The End of Mole Day

Written by DrChillbrain

2024 marks the fifth year of the Custom Magic Mole Day event, and it will be the final one. To send it off though, we’ve cooked up something really special.

First of all, what’s Mole Day? It’s a silly idea for an event I had back when I was in high school (insane thing to be able to say) and on the staff of CM. Basically, Mole Day is a holiday celebrated on October 23rd (from 6:02 AM to 6:02 PM) held in honor of Avogadro’s Number, a constant used in chemistry to measure numbers of atoms or particles in units of one “mole” each, 6.02 times 10 to the 23rd. It exists as a silly thing for school chemistry classrooms to do in the same vein as Pi Day, but I’ve always found it charming. The National Mole Day Foundation chooses a unique theme for every year, usually dressing up moles (the animal) as characters from some popular movie or in some theme, and Michael Offutt always puts out a themed folk song about it. It’s a lot of goofy fun, and I wanted to host some sort of event on the server, so I figured hey, why not do it themed around this. I’ve ran this event for 4 years running at this point, and there’s been a bit of decreasing interest each year, plus I’ve just been less involved with this hobby than I have been in the past. I figured that it would be best for Mole Day to go out with a bang rather than quietly die, so we’re making this final Mole Day event especially awesome.

The Mole Day project has had different structures over different years, but it’s always been the same concept at its core. Members of the community all submit cards to one big cube or set project, all themed around Science-y themes, and then at the end we draft it. This year is mostly the same idea, with one little twist: Rather than all new cards, we’ll be celebrating the event’s history by bringing back 180 cards from past Mole Day projects, in addition to 180 slots for new designs. The reprints will be in polls posted in the #mole-day-reprints channel, and there will be new card polls posted each day. You’ll also be able to see the full skeleton of reprint slots on the set skeleton sheet.

There’s no set archetypes this time, since balancing all of the reprints would be kind of a nightmare in that regard, so we’re expecting the set to have a little bit more of a chaos draft vibe. There’ll certainly still be some themes you can draft around (we had that savannah animals theme in a whole bunch of these sets) but it won’t be quite as linear as last time. So go nuts! Make sure you check the pins in #mole-day-cards for the set skeleton and rules about how to submit and vote on designs.

I hope to see everyone submitting some awesome cards this year! Let’s make this final Mole Day one to remember.

Now, back to designing. For next month, as ‘tis is the season, design a Halloween-y modal spell. 

Good work, and good luck!

-BRAININAJAR

If you'd like to participate, please join the Custom Magic Discord Server! For some more specifics on how to submit, refer to the following:

1. Use the $design command on the Custom Magic Discord Server to submit your card. You can only submit one entry. Submitting a second entry will erase your first one, and so on. If you submit more than a single design in one submission, it will be ignored.

2. If you are not looking to ⁠showcase your submission in the #Showcase thread, you're not looking for feedback in the #Feedback thread (both found in #custom-designs on the Custom Magic Discord Server), or you're looking to submit your design more discreetly, please use the #⁠bot-spam channel. Do not spam the ⁠#custom-designs threads.