April’s Custom Cards: Monsters!

And now, a roundup of the custom cards I put out every day of this month. Here’s a break so any WOTC employees who stumble upon this won’t necessarily see unsolicited designs!

In March, I did a theme of Boros cards, and after a month playing in small, efficient and often card-advantage minded red-white cards, I wanted to do something that involved lots of big dumb monsters in the colours I’d been ignoring for a month.

I talked to Fox, an absolute Just A Casual Magic: The Gathering fan and all-round Big Creatures Good And That’s Why I Should Win player, about what she considered ‘big.’ There were a few conversations on it, where she gave different values, and how toughness was necessary to be ‘big.’ The net was that any given creature to qualify as big needed a total power-toughness combo of 9, and it couldn’t have a particularly small toughness – like, X/4s were borderline.

In addition to just a lineup of the Beefiest, though, I wanted to design some cards that get out of hand – I think of [mtg_card]Vinelasher Kudzu[/mtg_card] and [mtg_card]Quirion Dryad[/mtg_card] as ‘monster’ cards.

Here then is the gallery!

 

This is a second iteration on most of the cards. Now, Strixhaven happened while this group was being made, so there’s some wording in here that would definitely have been done differently if I had my time. In fact, there’s an element of wording, in general that I want to address. Why I use reminder text all the time, and why I so rarely do flavour text.

I dislike reminder text. I feel like a lot of cards would have more room for interesting flavour text if they didn’t have reminder text on them. The thing is, those concerns are for me a sign of what I shouldn’t give in to: I want to get rid of reminder text, I want to include flavour text. But flavour text is hard and reminder text is useful for players who aren’t me.

That means that by keeping reminder text, and not forcing flavour text means text is more likely to force me to respect those limits.