MTG: Piracy and Proxies
Should you ‘steal’ Magic: The Gathering?
How do you ‘steal’ Magic: The Gathering?
USP-08: August’s Custom Cards
The Masqued shed their old identities to become anyone; known mostly for masks they wear that distinguish them from normal partygoers on the Palace Boats. The Faceless have masks of wood, bone, and dirt, or create faces that look like animals just because they know it is hard, otherwise, to tell where to look when you talk to them. Some take on forms designed to express an identity that demonstrates their skill, their aesthetic sense. But then there are those, in these same magics, who have their identities shriven from them – people who need magical aid to restore themselves to being a person again, people who somehow are there, but not, manifested to the world but done so without an identity. It is a strange thing to have every name, and stranger still to have none.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MtG: Oh How It Pains Me To Do This
I’m really liking the Transformers cards as commanders. I know, since I hate the Lord of the Rings so much what am I doing being okay with transformers? Well, I mean, for one, nobody pretends the Transformers aren’t dumb as shit, and also the central narrative of Transformers is bunches of idiots smashing their toy collections together, which makes a great fit for Magic: The Gathering commander games. But wait, you may wonder, what – what’s with this elaborate trap? You weren’t paying attention for a moment and now, I have seized power! It is time for a transgender icon, STARSCREAM to command!
Now, let’s you and them fight.
Continue Reading →USP-07: July’s Custom Cards
While the Outlands rage at all sides, as the Vast’s people slowly gather themselves to respond to the Ice Palace and the open door of death in the Usurper’s Throne, what are the Palace boats doing? What of the culture of Vampires that scourged a whole mountain range and ruined forests of centuries of growth, how have they prepared for the obvious oncoming war?
They haven’t.
They’ve been busy.
They’ve been busy fighting with one another endlessly about who, exactly, is the most royal member of all these Royal bloodlines.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: Hating Lord Of The Rings
I can’t seem to put words on paper that aren’t about this, so here. Let me exorcise this foul spirit that haunts me. I am deeply, abidingly sick of everything to do with Lord of the Rings, and actively hateful towards the Lord Of The Rings magic set that I want to see fail. Again.
Continue Reading →USP-06: June’s Custom Cards
The Palace boats like to pretend they’re free from the concerns of lands. They like to imagine that the vampire estates are free and fluid and empowered by dangerous ideologies. They’re not subject to things like the weather and the mountains and the demands of forests and birds. But they’re not the only people in the world, and it seems that for all of their exclusion and demands, for all of their superiority and aloofness, there are always going to be people ready to reach out, and with fire and rage, bring them down to earth.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →USP-05: May’s Custom Cards
Where life and death no longer hold permanent sway, the question that follows is what matters what you do with your days? The Vampires believe this is why they’re justified to commit genocides; with their overall lifespans so long, any threat to their existence represents a more catastrophic loss of life compared to other cultures. For everyone else, that’s a load of bollocks. Whether cries for revolution, selfish demands for destruction, or a bellow fit to demand the rise of the dead, it ultimately comes down to what you choose to do with the time you have presented in front of you.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Scourge, the Magic Set
Magic: The Gathering has some really interesting things recently coming into my space. In the past literal full year at this point, Wizards of the Coast have released products that do nothing but personally irritate me, and the horizon shows no abatement on that score. I hate Urza, I hate Mishra, I hate the Phyrexians and the only reason I don’t flat-out hate Dominaria is Kelly Digges’ work on worldbuilding that space being absolutely breathtaking to consider as a form of craft. These are spaces for which I have literally no actual emotional attachment, stories that I want over and gone as soon as possible so that Wizards can maybe pursue the dream of twenty years ago presented by Mirrodin of maybe not just continuing to write the same story in the same generic fantasy plane over and over, badly. But then they went and hired the Pinkertons.
I didn’t want to talk about this article this way. I wanted to reflect on the twenty years I’ve been playing this game and the twenty years I’ve been designing custom cards for it. I wanted to reflect on the importance of a game that maybe, part of me wonders, could have been my life, and which could have connected me even closer to some people who I think of as incredible and amazing and beautiful, but talking about that, and reflecting on that, feels deeply irresponsible because wizards went and hired the Pinkertons.
Continue Reading →USP-04: April’s Custom Cards
Strategies and tactics abound in the many different types of war across the Usurper’s domain. Some are wars, some are politics, some are wars that don’t ever get fought because things are addressed ahead of time. The point is, it’s one thing to establish a powerful offensive, but it’s another, and far more dangerous one, to establish the boundaries of careful hate.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: Soundwave Superior
It’s weird given that I write about Magic: The Gathering and Transformers that I let the official printing of Magic: The Gathering Transformers cards. Oh and they’re all legendary and weird and Commander cares about legendary cards that shape the deck they belong in and are also weird. Oh and they’re all illustrated to look like screenshots from G1 Transformers, except they’re not, because of subtle hints like how Flamewar didn’t exist and Megatron is a tank and also they’re illustrated to look really good, and G1? Did you get this? It looks like ass.
There are fifteen of these cards. I’m not going to run through all of them, because there are fifteen of them and I need to think about how much time I spend talking about a card game full of elves (and now hobbits and cyber squid) especially when it crosses over with broken toys I got from the Salvos up the street from Woolies except I didn’t really, I’m pretty sure a bunch of those were Go-Bots, anyway.
USP-03: March’s Custom Cards
Whether at the behest of crown or land, there is war afoot. While the dead refuse to stay in their ends, the Palace’s open gates stream with painful memories, old wounds that refuse to close, injuries that have yet to face justice, and the great Palace boats make war on one another as a matter of sport. Weapons, hands, presence and pain, all are being prepared for the great clash that waits to begin anew.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: The Tools Of 2022
2022 saw six new Magic: The Gathering sets introduced, and in that, we saw almost twenty four new mechanics with new reminder text, introduced to the game. As someone who didn’t buy a single product all year, these sets interest me entirely because of how these tools get added to my personal toolbox of ‘things to play with’ as I play around at making custom Magic: The Gathering cards.
Let’s check at them!
USP-02: February’s Custom Cards
Few things can create stupid decisions like romance. Across the Palace boats, there are so many conflicting relationships, whether they be romantic or pragmatic or both, and the tempestuous manner in which these relationships are set up, secretly or publically. Of course, there may be some reason why the vampires of these Palaces, eternal and timeless, seem so enraptured by an immediate need to court – but perhaps it’s just the fashion for the time?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →USP-01: January’s Custom Cards
Across Achresis, there are ruins of the great scourge, machines left scattered and broken with the heavy machines of a war made to strip the forests. The refusal of the dead to die seemingly foments ancient mythical spirits that want to punish those that try to live eternally. New forms of life take on famliiar shapes. Wherever you are, it seems, there’s always a reason for everyone to have a Best Friend.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: Introducing…
The territorial oceans of Achresis, known to the groundlings as ‘the Vast’ are dotted about with islands and estates, each one populated with the landbound lords considered too weak, too poor, too unimportant to command one of the vast, splendid Palace Boats. Great, towering constructs, many storeys tall, liners with whole permanent populations of courts, mages and warriors and spymasters alike carrying the great fist of the Crown of Blood to where it can most exult in its excesses or express its displeasures.
They say vampires can’t cross running water, but it’s another thing entirely when the water moves underneath you. The Crown of Blood, a title inherited by the Vampire who has at the moment, gathered the most of the true royal bloodline, speaks of who gets to wield the authority of the people. Coup after coup after coup, bloody and unreasonable, has set the Vampires of the Palace Boats at each other’s throats for generations, while they gorge themselves on lesser bloods and royal jellies for decadence’ sake. The needs of servants are done by Husks, soulless bodies that work off the debts of the living, and the energies of spirits are put to power great magics. Each Palace has its own character, its own tone, its own rebellions.
There are many things to occupy the royals of the Crown of Blood, of course. There’s a great iceberg burst from the sea but five years ago, and immediately captivated a school of vampiric artisans and researchers, who set to making it a beautiful ice palace, where research into the strange ice’s properties and inhabitants could continue apace. There’s the games of chance at the casinos, or the games of statecraft with the Masqued, the unidentifiable spies of the Crown. There are pursuits on land, exploring the scourged barren lands that were once ‘Outland’ territory, with its scattered barbarians and outcast god, where you could be the first to make a unique kind of Vampire. There’s of course, the fad for romancing planeswalkers in the name of reckless love.
And of course.
In the centre of the ocean, over the vast, dark spiral in the water, there stands on mighty columns, there is the six-sided shape of the Palace of the Dead, whose gates have been held open, and through which spirits struggle to fly, and whose largesse has ensured the steady flow of magic, and the denial of death. The Palace boats do not go near the Palace, knowing it is through respect to its King, their bounty is assured.
Everything is good, if it’s good for you.
And nothing at all is going to change that.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: 2022’s Custom Cards, by The Numbers
Every day of 2022, I shared a Custom Magic Card — a card for Magic: The Gathering that I designed, using art gathered from the internet — on Reddit’s /custommagic Subreddit, My Talen_MTGee Twitter account, and then eventually, on Mastodon and Cohost. With 2022 behind me, I figure it’s now time to collect all the information I can about all the cards I made, and what I learned about myself and my assumptions.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →MTG: December 2022’s Custom Cards
Hey, it’s a new year, but there’s still some business from last year to tidy up. No-Effort November yielded a bunch of cards with no themes, obtained by grabbing everything out of my year’s total collected work that I cut from other lists or other ideas. Simply put, you got a grab bag of ‘huh, why not?’ designs.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Decemberween 2022: Magic Documentaries
Okay, Magic: The Gathering content for Decemberween. I know, I know, some of you aren’t into this game and don’t want to watch anything relating to the game made by the company that treated Orion Black terribly. But I do watch content based on this game, I do care about it (even if I feel it’s always appropriate to mention the way the game is made by a company that treated Orion Black terribly), and some of that content is really interesting to me.
Last year I got in the habit of watching a set of daily content creators who just shared videos of them playing the game on camera in a way that I liked. This year I thought I’d highlight some of those video producers that, in my opinion, treat Magic: The Gathering like the sport that it is, and make some really cool game documentaries about it. Liiike this great video by Rhystic Studies on Red Deck Wins, an archetype that kind of taught everyone playing the game early on what math was:
And for a similar long-form, here’s Pretty Deece that I don’t think I’m necessarily always in agreement of, but it’s a good channel for providing this kind of content, more zoomed in on specific periods of time rather than on the history of archetypes and what it means or how it feels.
Want to engage with the game but you’re social distancing this Decemberween, not because you have to or anything but because you’ve realised how awful a lot of the people you were successfully avoiding these past few years were? Well, check out these neat channels!
MTG: November 2022’s Custom Cards
Ah, No-Effort November is over. But the cards of the month were made the month earlier, which is why despite it being No Effort November, there was, in fact, effort for these cards! How dreadful! But the theme of the month – I’m sure you’ve already worked it out, right?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: October 2022’s Custom Cards
Another month, another crop of cards! And it was October, so they were all spooooooky!
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: September 2022’s Custom Cards
What the heck was September all about? I mean yeah, sure, it was obvious, but was there more to it than just… that?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: The Force Check
In Magic: The Gathering‘s oldest formats, Legacy and Vintage, one of the most important spells that exists is a card printed originally all the way back in Alliances from 1996, Force Of Will. What the card does is pretty simple; it counters a spell, but it costs one point of life and a blue card out of your hand to do it, and, crucially, no mana.
I’m going to say some nice things about Force of Will here, but I want to make sure you understand I don’t think that the card’s a good thing. It’s more that, like the many diseases of Montgomery Burns, older formats have enough broken nonsense going on in enough broken ways that Force of Will fills an important part in the ecosystem. It’s one of those funny things about big enough games that grow over time; the mistakes sometimes can cancel each other out.
It’s also a namesake for an effect (multiple other cards are called ‘force of’ something to represent they can be cast for free), and the phenomenon known as a Force Check.
Continue Reading →MTG: August 2022’s Custom Cards
August is over, a month of tricks, so what cunning trick did I play this time? What single, central theme was how I built the story of the month’s cards?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: Traps
There are, in Magic: The Gathering, an absolutely overwhelming number of subtypes. Subtypes are ways for the game to make meaningful mechanical information on the type line of the card, and, if you’re wondering, by volume, most of those subtypes are creature types. It’s how you get Humans and Wizards and Orggs and Kor and Brushwaggs.
But it’s not just creatures with subtypes; artifacts have them as well, with subtypes like blood and clue for the widely available tokens, but equipment is probably the best known. Enchantments similarly have Auras, as their most common subtype representative, but they also have things like Backgrounds, Shards, Sagas and Curses. Lands, well, the subtypes of lands are widely known, what with Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain and Forest.
When you look to the instant and sorcery, subtypes are much less common. There’s Arcane, the Kamigawa era mistake, Adventures, which are from the mistake Eldraine, Lessons from Strixhaven about which I have no hot takes, and finally, the subtype Trap.
Traps are a little orphan subtyle from Zendikar and Worldwake, and that’s it. There are twenty trap cards, distributed almost evenly across the colours, and the mechanic is, to say the least, unsupported. There are two cards that relate to traps, one that tutors one up and one that makes your opponent discard them, and they’re both blue, which seems a foolish thing to me, but whatever.
If you’re not able to intuitively glean it looking at it, traps are a card that do something, and have an alternate, reduced cost, based on your opponent doing something that makes the trap even more effective. One of them, Mindbreak Trap is a legacy sideboard card because it can protect you from storm decks going off on turn one, and storm players will often delay an explosive turn to check for it (or any of a number of other possible explosive solutions). Beyond that they’re a category of card you’re most likely to see as someone’s pet.
Trap is almost what I’d consider a dead subtype; there are only so many applications of the flavour, and the mechanic, while nice, eats a lot of space on the card. Plus, the more complicated the trigger, the less room you have for the effect on the card. They want to be responsive, as well — it’s not like Guerrilla Tactics where the card is a basic burn spell that can also punish an opponent doing something to try and stop you.
Still, there’s a lot of room for flavourful play around the whole question of them: there could be creatures that react to traps, or that can be sacrificed to counter traps. There could be trap cards that recur themselves when their conditions are met, and there could be trap cards with an entirely different structure, and all that needs to link them together is ‘being a trap.’ Consider a Foretell card with rules text like ‘Foretell 4RR. This costs 4R less if an opponent gained life this turn.’ It’s still sitting out there, you did foresee the problem, but the spell itself doesn’t necessarily need to consume a ton of space on its alternate cost because a lot of that rules text is shuffled under Foretell. Then, the only thing that you need to do to make the card work with the other trap cards is to have the subtype.
MTG: July 2022’s Custom Cards
Hey, you do know I post these cards to both Reddit and Twitter, right? I just realised that you may not be aware that this is a daily thing, with room for discussion on every card.
uh anyway, July’s custom cards!
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: Building Grismold
It must suck to be the kind of commander content creator who has to think in terms of focusing on the next most immediate thing. Commander’s really interesting, as a format, and there are cards all over the place that you can wander over and explore in your own time at your own pace. Like me, where I found myself looking at another commander I never bothered to really consider in the past, with a theme of sweeping the board, controlling small creatures, and also reacting to death triggers.
Because I’m definitely branching out.
Continue Reading →MTG: June 2022’s Custom Cards
The month of Gay Pride is over and now we’re going to talk about the month of Gay Wrath! Wait, what do you mean? Oh I guess we’re going to focus on the custom daily cards from June!
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: Halena — They’re Lesbians
Hey, I wanna make a commander deck around something Pride themed, and since there’s really no good option for a Saheeli-Huatli deck at the moment unless Kykar, I dunno, watches, or something? Instead I decided to look at a couple that I was thrilled to see get cards, then get another card, Halana and Alena, Partners.
MTG: May 2022’s Custom Cards
May is past! 31 cards, of type and style, a card a day designed for the commander format around a theme. What was it? What could it possibly have been? Have you worked out the theme…? Do you even care? Do you want a convenient gallery to peek at? Let’s go!
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
MTG: New Capenna Overview
Overall, my first impression of New Capenna is that I’m just not particularly into it. I look at the spoilers, which have a lot of word-dense cards, and I don’t have a particularly strong reaction to most of it. I’m sure it’s fine and I’m sure there are cards that can do busted things, but I’m just not that interested in it.
Part of it is that I’m not very interested in these factions, certainly not how they’re expressed. The art deco city is cool, the magepunk tech is cool, the idea of a city founded by angels and run by demons all work, sure, that’s… fine. It’s not like they did a bad job of doing what they’re doing. It’s just not something I personally find very interesting, and part of that, I think, is because to me ‘demon’ has a set of affiliations and tone that makes a white-blue-green one feel ‘wrong.’ Or rather, feel non-demony.
MTG: April 2022’s Custom Cards
I like making Magic cards. It’s easily my favourite way to engage with the game. In the name of discipline, in the name of getting cards done I will sometimes make cards I’m not wildly happy with, but largely, I like my cards. Since my normal theme of April is to try and focus on me and on being indulgent, it can be challenging to really nail down what makes a me month worth of cards. After all, many of them are my precious babies.
What can the cards be about then, in this context?
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
