#custom-magic-cards — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #custom-magic-cards, aggregated by home.social.
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Reviewing Usurper’s Palace 2 – Liar lore
Thumbnail below the fold!
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https://press.invincible.ink/reviewing-usurpers-palace-2-liar-lore/ #CustomMagicCards #UsurperSPalace -
Custom Magic: The Everythingamajig
Hey, have you heard me call a card an Everythingamajig? Yeah, this is about that. Here, lemme explain.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
The term while broad, is a way I refer to a particular kind of custom Magic card where the designer has made a card that will never not be useful. I don’t want to show you a specific example someone made because that seems like I’m trying to address a person rather than addressing a design pattern. Here then is an example probably inspired by someone but trying to not just replicate another person’s work:
This card protects itself, it supplies itself with more cards, and it makes those cards castable. For a knight deck, it’s an obvious inclusion since it both helps you cast them and draw them and it’s also a knight that enables the other knights you can cast. This isn’t to say this card is overpowered — after all, it’s just a 2/2 that attacks and blocks.
What I want to complain about here is that Syr Everythingamajig is a card that does everything on its own. It presents a question for what to put in the deck with it and then it answers that immediately: It wants knights. It obviously wants knights. It wants knights and then you want to attack with those knights and that’s all the card is for. It might have some interactions with other knights but by default, just putting knights on the field is what this card wants.
This isn’t even a pushed example! I’ve seen stuff like this that’s better.
Everythingamajigs aren’t overpowered. They aren’t a design sin, per se. What they are is, in my opinion, boring. A good way to consider a card an everythingamajig is if it does all three of the following:
- Converts resources from one thing to another (colloquially called ‘engine’ cards)
- Protects itself (ward, hexproof, and, if the card has an on-hit trigger, evasion abilities)
- Accumulates more resources (such as drawing cards or creating tokens)
There are cards, real cards, that live in this space somewhat. It’s not quite like the Pack Rat problem as I describe it, where the card represents a first-order strategy that supplants almost all everything else you could be doing. It’s that no matter what you’re doing, an everythingamajig shows up and does something for every choice you could make after its arrival.
Modern Horizons is a space where Wizards are happy to print cards that are if not actual Everythingamajigs, certainly closer to it than I like. Cards like Ocelot Pride and Psychic Frog get close — the Pride enables you gaining life, it is made to be challenging to block, and it enables and improves the arrival of tokens. Psychic Frog is similar in that it both benefits from cards in the yard, can put cards in the yard, and protect itself in the process.
Now, note that none of these are themselves that Everythingamajiggy. These are cards where the designers of Magic: The Gathering have pushed the cards for competitive play, and that means they pack a lot of value in, but they don’t quite do everything. There are angles to attack these cards, because, again, an everythingamajig is not a broken card. It is not inherent to the form of the card that an everythingamajig is going to be overpowered or even polarising around itself when you play with it or around it. In some cases, an everythingamajig can be pretty innoccuous — the card Astral Slide was capable of behaving like an everythingamajig (once you built the whole deck around it), and it’s hardly a card that seems overwhelming now.
Alright, that’s the problem, how to fix it?
One thing that helps to fix everythingamajigs is to be mindful of space on the card. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce and keep adding to a card while you have free space to do so — but when you remember that keeping a font a legible size is important, you can focus on instead making it so each card does something interesting rather than needing it to do several different interesting things. This particular idea is, yes, building on a previous thing I’m habitually pointing out (the single most retyped sentence I have in my history on Reddit is, I’m sure, the phrase ‘the normal maximum number of lines of text on a card is nine’), but it doesn’t stop it from being true. If you focus on making a card that’s got a specific purpose and aim, then it’ll help you to stop making cards that try to make themselves desireable before they’re interesting.
This is something Wizards are really good at, by the way. There are a lot of cards at the mythic rarity that present a kind of high power, high prestige, oo-you-want-it kind of desireability (like look at all three versions of Trostani) but in the process the cards aren’t the kinds of cards that distort the game around them. If you have a deck which wants anthems, tokens, and doesn’t like theft, Trostani Discordant is some seashells-on-the-seashores really really want ’em, but it isn’t a card that goes into every deck that does one of all three of them.
A part of all of this that I think helps the most is to when you’re designing a card, consider the card’s purpose. Know what the card is for and know why it matters that it serves that purpose. Do you want a card that is used for aggressive attacking, or defending on controlling decks? Do you want a card that meets a need for a particular play experience? Or do you want a card that represents the flavour of a particular creature or person? These purposes are a place to start, but they also let you underscore what the most important thing about that purpose is.
Wanna see a time I think Wizards completely botched that?
Umezawa's Jitte was made with a purpose of being a big, impressive rare equipment when Wizards hadn’t really dialled that in. It’s a publically stated fact that the Jitte’s design is a mistake and there was something wrong with the costing or the imagined triggers, and the result being an oppressive card that every deck with creatures wanted to run is one part of that. Note that part of the problem was also that the Jitte was itself so good that it meant you wanted to run creatures to have Jitte swinging going on and the best decks of that format were concentrated around optimally making the Jitte work.
That is, the Jitte, an everythingamajig, was so good that it made it so you wanted to be the best everythingamajig deck.
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Custom Magic: Whybrid
Time to time, we will see in the custom MTG community, a card that is hybrid, pulling together effects that are out of type for one of the two colours in the cost. This is a real tricky challenge to explain conveniently because at its heart, it’s an idea that once you get it, is very obvious, but before you get it, it’s opaque. What makes it okay for some […]
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USP-12: December’s Custom Cards
The coldest winds blow across the old ocean. The boats turn towards that widening gyre. The spiralling waters underneath the Palace of the dead buck and roil, as the players in place similarly whirl and dance around one another. Ullaine’s curse, the fascination with Planeswalkers, has a reckless cadre of resistant planeswalkers returning to the plane. The Outlanders […]
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USP-11: November’s Custom Cards
In a world of adventures and conspiracies, with competing factions of shape-shifting identity thieves, there is always a chance that something can go wrong, that even the best and most elaborate plan can be thrown into disarray. There is no magic you can lay out that’s so reliable it won’t have someone finding a way to pick at it, to undo it, to render all […]
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USP-10: October’s Custom Cards
The Usurper’s Palace’s doors hang open. The gates of death are but another place that determined souls and desperate damned can find their own way out. A soul extracted from its husk can struggle over the threshold. The very nature of death, with the Usurper holding the Palace as they do, leads to the sloshing life and the unnatural growth around the world. […]