Pre-released cards are all that more exciting to see because they offer a tantalising glimpse into the secret world about to be unveiled when the set is finally released.

We decided to pre-release our own cards in order to raise the level of anticipation and excitement for what was to be the inaugural Sydney invented draft.

But the pre-release phase served another, more practical purpose.

Play-Testing

Wizards of the Coast spends a lot of time fine-tuning and play-testing their new sets to ensure the cards work well together and don't contain too many broken, over-powerful or under-costed cards or card combinations.

Because we wanted the thrill of drafting cards we'd never seen before, secrecy was an essential ingredient of our invention process. Yet secrecy doesn't make for good game balance in the cards we'd designed. We deliberately wanted to perform no play-testing before we began drafting the cards.

What would stop one of us designing insanely overpowered cards (even if by accident)?

Benefits

The pre-release was an important safety check in the design process. It allowed us each to release five cards which revealed important, new, or difficult to explain concepts in the rules we had invented. And it allowed the other players a chance to vet those cards, suggest improvements, re-wordings, or changes to the costs.

Even if a mechanic was quite balanced, it might be wordy, so it was important to pre-release such cards and mechanics so it would be straightforward to draft the cards. Otherwise we could spend hours reading and trying to understand the text of each card the first time we saw it.

We used other checks to ensure card templating was up to scratch, set costs had a good spread, and individual cards weren't too powerful (see the Tournament rules for more details). But the pre-release was probably our most visible and fun method.

Time Frame Needed

The pre-release was originally scheduled to occur over the course of one week: each player would release one card each day, for a total of five cards each.

It didn't end up working quite that way. For a start we were all too busy to pump out cards at that rate. Also, we decided to provide a write-up for each card, which took a little creativity. Lastly, the cards and descriptions needed to be collated, edited and published, which took a little time. All this added up to a pre-release phase which went on for perhaps six weeks. But the results were worth it. The level of anticipation at the end of that time was very high.

Read each day's pre-release write-up to see how the revelations proceeded, and to have some sense of the emerging themes running through each player's set.