This month, the server hosted the Daylight Savings Jumpstart Battle, a two-week long jumpstart pack design event. Players divided themselves into four vaguely Daylight Savings-themed teams: The (White) Early Birds, the (Blue) Time Turners, the (Black) Night Owls, and the (Green) Sleepyheads. Each team was given a design prompt and an artwork each day, and by the end of the event, they’d each produced a finished (or mostly finished) Jumpstart pack! I’ve gone through and selected some highlights from each, to showcase the exemplary creativity of these designers.

Team Early Birds took their pack in a really interesting direction, with both bird tribal and flicker synergies. The result is an aggressive pack with great tempo opportunities, and a very cohesive final product. Their work converting my goofy art picks into serious designs (especially on Exotic Robin) was also super impressive. Iriark acts as a great leader for this pack, with protection for itself and a powerful flickering ability that works really well with the pack’s evasive flyers. Great work, my feathered friends! 

While Team Turners didn’t quite finish on time (ha), their suspend-themed pack still had a lot of creativity on display. Though the pack also has more traditional suspend cards, I’ve highlighted here a few of the more interesting interactions these designers came up with. Postreschedule is a deceptively powerful Cancel With Set Mechanic with a truly fantastic name, and Eternal One seems super funky and potentially very strong, especially with the variance factor of the spells in the other packs. Teferi’s static ability is really exciting in a pack that can potentially have two or three spells suspended at once, and the planeswalker is topped off with a final ability with a very high ceiling and also an incredibly silly name. Great work, my chronological comrades! 

Team Night Owls focused their pack on the theme of “not casting spells on your turn”, in what may have been a clever callback to Innistrad’s werewolves. Nocturne seems like a super fun mechanic to play with, and while it’s not showcased here, the pack’s many ways to generate value on your own turn without casting spells really brought the package together. Screeching Menace seems absolutely terrifying (as it should), and the Nocturne mode on Encroaching Night is super funky. Overall, this pack seems like a blast to play with. Great work, my moonlit mates!

Team Sleepyheads’s “tapped creatures” themed pack is probably the biggest flavor win I’d seen all month! Dormant is such an interesting mechanic, with the risk-reward of leaving your guard down being mitigated by several protection options in the pack. Convoke, which appears on a couple of cards, also provides a convenient way to get your Dormant creatures tapped without having to attack into a tough board state. Slumbering Bear is a perfect Bear With Set Mechanic, and I am so very here for it. Overall, this pack makes me feel warm and fuzzy, both because of the flavor and the mechanical value that this pack oozes from each of its cards. Great work, my hibernating homies!

As you’ve now seen, the design work for this challenge was truly remarkable, and the event was an absolute blast to run. You can look forward to more Jumpstart design events like this throughout the rest of the year, only in the Custom Magic Discord server!