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.

The logo for the Usurper's Palace, showing the title text overlaid on a six-pointed spiral vortext.

Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.

This month’s theme is token creation. Every card released this month, in some way, can make more bodies on the field. I mean, you can wiggle around if a manifest is the same thing as a token, but the important thing for this month’s cards is that they relate to somehow, putting more bodies on the floor.

We don’t have any planeswalkers this time, but we do have a trio of legendary characters, and the flavour text also gives us a larger collection of legendary folk to talk about!

The three legendary characters presented here are Pia, Jhura, and Khulan.

Jhura’s a pirate, a vampire, and entrusted with the border of the Palace kingdoms known as The Vast. That is to say: She’s responsible for keeping every tribe, every sub-oceanic group, and every single kraken and beast underneath it under control. This is an easy job because largely, she’s just finding new locations, killing someone, and moving on. This has led to her thinking her job sucks and doesn’t matter, because it does suck but also, it really, really matters.

Jhara is the only person the Palace boats has assigned to deal with one of their largest, most existential threats. But oh well, that’s something to notice another time.

Pia is one of the people untidily sorted by the Palace boats as the ‘tribals.’ When the islands were scourged to create the Barrens and the Palace boats, there were many tribes scattered around – Pia meditates daily on her history, the spirits of her past. The open door to the underworld means that Pia’s spiritual ancestors showed up to talk to her about what the world was like, before she was born, and now, every time she dies? She can just walk on out and bring more friends with her when she does.

Then there’s Khulan! When the vampires scourged the Barrens, they killed all the dragons, as potential threats to themselves, killing almost all of them off.

But this is a world where the realm of the dead is not so far away… and the right urge, the right rage, can call back the dragons from the brink of extinction. When the Barren Crawlers travelled across the spreads of what used to be their home, they gathered as many angry Outlanders who wanted to take the fight to the Palace Boats. Turns out Khulan, who rages so hard that death can’t take her and dragons chase her, she may not be a strategically excellent presence in the coming war against the boats, but when your shout brings dragons maybe you don’t need to be.

The other characters shown here are Bruen, Xaia, Altansarnai, Quell, Ganbataar, Eloi and finally and most importantly, Gansukh. This is our first appearance of that name. Gansukh, the Palace Usurper. And yes! That’s going to be important. From the cards, we do get to see hints that Bruen seems to show up on artifacts, and Xaia’s doing something ‘helpful’ that doesn’t look like it’s likely to be helpful.

This month required me to have a reasonable, standardised set of information available. Tokens are standardised in a set, and I figured, in the name of making this set less complicated for memory reasons, I wanted to try and standardise my tokens by type and form. Every card that could make a token was going to make a token of a particular set and that means for any token, I needed to come up with two or more cards that created them. That gives me 0/1 plant tokens, 1/1 construct tokens, referred to as the ‘husks’, 1/1 flying blue and white spirits, that represent ghosts flitting out of the Palace of the Dead, the green and black hydra tokens with ravenous, the 5/5 red dragon tokens, and them great big 8/8 kraken tokens. There are also 2/2 dog tokens but we covered those earlier. That’s your general ‘body’ combat tokens, and we also throw in the 2/1 puppet tokens that can’t block, which are more of a spell effect, and represent – well, they’re puppets.

Made by the vampires.

So you can guess how they’re made.

It’s untidy.

There’s always going to be cards that I’m proud of but also, hey, why not take a moment to pick some nits on my card designs?

I’m not happy specifically with Coil Caller. She’s about as wordy as Moon Circuit Hacker, but it’s still a lot of words on a card. She doesn’t seem to be overpowered to me, it’s just a byproduct of needing to keep the reminder-text heavy keywords Dethrone and Ravenous on the same card.

Mechanically, I like it a lot! It’s a grower card, but it’s reasonably expensive, and it can only grow steadily, which means that while there’s an engine there, it’s a very slow one and pouring energy into it can eat a lot of your time and mana.

Also, a special flavour mention in here of Coiling Over/Warehouse Plunderers. See, I couldn’t ever find a way to have the flavour express (to my satisfaction) that the ravenous hydra of the Barrens are the land healing itself through the scourge, and that earth like it burst free with hydras at random points of time. The Outlanders, realising they had this, started going to docks and shipping small pots of dirt – hoping that Hydras would appear out of nowhere on the vessels in the middle of the journey.

The story of the Warehouse Plunderers is discovering this happening – and it’s a persistent card, because there are a lot of these pots across the waterways, waiting to be found by yet another group of thieves, because nobody cares to investigate the cargo that aggressively.

I like the story I packed onto this card! But it’s not there if you don’t already know the story elements, which I don’t have a way to put somewhere on any other card that relates to this one, so I feel like it’s not a great example of storytelling on a card.


The Usurper’s Palace (USP) is a collection of Custom Magic cards made with the general structure of a commander draft set. The cards are posted, one per day with different themes every month, to the Custom Magic subreddit, on my Mastodon and Cohost. Follow along for more!