isn't going to be a third chance for the cards. The first card will probably be going up on gEngine in a month's time (or thereabouts) for the monthly winner of the summer league.

Yes the summer league is still ongoing... the winner this month gets to pick a DJ magi for inclusion on gEngine for "Advance Playtesting". At the moment, it seems bpd9383 will be the winner, but there's still 24 more hours to go, so I guess anything can happen.

And back to the topic of this post - whew there's just so much happening, I could take another hiatus even before I've ended my last one - the expansion after Exodus Flight would be Ancient of Days/Ancient Enemy. Why such a long and weird name? The short form explaination for the name is that AoD/AE will really be two expansion combined into one.

AoD will be a 100 card expansion with the following breakdown:

Arderial/Cald/Core/Naroom/Orothe/Underneath/Universal - 6 cards each
Kybar's Teeth/Weave - 8 cards each
Bograth/Paradwyn - 9 cards each
d'Resh/Nar - 11 cards each

Unlike EF, no new stuff will be introduced in this set, but it will continue to support existing themes and ideas. The power level of the cards will escalate slightly as EF isn't suppose to raise power levels. I have no idea will be in there yet, because the set is just an idea at this point, but that's the rough gist of the expansion.

Now AE will be a different beast altogether. It will not have any of the usual regions, but will instead comprise of one region - Invader. Yes, you heard right, the Invaders are coming! I have no idea how many cards will be going into this set or what the cards will do or even if I'm going to introduce new rules for it as of yet. Those decisions will ultimately have to be made, but not at this point in time. I have already displayed one of the Invader cards a long while back, but here it is again...

Wow, the card was done in August 2005, almost a year back...

I have no idea how the fans will take this idea, but should this concept prove successful, I don't see why future sets shouldn't have more Invader cards... and maybe other new regions? Conversely, should the idea prove unpopular, AE can easily be removed without damaging AoD in any form. Hence the reason why it's named separately from AoD.

All this could be pure speculation though. At the rate things are going 2i might put out official Invader cards before I can get this set online, which would be a good thing. I think...