MTG: March’s 2022’s Custom Cards

There goes March and all of its forthing, so let’s look at what the custom cards I made last month are. Did you guess the theme? Okay, I guess it’s easier to say: At what point in the month did you guess the theme?

Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.

The March theme was Bears. Every single card printed was what qualified, in my mind, to a criteria of a bear. Some qualifiers and parameters on that for this list — and bear in mind, this isn’t what I mean whenever I say a bear, it’s just the limitations I put on these cards.

  • A bear has a converted mana cost of 2.
  • A bear has power and toughness 2/2, on the card.
  • A bear has to get as close as it can to being a limited-tolerable card.
  • Wherever possible, a bear is a card that is as simple as possible.

And now, bearing those rules: The gallery!

An interesting limitation on this design space, especially when I had the rules that the card has printed power and toughness 2/2, that blue is a colour that, believe it or not, has never received a vanilla 2/2 for 2. It’s received a number of cards that are clearly better, like nobody’s going to argue Snapcaster Mage couldn’t be changed slightly to be a 2/2 and still have a great upside (like, say, cut Flash), but simply that base rule of blue not getting a bear is… there. Which meant both of the mono-blue commons had to have some kind of drawback, while still being worth playing in a format like Commander (which is my focus).

There are also a number of cards where I’m very tickled by being able to make them just out of configurations of keywords – like Knight of Thorns with its combination of Conspire and Exalted.

Liquid Trauma started as an attempt to represent Gunk Slug, an infamous experimental design that shuffled ‘dud’ cards into your opponent’s deck. The result was getting a number of dead draws, which were ‘as good as not drawing a card,’ so I tried for that vibe without needing to build in out-of-game-zone spaces. I eventually settled on counters and dice, and knowing how much I dislike dice, that’s impressive, huh?

Foreseer of the Deep’s original art? Had some weeeeird looking boobs, which I edited out. I also kind of wanted it to be able to cast Ancestral Recall and Lightning Bolt if anyone cast the spell triggering it, but I kind of feel like that would make the card too central to everyone’s attention and it wouldn’t really be an effect that feels like it belongs to a 2/2 for 2.


The top 5 cards, according to Reddit’s demotic process: