Ken Nagle from Wizards of the Coast explains here how he designed a Magic: The Gathering card inspired by me. It's in the Shards of Alara set.
The first of many Sirlin-inspired Magic cards.
Hadouken!
David Sirlin is a world-class Street Fighter player and game designer. Whenever he talks about "the most balanced" games with "the best design," he inevitably sticks Magic: The Gathering at the top of his list. He obviously has great respect for the game design work we at Wizards of the Coast do on Magic.
A simple question arose in my mind: if David Sirlin were to design a Magic card, what would it be? I reached for the lowest-hanging fruit...
In Naya design, this card was upgraded to hit players, ending many a stalemate between Spearbreaker Behemoths and Feral Hydras. This card was cycled across Naya into Soul's Might, Soul's Fire, Soul's Grace, and embraced by the creative team as a chance to show Ajani on cards other than Ajani Vengeant. Development and templating dropped the "tap your guy as an additional cost" to remove text and combo better with attacking (via exalted and unearth).
Here's my Hadouken.
Thanks Ken, that's awesome that you made a hadouken card as a tribute to me. Though if I designed a card, it would have been something that captured the essense of the Shoryuken. The Shoryuken says, "I know what you were going to do, and I was ready for it." I would have looked for some way to make a counterspell that you play ahead of time, proving you know what's coming, rather than as a reaction. Meddling Mage comes to mind, the card that Chris Pikula got to design for winning the Sydney tournament in the year 2000.
This card requires knowing the opponent's deck.
To really get that "bam!" moment though, it would be better if you could bait the opponent into playing just the card you expected, then show right then that you expected it. It's pretty hard to capture that in Magic though, because there isn't really a clean way of naming a card, yet keeping it secret which card you named. If there were a way though, it's easy to imagine the cycle across the colors. The red version would deal damage when you Shoryuken them; blue would let you draw cards; green would put a token creature into play under your control; black would make them sacrifice permanents; white would do something boring.