What is this?
The idea is that people submit card ideas and then we vote on which ones are the best. Usually there are several rounds of this, each with its own restrictions. I ran the last such contest, with each round based on a specific expansion—make a card for Intrigue, make a card for Prosperity, etc. I burnt out partway through (sorry, everybody!), but we did get through one contest for each expansion. Before that there was another contest where each round had a mechanical theme—make a trasher, make a village, etc. This would be the third such contest here on f.DS.
Anyway, I would probably participate, at least in some of the rounds. It's a fun exercise, but it doesn't tend to actually produce good cards because there's no process for playtesting and refining them.
Did we actually get through one contest for every expansion? I thought we missed out on some. At the least, there were some contests that didn't actually conclude.
I'd be interested in finishing off that round of contests.
Yeah, there was never a final poll on three of them. We also now have Adventures released, so maybe finishing those off and doing a new one for Adventures and maybe some further treasure-chest appropriate themes (Promos; cross-set mechanics; etc.) would be interesting.
I'm interested, although I'd suggest spending a couple of months preparing and then make it a 2016 contest, because you may find it hard to squeeze enough rounds into the remainder of this year.
Some possibilities for themes, if you don't want to repeat what the last two contests did (some of these are less likely to produce interesting results, I admit):
* Everyone designs based on a card name, or a short list of names
* Find a random piece of public domain art, everyone designs a card that could use that art
These could be fun, yeah.
* Get people to sign up, then give each person a different design brief with the aim of making a single set
This would probably be too restrictive and not interactive.
* Pair contestants up (possibly one experienced player and one relative newbie) and do any of the possible themes
I don't know that something like this would need to be an official part of the contest. Participants could of course pair up on their own, whatever we end up doing.
* Have some kind of secondary contest to actually playtest the cards somehow
This would definitely be a plus. Maybe this could be done PBF style (probably too slow; I don't guess you would need a mod though, honor system for shuffling should be fine since we're trying to playtest).
One thought I had related to this is that the approval voting may be a bit restrictive in the sense that sometimes really interesting ideas are submitted which just aren't full fleshed out/balanced. Perhaps some system for selecting both a "best card as-is" and a "most interesting concept", where the concept card(s) could be tweaked by the group with a second poll for picking the best tweaked card.