MTG: October’s Custom Cards — Alternate Horror

Ah, Dread Month, a month of horrors and vileness, a month where there’s terrible things afoot and grim subject matter. Well, time to make some spooky cards, right? Nice and easy.

This is a rare time where I had a bit of a problem with making this month’s cards. I started out with one theme — a set of Innistrad-themed cards that used the regional watermarks of the locations around Innistrad. I then tried an idea of a full set of daily zombies, but I immediately got bored with that.

What I did instead was this month, I revisited a bunch of mechanics based on things that might fit in a horror setting. The idea drifted a little, but I still have a bunch of cards I like and am happy with.

The ten mechanics I looked into were:

  • Haunt in blue-white, for creatures with abilities that they then confer to other creatures.
  • Prowl in blue-black, for rogues sneaking around and trying to make the most out of what they steal
  • Bloodthirst in black-red, for violent monsters that get worse when you’re suffering
  • Monstrosity in red-green, for creatures that experience something and snap
  • Wither in green-white, for injuries that make you struggle to fight back
  • Afterlife in white-black, for creatures whose deaths rouse angry ghosts
  • Vanishing in blue-red, to represent things that are slowly melting out of reality
  • Scavenge in black-green to represent, well, scavengeable things
  • Living weapon in red-white, representing masks that are infected with a virus that coagulates a ‘self’ if you don’t provide one
  • Emerge in green-blue, to represent magic that involves using meat to make magic work in uh, unsafe ways

And here’s the cards: