I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time to run the drive to work.

Okay, so today I'm talking about one of the basic tools of design, the cycle.

Okay, so first I need to define what a cycle is, for those that possibly don't know, so most of you know.

So cycle is a grouping of cards that are connected in some way.

There are a couple different ways we do them.

So, well, there's, first off, okay, there's a couple different ways we can group cycles.

The most common way to group cycle is by color, which means we'll do something where every color gets an effect.

You know, so cycles come into two categories.

They either can be what we call tight cycles or loose cycles.

A tight cycle means that most of the spells are the same, that usually there's just one tiny difference.

For example, let's say we have a creature cycle, like the guild, the guild, uh, um, the guild, um,

the guild mages from any of the Ravnikas, um, you know, they cost a certain amount of mana, uh,

like a tight cycle means, you know, they cost two mana and are two twos, and then they have a structure that is very similar.

Like with the guild mages, they each activated twice, once in each color of the colors that they were.

So tight cycle means that all the cards in the cycle are pretty similar to each other with usually one or two changes, where a loose cycle is, okay, they have one thing in common.

Like, for example, sometimes we'll do it where there's a mechanic, but then the effects are all just different.

And usually in a tight cycle, oftentimes

the manacosts are tied together. We're in a loose cycle, eh, not necessarily. You know,

sometimes loose cycles, for example, when we do multicolour sets sometimes, we'll have like

really loose cycles, we want to represent all the colors, but it's, what it does is kind of super loose. Like, oh, this is a creature cycle, so they all have a creature.

But what the creature is or the cost or the size, none of that's the same.

So that's kind of more of a loose cycle.

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