Hey back everybody! Welcome to our 2014 wrap up, the first year I have been posting all the way through. I had a nice surprise this morning, as WordPress had the same idea as I and sent me some stats about the year. I will gladly use some of those, now.
Firstly, it seems the 5 most viewed articles all happened during October and November 2014, which shows the website’s popularity is increasing. Since I stopped posting for most of December, nothing to worry about there. Here are the top 5 articles:
- Back To Close The Cycle – October 8th
- Preparing for the Holidays – November 26th
- Going Green (again) – October 15th
- Nonochrome – November 20th
- Seeing Red – October 29th
Check them out if you don’t remember, I will feature a couple cards from them later in this article.
The number of views and unique viewers was multiplied by 10 in 2014! For comparison, the number of posts only doubled, as I didn’t post through the whole 2013 year. Isn’t that exciting? My top referrer is google, then comes imgur, facebook and reddit. I have good hope for imgur, which I just started to use a couple months ago.Every weeks it regularly gets me one or two thousand views! You can follow me there, I post all the cards at the same time as the articles.
For locations, my viewers are largely coming from the US, though the breakdown is interesting:
- USA – 1230 viewers
- France – 155 viewers
- Germany – 121 viewers
- Canada – 98 viewers
- Poland – 65 viewers
- U.K – 39 viewers
- Australia – 36 viewers
- Brazil – 27 viewers
- India – 26 viewers
- Italy – 14 viewers
47 countries overall! Small world.
I don’t want this article to last forever, so let’s have a quick look at two cards from the two most popular articles. They are pretty recent but it’s never too early to think back on designs! I used MTG Cardsmith for the new versions, as they improved a bit recently and I’m away from my computer and Magic Set Editor…
New
Old
Looking back on Orzhov Hypocrite, I thought I might have underestimated the power of a 2 drop with first strike… I figured that lifelink is a nice add, but vigilance on top of an ability that makes a creature so much better in combat was a little pushed. With both, you could attack pretty safely, gain life, then gain life again by blocking the turn right after!
I did some research and 2 drops with first strike usually have either an activation cost or two of the same colored mana in their cost. That being said once I finished my edits I realized that the original design was supposed to be a rare. Not really a splashy design for a rare though. I also came across Deft Duelist who made me wonder if I needed a downside on my uncommon two-colored 2 drop with two abilities. I still think First strike and lifelink are pretty good and vigilance would put it too far up in power level.
Old
New
Now for Snake Speaker, I liked the original design but I wanted something yet a little more elegant for it. Protection is by far the simplest solution, and it open a great design space, such as reach creatures with protection from flyiers, etc.
Now we have to agree that protection is a lot stronger than making creatures lose deathtouch. Since the protection target is narrow, – deathtouch creatures – I think simply taking one toughness off should do the trick for power balance. Speaker could still be an amazing uncommon in a set with a lot of deathtouch, quite obviously.
So here’s for this year, I hope you had a great time coming to Bullzzai for your weekly articles. Next year I plan on still being very busy so I will probably stick to a couple cards weekly. This has proven to be a fair format, and honestly doing it right still takes a lot of work. But I’m still here, still enjoying it, and I’ll make more cards in 2015.
Happy new year to you all!
Ominous Designs 