When designing cards, do you ever look through a list of prompts or like, a Brian Eno "Oblique Strategies" deck or something?
Or do you try to design comprehensively (every combo with a mechanic) and then rule out the ones that don't work?
Or do you just sorta freehand it and what you come up with is what you come up with?
I enjoyed reading about Oblique Strategies back when, and who doesn't like Sense of Doubt (where Bowie and Eno got opposite instructions they kept secret), but I've never felt like, what this situation needs is a random cryptic nudge.
I come up with stuff however I can, all different ways. I hunt down ideas; I try to think, what are the different things I could do with this mechanic. That accounts for a lot, but lots of stuff shows up other ways too. I go through old ideas to see if they spark anything; I start with flavor; I have specific slots to fill, and may come up with a card from the combination of what I still need; these days sometimes I try to make a fixed version of an old card, or just a new version. Many things in the end change a lot; the final card wasn't really the initial idea, it was all shaped by how it played and the issues that came up. And you can see these journeys in the secret histories.