Board 8 > Magic: the Gathering Topic: Beware the Chupacabra

(+) Yeah! (+)

I did bring that up in my essay, so I hope that scores points!
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Well I got an email saying I advanced to the multiple choice-- anyone who did the thing not get one?
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Got mine too!
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It sounds like everyone who completed step 1 got the questions.
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My assumption is that they just disqualified anyone who didn't submit all 10 and did a word count with a bit of margin of error to make sure it was within bounds, and passed everyone else. I doubt they even checked to see if it was comprehensible.

I'm curious if 10 essays of lorem ipsum would have been accepted. I imagine almost certainly so.

Anyway I'm more concerned about the multiple choice as it's been very difficult previously.
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Yeah that's what I was assuming on the essays. They're probably used in later rounds but I doubt they're even read in this round.
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According to the overall rules, criteria to pick the 8 finalists are:

Trial 1 (Essays): 30%

Trial 2 (Test): 10%

Trial 3 (Design): 60%

Thats for the 100 who make it past the test, though. What are some good study materials?
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Making Magic, Drive to Work, the answers to the last two GDSes. Pretty much it.
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Im concerned that the answers to the last two GDSs are too dated now.
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I looked at the GDS 2 test last night and I think it's still pretty current. It references Intimidate and Shroud as evergreen keywords, but the actual answers to the questions still make sense.

Also it might give you an idea of the type of questions to prepare for. Some of them are kind of tricky, you really have to pay attention to the precise wording.
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It's not like MtG's design principles have changed all that much since the first GDS. Like the specifics are going to be different but overall if you understand the first two well it can only help for the most part.
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I hope someone from Board 8 wins the internship. Please create an undead Avacyn legendary card when you reach the mountaintop.
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True story I have an W/B Avacyn deck with a bunch of hideous looking horror cards in it like the Vebulid so I'll have your back on that when I win
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All right, I will slip Maro some cash on the side for you after round 2.
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Bump
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Waiting for 6 a.m.
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I'll have to wait until after work, hopefully my brain is still functional by then.
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there's only one internship spot and like 3000 people still in it. I think it's a little premature to say goodbye to your friend at this point.
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Pretty sure it's less about knowing obscure interactions and more about understanding the design principles behind em. Not saying your buddy won't be a strong contender but that's certainly not something I'd consider a particularly good pitch for someone who's going to win either.
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The questions went out this morning. If you're like me and are worried about completing them in one sitting, you can review them freely over the 24 hour period. We can't discuss them further, so I won't, but good luck.
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Thanks, I snuck a peek at them just now. A lot of these are tougher than I expected.
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I submitted mine. I also recorded the questions, my answers, and my thought process for each, so we can discuss / argue after the time period has passed.
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No, there's a cut to top 8 and then a final design challenge to weed them down to 3, wherein those three are flown to Wizards HQ for in person interviews and the winner gets the internship. In previous contests I think all three got offered internships by some department eventually though, if not necessarily as a designer.
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Okay, submitted my exam. Some of those questions were pretty rough. Still, I feel confident in about 80% of my answers, and I at least think I had an idea for the rest based on what I looked up.
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Did em. Took 3 hours since a lot of em were tricky but I feel like a score as good as 71/75 isn't out of the question which is nice. Not saying I got a 71/75 or even that that's my upper bound but the ones I was "pretty sure or better" on that. I'd probably put the lower bound at 59/75 if I got literally every question I had any doubts whatsoever on wrong.
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Sceptilesolar posted...

In previous contests I think all three got offered internships by some department eventually though, if not necessarily as a designer.

That definitely happened for the first, dunno about the second.
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Here's my answer sheet. I provided my reasoning and answer, and also a general categorization and how confident I felt about my answer. I think I ended up with about 3 where I really felt stumped and had to answer on intuition and another 3 where I had it narrowed down to 2 answers but wasn't confident on my choice. Let me know what you think.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/17bqgEcrbiqQi7a4Vwp-mk054EeAaE7eBarWkzvFsfjg
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lightning bolt or llanowar elves
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I don't think it was a well designed test. It felt like more than 90% of the questions were throwaways and that whether you succeed or not will be determined almost exclusively by your ability to read Mark's mind for the others.
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I'm of the same opinion. The "tough ones" were either rarity questions (I'm not great at those) or the ones where I was fighting the wording of the question/answers more than the content.
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I felt okay about rarity for the most part. I really wanted to say that the Act of Treason that gave +1/+1, hexproof, and trample should be a common because it would mean at least one of each rarity got used, but since it's two steps beyond anything that's currently been printed I had to conclude it was an uncommon and Maro just didn't give us a common to choose.
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I can only imagine the cutoff score is going to be crazy high.
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there were a couple rarities I was on the fence about, but I'm way more confident about those than like "how do you cost a card to make the play design guy like it"
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The main one that had me as WTF for a long time was what ability to add to Mysterio to not make him change colors since he was blue and green and 3/5 of the answers made some sense for Blue or Green. I eventually decided on "Mysterio can only be blocked by one creature" since the damage one didn't say combat damage which made it feel more like a blue/red card despite not having any ways to abuse that, and the untap one seemed more white central than green-- but I have no idea.
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Curioisty clause IMO.

Green can do that; see Warrior's Lesson, Driven//Despair as recent uses. The point is that Mysterio is Hybrid so has to be doable in monogreen or monoblue and that's the only ability that is applicable both.
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Yeah I know green can do that but it always says "combat damage" whereas this one says "damage" which I thought was the trick since green or blue can actually do 3/5 of the answers if you're not being liberal with how to eliminate options there
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Has blue ever done "can only be blocked by one creature" ? That feels very non-blue. Blue does straight unblockable rather than that.

I could see the untap one being a correct answer as well, UG creatures have been doing that for a while.
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Blue doesn't but green does. You only need one of the two colors in a gold color to do something for it to "make sense" as a gold card. In fact one of the other questions explicitly tells you that they aim for that so as to avoid the "well why not just make this mono color then" issue. Hence why that question was so dumb because as said 3/5 of the answers made sense as appearing on a blue or green card.
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15. If this card was a hybrid creature, what colors would it be?

17. What ability could be added to this creature without changing its colors? Use your answer from question 15.
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Ohhhh my bad. Yeah I got that wrong. Whoops. Much easier question if I correctly read it as hybrid!
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I came to the same conclusion as Tera, though I think 'untaps itself' is a plausible answer, just less so than the curiosity ability.

From seeing other people's answers, there are 3 which I probably got wrong and 1 which I think I could have easily gotten wrong. I'm hopeful I got the others right. No idea if that will be good enough or not though as a lot of the other questions are easier.
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The only one I'm fairly positive you got wrong after glancing over your test was saying morph was more build around than transform because pretty much every transform card has some gimmicky way to flip it which means you need to build around the flip condition to some extent, whereas morph with very few exceptions tend to just be alternate costs/effects depending on whether you morph or not.

There are some others I disagree with but they were all ones I wasn't exactly sure on myself.
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No, I'm very sure that transform was the correct answer. There's a Making Magic article by Maro where he says morph is a linear mechanic.

The three I think I got wrong were 'Why does green get larger common creatures than white', 'What pair of mechanics causes more confusion', and 'Why don't we print 7 mana instants and sorceries'. The one I might or might not have gotten wrong is for the red-blue artifact-matters creature, the one about what change set design would most likely make. Since I still haven't seen a totally convincing explanation for why any given answer is right for that one.
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I'm only convinced if he said transform wasn't in an article.
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The point there I think is that if you put Avacyn, Legion's Landing and Search for Azcanta in the same deck, you can't build around "Transform", where you can build around Morph.

But I agree it's a bad question.
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The thing about transform is that there's no consistency in what makes a card transform and how it transforms, so it's very difficult to build around the mechanic of transform. There are actually two cards from Shadows block that care about transforming itself, but that's about all you can do.

I think many people got confused between building around a mechanic and building around a single card. There are transform cards or groups of cards you can build around, but because what transform does on a card is totally different from card to card, you cannot build around it as a mechanic.
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Yeah I answered differently on all four of those. Answered "white has better removal" "myriad + battalion" "it's too impactful for common" and "look at a flat number" (my logic for the flat number being the ability just seems too weak and slow if it looks at casting cost) all of which I'm somewhat sure on but not sure enough to say "there's no way your answer is right."

Actually fairly sure the myriad+battalion one was wrong too as that's the only one I actually found confusing-- just forgot about it.
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Yeah, the green creatures one was unpleasant, because the answer I would have like to respond with is "Because the colour pie says so," and that wasn't given as a possible answer.
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