Did you know I like card games? It's true. This was an attempt at drawing my good ol' magician girl Tsukiko, in the style of a Yu-Gi-Oh! magician card. Yu-Gi-Oh! magicians have lots of strange shiny orbs and gold trim which was actually pretty fun to add shading and highlights to, once I figured out what I was doing.
I also had to anime up Tsukiko's face, which went against everything I've learned about proper facial proportions and drawing realistic noses. But some sacrifices have to be made.
Thank you vividplus6 for sending in a question about my Sentinels decks. That reminded me that I never actually posted a deck wrap-up about Skimmer, even though I remembered writing one. Well, I checked my drafts, and found this. I don't know if I thought I had more to add, but it looked complete enough to me.
It's that time again! Going back to hero decks, which tend to be my happy place in terms of Sentinels design, we have another member of the New Granwall Guardians. My setting's equivalent to The Flash and Iron Man and Spiderman all in one: Skimmer!
Let me start by talking about a mechanical challenge.
Skimmer is a speedster hero. Canon Sentinels of the Multiverse already has a well-designed speedster hero, and speedsters are common among other custom content creators' superhero teams. Including Mercury, made by insomn14, aka, the guy with whom I collaborate more often than any other creator.
Being a speedster in a card game typically revolves around playing lots of cards in one turn. That feeling of slapping down card after card makes the player feel like they're moving fast, giving the perfect resonance between player and character. But when there are so many speedsters trying to evoke the same feeling in the same game, how could I make Skimmer stand out?
My first thought was that I could ignore Skimmer's speedster qualities and focus more on his other traits. He can fly and he has a suit of cool gadgets. I typed up one version of the deck that didn't have the normal speedster "play multiple cards" angle and it just didn't feel right. I knew I had to suck it up and figure out some way to make a unique speedster.
After basically drinking a lot of caffeine, writing up six or seven potential Skimmer gimmicks (and part of the deck for each one), I cracked the code. What if Skimmer focused on playing multiple copies of a single card each turn? And so, I wrote up a simple card called Accelerate and a card that used it.
I saw the image in my mind. A player slapping down two or three Accelerates before ending the chain with a "finisher" card like Disorienting Winds - a card that got stronger the more Accelerates they'd played before.
I'm pretty critical of my own work, but I can give myself a big pat on the back for the Accelerate gimmick. It's not just unique among speedsters, but unique among Sentinels (well, at least, the official game and all the custom content I'm familiar with). It's simple, which is important when you want players to play quickly.
And there's loads of design space! There are infinite ways to design a card that gets stronger based on the player playing Accelerates, and it's also easy to make simple cards that make the deck work better.
Now, finally, let's talk about Skimmer as a character.
Skimmer started out as a character I played in a superhero TTRPG. But at that point, all I knew about him was that he was a guy in a dragonfly-themed suit of power armour. In the TTRPG, I basically just played it as though Skimmer was me wearing a suit, but I didn't want him to be an artist insert in the Sentinels deck. So I had a think about who Skimmer would be under the suit.
One comment on an old hero concept of mine stuck with me for a while...
My group of superheroes was, uh, very white. With a specific request for racial diversity and a blank slate of a character who could look however I wanted, it seemed like a good opportunity to introduce the first black character in the New Granwall Guardians.
Drake Wing was once an ace fighter pilot. He was chosen to test out a secret military project, the Dragonflight Suit. The project was scrapped because Drake was the only person who could successfully pilot such a fast and complicated piece of equipment.
He may not have full-on superpowers, but his ability to perceive, process, and react to information is far beyond an average human! When a disaster struck New Granwall City, Drake broke into the compound, stole the suit, and used it to save the day.
Art note - this deck has a lot of metal in it. Lighting and shading metal isn't something I'd done very often, but I think I nailed it in For Great Justice.
Once Skimmer was booted out of the military for showing off top secret tech, he joined the New Granwall Guardians. There, he took a role the Guardians desperately needed - he's a Type B personality. He's calm and level-headed, accepting all information before coming up with a strategy. But since he's a speedster, he does that quickly!
I'm not a fan of superheroes using millions of dollars' worth of military technology to obliterate criminals. That's part of why Skimmer is the hero of mine who does the least damage. The Dragonflight Suit isn't a mobile fortress of artillery - it's a swift and subtle scouting unit.
So Skimmer is a support hero. Specifically, he focuses on "debuffing" the villain cards, compared to Tsukiko who focuses on accelerating and buffing the hero players. Skimmer can stack the villain's deck, turn off their damage reduction, reduce damage enemies deal, and increase damage dealt to a specific target.
One thing I am not very good at doing is designing a hero's nemeses promptly enough to actually feature them in the deck. This time, I finally got it right, and Skimmer can be seen fighting his arch-rival on two whole cards. (Well, really only one, but still.)
Arachnia is a master thief with four arms and an army of trained spiders. I already had a spider-themed thief character from stories I'd written long ago, including the scrapped JoJo story I posted here way back. With an insect-themed hero in need of a villain, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to bring her back. Hopefully some day I can figure out how to design a fun villain and she can have her own deck.
What would a dragonfly be without wings? The Dragonflight Suit is equipped with two laser blade emitters on Skimmer's wings. But a clever person will note that shooting laser blades out of your shoulders would not actually help you fly. Even though I drew the wings in all but one piece of "Skimmer flying" art, the wings are really just there to look cool.
The power on Laser Wings is very similar to Skimmer's innate power. Both let you deal a bit of damage and take an Accelerate to your hand. Skimmer's innate power lets you take an Accelerate from the deck as well as the trash, but Laser Wings deals a bit more damage and lets you draw a card if you don't want to move an Accelerate from your trash (or don't have any).
Why did I do that? For variants! The ability to easily retrieve Accelerates after you've used them is essential to Skimmer's deck. If it weren't for Laser Wings, players who were using an alternate character card would have a really hard time getting Skimmer to work.
Speaking of variants -
Damselfly is Skimmer's time-travelling daughter from the future, Kalisha Wing. During some battle, when Skimmer's suit was damaged and he was unable to get out of the way of an attack, a portal appeared. Damselfly whisked her father out of the way but took the brunt of the attack in the process.
Damselfly spent some time in the present recovering from her injuries, having her suit repaired, and preparing for the return time warp. In her time, 25 years in the future, she's a core member of the "New" New Granwall Guardians. She spends some time teasing the others about what may or may not happen to them in the future, and especially loves teasing Skimmer about who her mother might be.
In the game, Damselfly uses Skimmer's Accelerate cards in a brand-new way, opening up the potential to play multiple "finishers" if you've got the Accelerates to spare. It's harder to do that, since you lose the ability to easily grab Accelerate out of the deck, but once you're set up, she is a powerhouse in the classic speedster way of playing a ton of cards.
Speaking of time nonsense, I wanted something to match the trope where a speedster goes so fast that everything around them seems to move still. Stopping a deck from playing cards for a round fits the theme, and that effect is the ultimate Sentinels "debuff" card, so it felt like a good fit here.
I struggled a lot on how to draw this one. I pictured it as Skimmer solving a bunch of problems while the scene was frozen... but that's hard to do in a single static image.
Finally, I decided it would be pretty easy to draw Skimmer posing in front of a clock and throw a bunch of effects on it. So I did that.
I really likes the sentinels decks you made and I was wondering if there was gonna be any new ones you might make
Thank you!
My most recent Sentinels deck was Skimmer. He's available on my digital mod and as a printable deck, but I never actually posted about the deck here. Whoops!
Skimmer is another hero deck; a speedster with a flight suit. I'll write a full post for him at some point.
I haven't done much Sentinels design since Skimmer, though. I've been working on another project for a while and haven't had the time. But I've drawn a couple other pieces of art that may get used for Sentinels decks in the future, so I can show those off and talk about the potential decks.
Electrogeist
Electrogeist is a hero who's appeared in some of my other decks' art. He uses electrokinesis, gadgetry, and a scientific mind to fight and support his teammates. Unfortunately, in more than a dozen attempts to design a deck for him, I never got one that played well.
Arachnia
Arachnia is Skimmer's nemesis, a playful and flirty catburglar. Except she's more of a spiderburglar thanks to her four arms and mastery over spiders. Sadly, everyone has a kryptonite, and mine is Sentinels villain design. I just can't design a villain I like! Arachnia is a particularly complicated one since her fight would be more about foiling a robbery instead of just fighting something.
More art of Unmute and her crew of baddies: Ego Trip and Fractal.
I don't know why I love C-tier villains so much, but there's something about super petty motivations and low-rent aspirations in baddies that I can't get enough of.
Are these three going to try to kidnap world leaders? Threaten the world? No.
Will they do wild crimes to get Becky views on Youtube? Yes. XD
Doing some more rubberhose fanart! Here's a Jaiden Animations. I'm not really big into Vtubers, but her avatar is one of my favourites. And it translates surprisingly well to rubberhose!
It's apparently been about a year since I added new content to my Sentinels of the Multiverse mod on Steam, so time to rectify that.
This update adds a new villain, the necromantic disaster Netherwarden and their cadre of spooky specters, as well a new environment, Challenger Park where new heroes go to learn from the past generations and make their own name in the hero community.
I've gotten a lot of positive feedback on both decks from my playtest community, so I really think you'll enjoy them too. If you get a chance to play them, make sure to let me know what you think!
You know me, I love drawing rubberhose characters. And I also love Drawfee and rewatched Drawga recently. So when I saw Jacob draw rubberhose Invader Zim, I was inspired...
A while back, I posted some Sentinels stuff which included a set of 1920s cartoon promos for all of my heroes - except Silhouette, who I hadn’t made at the time, but she is not left out!
But I know what you’re thinking. What are these old-timey cartoon versions of my heroes? How do they fit into the flimsy made-up canon that my decks are retroactively based on?
Okay, you’re probably not asking those questions, but I made a whole deck to answer them. Welcome to Ol’ Inkwell Town...
The story behind this deck is basically that the heroes woke up one day and found that they were no longer in New Granwall City. They were in an alternate cartoon version of their hometown - and they had to find a way to get back.
Ol’ Inkwell Town is made up of three distinct locations. My heroes Gold Dragon and Skimmer, plus guest heroes Charade and Alius (by insomn and Mistillitain respectively), explored the main city. Various street corners looked familiar to Gold Dragon and Skimmer, though danger lurked in the skies.
The first cards to show off are pretty simple mechanically, so let’s talk thematics. Ol’ Inkwell Town is mostly based on black and white cartoons. I watched a lot of Popeye in particular, since Gold Dragon’s old timey cartoon version was heavily based on Popeye. The deck also includes some Loony Tunes clichés like falling pianos and anvils.
Instead of simply drawing a falling anvil, I turned it into a character. Living objects is a bizarre trend of those classic cartoons, so I put faces and white gloves on everything from lamp posts to other heroes’ equipment.
The deck is intended to be wacky but deceptively brutal. Making hero equipment cards “come alive” is an effect that already exists in Sentinels, and it’s a dangerous effect because it allows villains to destroy your cards simply by doing damage. Ol’ Inkwell Town’s version is even more brutal by having your equipment fight you when you try to use them. However, heroes whose equipment are mostly magical (denoted by the Relic keyword) are immune.
Bomby is a very destructive effect, but you have a whole round to try deal with him before he goes off.
The second location visited by heroes is the cartoon equivalent of the Alesia Circus. This is where Escarlata, Electrogeist, and Tsukiko ended up.
The Table of Pies is both a benefit and a negative. Playing the top card of the environment deck usually means another cartoon is coming into play, accelerating the deck’s nonsense. Then it increases the damage the cartoons are throwing around by giving them an arsenal of pies.
However, the heroes can use the pies too - either throwing them as well, or eating them to recover HP. Heroes typically have powers that are better than what Table of Pies offers, but in a pinch, those powers might be exactly what you need.
Past the pies and into the circus proper, Escarlata and Tsukiko discovered an old-timey version of Tsukiko herself, who cast a horrifying spell on our modern-day Escarlata...
When Escarlata was pulled into the box, a cartoon version of her appeared as well! Electrogeist and the modern-day Tsukiko were shocked!
The Enraged Escarlata isn’t really a card in the deck. At the start of a game of Sentinels, you choose one of the 2-5 variant character cards that each hero has available, play as that character card, and put the rest back. Only one card in the official game can switch variants mid-game, but I think it’s interesting design space, so I threw it on a card here in an intentionally wacky environment.
The “thematic” way to play this deck is to have my heroes switch into their cartoon selves when Forced Volunteer hits them, but you’re free to switch your hero into any variant you want.
The modern-day Escarlata wasn’t really gone forever, though, and she quickly found her way back to the stage from wherever the magic had put her. There, she met her own cartoon counterpart...
The deck has two copies of Cartoon Counterpart, and even though it took extra drawing, I was convinced to change the art for the second copy. This is an annoyingly wordy card, but the premise is simple. Cartoon Counterpart fights its “owner”, who thematically is the one the cartoon is a counterpart of, but if you beat it up enough, it helps you. Cartoon violence is the solution to all of cartoon life’s problems.
So, where was the original Tsukiko during all of this? Erm... occupied.
When I asked my friends on the Custom Sentinels Discord for things they wanted to see in an old-timey cartoon deck, I got lots of ideas for tropes and clichés (most of which I already had on my list). But someone (insomn?) reminded me of a saw I’d drawn chopping Tsukiko in half on the incap for her own cartoon version.
This inspired Choppy Sawington, who is once again harassing Tsukiko. He has a really nasty effect that I’ve toyed with before, of either chopping a hero’s hand in half or dealing some damage. (I would’ve liked it to chop the hero’s HP in half, but that’s way too strong.)
The icon on Choppy is Tsukiko’s nemesis icon, meaning that Tsukiko and Choppy deal extra damage to each other. Given Choppy’s ties to stage magic, and Choppy focusing on discarding cards compared to Tsukiko’s focus on handing out card draw, and the fact that Choppy’s only victim so far has been Tsukiko, I felt it was more than justified.
The third location in the environment is only touched on briefly, but it’s the haunted mansion where a devilish vampire lives.
Silhouette’s cartoon counterpart, The Zany Zywen mentioned right at the start, is a user of dark magic who offers power to those who seek her out. This is usually a monkey’s paw situation where the person who gains the power realizes they were better off without it.
Naturally, Silhouette herself is all about dark magic and cursed power, and envious of her cartoon self, so she charged right into the castle. A guest hero, Antiquarian by Gaist, joins her.
The gargoyles themselves are your typical prankster minions, and in the game they’re annoyingly hard to kill and annoyingly destroy the heroes’ stuff. I don’t have much to say on them in particular, so let me go off on an art tangent.
When I first started this deck, I’d been drawing simple backgrounds (or no backgrounds at all!) for the old-timey cartoon stuff. However, not only did I need some background art for the digital implementation of the deck, actual old-timey cartoons really did have nice background art.
The backgrounds are still fairly simple compared to what I usually do, but I used CSP’s pencil tool to shade and add a unique texture to everything. I wanted to give everything a grainy look to it and make the non-cartoon characters really pop.
Zany Bats is a card designed pretty much for Silhouette. The bats seek out the hero with the lowest HP, and Silhouette is likely to be lowest since she starts with such low HP. A hero bitten by the bats may deal themselves Infernal damage, which is Silhouette’s whole shtick. And finally - this one was accidental synergy - if Silhouette plays her own Form of the Bat card, she has enough damage reduction that the bats won’t hit her at all.
After the three groups of heroes escaped their perils, they all tried to meet up to share their findings. But there were still two obstacles...
As the various cartoons met up, they started a fight that escalated into a giant brawl.
The two in the center of Big Ball of Violence are Escarlata and The Zany Zywen. You can also see Tsukiko’s Tank Top sticking out of the cloud, as well as Gold Dragon’s tail, one of Charade’s now-sentient Stun Batons, Choppy Sawington’s... nose...?, and a foot. That foot belongs to Ampere, another guest hero by Mistillitain.
Finally, there was but a single obstacle...
Me!
Cartoons and their animator fighting is a classic cartoon trope - though admittedly it’s more of a Looney Tunes thing than a black-and-white cartoon thing.
I had some mixed thoughts about what the animator should look like. A giant hand from the sky? Should it even be a character, or just the reality-warping pencil itself? But I like where this settled.
The Animator has two abilities. It “erases” a cartoon and deals radiant damage, and it also plays the top card of each deck, essentially creating and rewriting the game every round.
In the art, we see a guest hero Chronan the Barbarian (made by Gaist) as The Animator draws a cartoon counterpart for him.
And that’s the deck! None of the cards represent how the heroes actually got home, but I think there are a few possible options. Maybe The Animator was the one responsible for bringing them there (I was) and sent them back. Maybe Silhouette managed to make a deal with her cartoon self and got sent back with dark magic. And maybe Tsukiko’s magic box was powerful enough to return them to the real world.
Whatever the case, I had a blast making this deck and I hope Sentinels custom content players have just as much fun playing it.
Hi I've used your stat maker for my Ocs for the past week. It's amazing but I was wondering how long did it take for you to make it?
Oops, another nice comment that sat in the inbox for too long... my bad.
Thanks, I'm glad you like it! The funny thing is that the stat maker barely took any time to make. I made it a while ago, so I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure I had it figured out after one day of lazily bashing away at it.
It's an HTML canvas with a set image. Then it's about ten lines of code to draw a hexagon with points at specific coordinates. I skipped any complicated math by just taking the blank chart into Paint and finding the pixel coordinates of each possible point the hexagon could go to.
And then there some text boxes at set coordinates for each stat, and everything updates when you move a slider. And that's about it. Altogether it's about 300 lines of messy code - most of which is the same simple process done six times because there are six stats and six sliders.
To the people having trouble using it on browsers besides the ones I use, or on mobile - which I never considered at all - sorry, but hopefully this explains things a bit. The stat maker was never intended to be a big project. It was just something quick and dirty that I made for fun some lazy afternoon.
How do you plan on adapting your character decks and environment deck into the new Definitive Edition?
Thanks for the question. Short answer - I'm probably not going to.
For one thing, Enhanced Edition is the version of Sentinels I play and enjoy. DE makes some changes that I think are great, but just as many that I don't like. My favourite EE deck, The Harpy, is completely different! I'm probably not going to buy or play DE, so looking at my custom decks as personal projects that I enjoy, there's no reason to convert them.
So then why not just put my decks in the DE format for other people to enjoy? Well... it's not that simple. Some of the core rules and design philosophies have changed between EE and DE. For example, there are no longer any One-Shot cards with "lingering" effects, like Gold Dragon's Sign Autographs.
There are also power level concerns. My decks are, I dare say, well-balanced for EE. But DE raises the power level a lot - heroes do more and play faster. Even if I fixed up all these lingering One-Shots and other things, what we'd be left with are decks that are too weak and too slow to be fun in DE.
So a direct port is out. I'd have to carefully redesign each deck (and I'd want to anyway in order to explore the new design space like Suddenly! and Reactions). But again - I don't play DE. I don't own DE. I don't know DE. I should not be designing DE content.
Maybe a future DE expansion will excite me enough to replace my collection. I doubt it, but if that happens, then I'll look at converting my decks.
Normally, some time after finishing a Sentinels deck, I like to give a general explanation of what the deck is about, using a few cards as examples. This time, I felt I had something to say about darn near every card in the deck. So... let’s lean into that. I’ll go through the cards roughly in chronological order and tell the story of Silhouette, the goth vampire heroine.
Though Silhouette (civilian name Zywen Lotus) has a fascination with darkness, she’s still... mostly heroic. Silhouette gets her shadowy powers from an evil vampiric artifact called the Shadow Veil, and I wanted the player to feel like her powers are dangerous. Because of that, she starts with a pathetically low 20 hit points and a lot of cards in her deck have her deal herself damage. Trying to prevent the damage typically doesn’t work, so you’ll need some classic vampire life-stealing powers to keep Silhouette healthy!
This also marks my switch to Clip Studio Paint for digital art, and it helped me make some of the best art I’ve ever drawn!
Chronologically, the earliest we see Silhouette is on the incapacitated art for Escarlata, a hero I showed off some time ago. At that point, Silhouette was a little blonde girl by the name of Abby Adler.
Abby’s parents were obsessed with making her into their ideal daughter - a prim and proper good catholic girl. They controlled how she dressed, how she acted, what she studied, everything they could.
In contrast, Abby was more interested in dark and spooky things that her parents would have disapproved of. In particular, she started visiting a vampire coven. She became enraptured by vampire culture and history.
When Abby’s best friend Cassandra was released from the hospital depicted above, Cassandra had gained the power to control fire. Jealous of Cassandra’s relative freedom and superpowers, Abby manipulated the coven master into converting her into a vampire.
Abby returned home to her parents, newly converted and with a new name, Zywen. Her parents kicked Zywen out of the house in the middle of a sunny day, where Zywen nearly died. Luckily, Cassandra found her in the nick of time.
So this brings us to the first step of Zywen’s journey. She is now a vampire. I wanted to include a bunch of “obvious vampire tropes” in the deck for a few reasons. For one thing, the deck also includes a lot of ‘shadow magic’, and I wanted it to be as clear as possible that the character you’re playing is a vampire. But also, vampires vary so wildly from one work of fiction to the next that I wanted to nail down what my vampires can do.
Vampires in the Spooky Ghostwriter Comics-verse are significantly physically stronger than humans at night, but weaker during the day. They drink blood, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be human blood. Animal blood works just fine. They can turn into bats and have slight hypnotic abilities.
Another important piece of any hero deck is to show off the character’s personality. Zywen is an edgy edgy girl. Why drink blood out of a glass when you can have a goblet? Why have a desk lamp if it’s not shaped like a skeletal arm?
However, as disappointing as it may be for her, she is not an ancient sorceress in a Victorian-era mansion. She lives in an ordinary with Cassandra. She plays video games and dresses up her friends in modern goth outfits.
The next step of Zywen’s journey focuses on a character that I haven’t made a deck for yet...
La Nocturna, also pictured in Escarlata’s deck, is one of Escarlata’s greatest nemeses. She’s a vampire, but with even greater powers than normal. La Nocturna had the ability to summon hands made out of solid shadow.
La Nocturna was considered to be a hero, a member of the New Granwall Guardians just like Escarlata. However, La Nocturna didn’t just arrest criminals - she massacred them. In her eyes, the rest of the Guardians were too soft to do what needed to be done to prevent further crime. (Though even that was a justification - really, La Nocturna just wanted to drink human blood and used her hero work as an excuse.)
Escarlata and La Nocturna fought some pretty brutal battles, but it was Zywen who ended the feud once and for all. Zywen knew that the source of La Nocturna’s power was the Shadow Veil. After a particularly rough fight that left Escarlata in bad shape, Zywen used her skills of deception and knowledge of vampire lore to ambush La Nocturna and take the Shadow Veil for herself.
However, when Zywen first put on the Shadow Veil, La Nocturna dissolved into dust. The dark magic that fueled all vampire powers left La Nocturna and was absorbed into the veil, killing her. Whether Zywen knew this would happen or not is intentionally ambiguous...
Now, Zywen had the same shadow powers as La Nocturna, and in rare circumstances, used them to fight criminals. But she still didn’t consider herself a hero, wrought with guilt over killing La Nocturna. Furthermore, the Shadow Veil was full of evil magic, and it had a tight grip on Zywen’s mental state.
This is where the core of the deck’s mechanic comes in. The Shadow Veil is evil. Using it hurts Zywen, but you also get benefits from taking on those risks. When you play the game, you’re moving HP tokens around, but you’re also deciding how far Zywen’s willing to tap into her dark powers.
(Side-note: Soulsearching shows off another quirk my setting’s vampires share with some other vampire mythos - no reflections!)
Finally, as villainy in New Granwall City became worse and the New Granwall Guardians began to need more members, Zywen decided to move forward. Maybe she didn’t fully forgive herself for what she’d done, but however she got her powers, it was worth doing some good with them.
Zywen briefly joined the New Granwall Guardians with an exact replica of La Nocturna’s outfit, taking over her identity. This was really confusing for me as a writer and I couldn’t expect anyone to figure out how this “second La Nocturna” thing worked by looking at a deck of 16 unique cards. So I skipped over this part of the story and moved on to the introduction of Silhouette.
Zywen decided that the Shadow Veil as it had been known before was La Nocturna’s symbol - a symbol of fear and evil. In her studies into vampire lore and magic, she found a way to change the veil’s appearance.
Transmute the Veil is a huge moment in Zywen’s story. Zywen is a character who very rarely has control. She starts out controlled by her parents. Then when she gets the Shadow Veil, she’s fighting for control over it.
Now, she’s the one calling the shots. And I wanted to represent that by making sure that Transmute the Veil offers a choice. “Reveal cards from the top of your deck until you find two semi-specific cards, choose one and keep it” is not a rare effect in Sentinels. But Transmute the Veil does something that no other card does - it makes sure the two cards are distinct. Every time you play Transmute the Veil, you will have a choice.
With the Shadow Veil in a new form, Zywen created a new costume and became Silhouette. From here, the rest of the deck generally just shows Silhouette on various adventures. She works alongside Escarlata in Brutal Ambush, and a couple cameo heroes in Drown In Darkness:
Alius, on Silhouette’s left is an upcoming hero created by Mistilitain. Charlie, on her right, is a shapeshifting detective created by Bobbertoriley. Bobbertoriley also created the environments depicted on both these cards. Brutal Ambush shows a casino run by and named after Jericho Moondancer (the non-demon). Drown In Darkness takes place in the spooky woods of Birchwood, Mass. The hedgehog gremlins being drowned are cryptids you can fight there!
Notably, both of these cards carry the “Infernal self-damage” cost. The Shadow Veil’s evil influence is still around - using shadowy powers or being too brutal still makes Silhouette deal herself damage.
The struggle between Silhouette’s good nature and her evil powers is a recurring theme.
This brings us to everybody’s favourite card of the deck. I love it because it, along with Brutal Ambush, are some of the best pieces of art I’ve ever drawn. Players love it because it’s one of Silhouette’s strongest cards and sets up a fun challenge where players earlier in turn order want to leave lots of enemies alive with juuuust enough HP for Silhouette to jump in and drink their blood.
So what’s going on here in terms of story? Well, most vampires in New Granwall City believe in living peacefully with humans. Zywen does too. But one coven master, Lazarus Vane, thinks differently. Lazarus wants vampires to return to their baser instincts and has the magical ability to make it happen. Casting a spell on the very moon, Lazarus made all the vampires in the city go berserk. Once again, poor ol’ Zywen just can’t stay in control of herself.
(By the way, the character getting his blood sucked is The Shining Knight, a minor villain who also shows up in Escarlata’s deck.)
Spooky.
Well, only a few more cards to go. Let’s get this done.
Silhouette becomes more adept with the Shadow Veil than La Nocturna ever was. La Nocturna could only create shadow hands. Silhouette eventually learns how to create an iron maiden.
Screaming Shadows represents her pulling a victim into a sort of shadowy realm full of distorted faces that scream at them. The faces also scream at Silhouette. Fun times.
The one getting screamed at is Unmute - a villain by @insomn14 . We were working on these decks concurrently, and are both fans of each other’s work. So I have Unmute as a cameo here, and Silhouette shows up on one of Unmute’s cards.
The guest character in Black Iron Maiden is The Faithful, created by zerami.
Vampire’s Tome is the spellbook that taught Zywen how to morph the Shadow Veil, but it taught her a lot more than that!
Spirit Siphon is a technique that only a few vampires can perform - drinking someone’s very essence instead of their blood. It could theoretically leave her target an empty husk, but that wouldn’t be very heroic. Silhouette’s version of the spell typically leaves her victim too tired to continue the fight while also restoring her stamina.
Spirit Siphon has another guest hero on it - Radiance, also created by @insomn14 . Radiance is one of my favourite heroes in the game, homebrew and otherwise. insomn and I also got a kick out of how Radiance and Silhouette have some mechanical similarities while being as opposite characters as possible. Radiance is a cheerful ray of sunshine that motivates her allies.
Because of all that, I knew I wanted to give Radiance a key role in Silhouette’s deck. Spirit Siphon is Silhouette’s only card that appears in the deck at 4 copies. You’re probably going to draw one every game, so you’re probably going to see Radiance.
And that is every card in Silhouette’s deck, and why it’s there. Thanks for indulging me! Here’s a close-up of Brutal Ambush, my favourite art in the deck alongside Bloodlust.
See you next time when I turn everybody into 1920s cartoons.
So like what tricks have Tsukiko the Magnificent performed??
Whoops. I finally got a question about my characters and I let it sit in the inbox for a month and a half. Sorry about that. Thanks for the question!
Tsukiko can basically do any kind of magic trick. I'll go through the ones I've actually depicted her doing...
In Tsukiko's deck for Sentinels of the Multiverse, I focused a lot on card tricks. It seemed fitting because Sentinels is a card game - having Tsukiko pull cards out of nowhere could be represented by letting players draw cards from their decks.
Ace Up Her Sleeve also shows off Gary, her per snake. Tsukiko is good at hiding Gary in her sleeves and hat, letting her pull a snake out of nowhere and having him disappear.
Tsukiko's real specialty is quick-change magic. She can change from one outfit to another in the blink of an eye - which is a useful skill when she gets various superpowers from different articles of clothing.
Tsukiko also does a lot of escape artistry. There's the classic trick of putting someone in a box and hoping they escape before you destroy the box or shove blades in it, which Tsukiko does in most of her shows. She can also escape from handcuffs, straitjackets, ropes, etc.
Finally, Tsukiko's Sentinels deck shows her doing some hypnosis magic. From what I understand, hypnosis stage magic is basically just asking audience members to play along and doesn't take any skill or effort on the magician's part, so I sort of ignored it in Dressed to Kill and anywhere else I put Tsukiko. But in the deck, hypnosis made for a good pair of support cards.
There are a couple bonus magic tricks in Dressed to Kill. In Chapter 11, Tsukiko performs knife throwing "the magician's way" to compare to how Stiletto, Alesia Circus's actual knife thrower, does it. Chapter 14 has her make Shiba Kariki, her sword, vanish and reappear similarly to how she does for Gary. There may be a couple other tricks in there that don't fall into any of these categories.
Funny anecdote. I watched a lot of stage magic videos on Youtube to try to figure out the kinds of things Tsukiko should be able to do. I wanted her to perform acts that are impressive by the standards of professional magicians, but without doing anything completely unrealistic.
I'd been feeling pretty good about the level I was writing Tsukiko at until I got to Shin Lim performing on Penn & Teller's Fool Us. That guy was doing things that made Tsukiko, my fictional character, look like an amateur.
Sentinels of the Multiverse has really taken over all of my hobbies...
In 2018, I finished a custom hero deck for Tsukiko. Next was Gold Dragon in 2019. Then Escarlata in 2020.
I kept intending to take breaks from Sentinels and work on other hobbies, but these have been so fun and rewarding that I’ve just kept making cards... without posting them to this blog. Until now.
The Alesia Circus
My first three decks were all heroes, but Sentinels of the Multiverse also has Villain decks and Environment decks. Instead of having a player control them, these decks act on their own.
Battles in Sentinels can take place anywhere from a generic superhero city to an intergalactic prison for supervillains to crazy time vortexes. Alesia Circus is one of the most important locations in my writing, and with Tsukiko already part of the game, I figured it was a perfect time to try my hand at an environment deck.
Dressed to Kill’s story focuses heavily on the performers and their acts, but to make the environment more interactive, I added a set of circus games that players can participate in, called Contests.
Around the time I was finishing up Escarlata, the custom Sentinels community really started expanding, and in particular, creators started featuring each others’ characters in their own cards. I decided I’d use this opportunity to see just how many cameos I could include. Some were front and center, others were buried in the background. The answer, as it turned out, was twelve - there are twelve characters made by my friends among the art!
When a player fulfills a Contest’s condition, the card gets flipped facedown. The back of all cards from the Alesia Circus environment have a ticket on the back:
Tickets let you visit Circus shows and get a bonus in the game as the performer helps you out. If you can’t visit a Circus show, the villain of the game messes with it, and throws some penalty at you.
The Alesia Circus was a pretty frustrating deck to make, to be honest. The art took a really long time, and since the Shows deviate from the normal Sentinels card template, I had to do a lot of work by hand. BUT I love how it turned out.
Digital Implementation
Sentinels of the Multiverse has a digital version on Steam, and recently, the devs added workshop support. Luckily for me, I have a programming background. So I spent an inordinate amount of time coding each and every Sentinels card I’ve designed (around 80), and now all four of my decks are available for free on Steam. (Though Sentinels itself is around $10, or $1 if you can catch it on sale!)
If you’ve got the game, get Spooky Ghostwriter Comics here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2436888590
The digital implementation was ALSO a lot of work but ALSO very rewarding. Heroes in the PC game have extra art beyond the cards - a few different poses depending on whose turn it is. I wanted to keep up the pattern for my heroes, which meant a lot more drawing. But considering how disappointed I am (now) with how I drew Gold Dragon’s character card, I enjoyed seeing how much I’ve improved since then:
Tsukiko Rework
Speaking of being disappointed with old work... the deck I posted for Tsukiko was not great. Since calling that deck complete, I’d learned a lot about art and how to design good Sentinels cards.
Generally, I don’t like reworking things. I’d rather take the lessons I’ve learned and apply them to new things instead of making countless revisions to something I called done. But Tsukiko was rough, and it got to the point where even I didn’t like playing as her anymore.
Luckily, in the grand scheme of things, most of her cards were fine, or at least good enough. There were only a couple absolutely dreadful cards. I won’t dwell too much on the card changes, since I know most people looking at this blog don’t play Sentinels. Instead, I’ll just show off one of the cards that got brand-new art. Because WOW, the original version of Escape Artist was bad:
1920s Cartoon Promos
Some time ago, I posted an old-timey cartoon version of Gold Dragon, saying how much I loved the rubberhose art style and wished I could do more with it. So I did more with it!
All of my heroes will or are going to have a variant character card in this style. Or in Gold Dragon’s case, two:
These are in the digital game too! (Other than Tsukiko’s which is still in the playtesting phase)
Silhouette
And finally, my current art project is yet another Sentinels deck. I hope to have it finished sometime this year. Her name is Silhouette, and she’s an edgy goth vampire with some of the best art I’ve drawn yet:
With Silhouette, I’m switching from Flash/Photoshop to Clip Studio Paint. It’s a fantastic program and I wish I’d made the change sooner. But there are still a lot of things to figure out.
More on Silhouette later, when her deck is complete!
Wrapping Up
If you’ve read this far, thanks for indulging me! Sufficed to say, I’m still pretty fond of Sentinels and making content for it. Of all the nonsense I’ve spent my free time doing, this has been the most rewarding by far. Hopefully my creative energy keeps up!
Thanks for the shoutout, PopCross Studios! I’m glad the Stand chart maker was helpful and it’s cool to (indirectly) contribute to such awesome Stand designs.
will you add a null setting in the stand stat maker
I’d rather not. I normally see 0/5 translated as ‘NONE’ instead of ‘NULL’, so that’s what I went with here. Trying to add different translations would just leave the tool too cluttered for not much gain.
Can u make another stand oc tournament I will love to show how op and weird my stands are
Actually, I had very little to do with the JoJo OC tournament. I didn’t create it, I wasn’t involved with any decisions, aaaaand the tournament I entered ended after only a couple rounds because it was an absolute dumpster fire in terms of judging and management.
But! There have actually been two entire tournaments since then, with another one currently in progress. I’ve heard that these are handled much better than the disaster I was part of. I don’t know for sure, I haven’t really looked at them much because. Y’know. Dumpster fire.
If you want to know more, check the stardustcrusaders subreddit. It’s a big subreddit and the tournament gets lost in the noise, so here’s a link to one of the latest topics: https://www.reddit.com/r/StardustCrusaders/comments/jov9je/jojos_bizarre_oc_tournament_5_round_2_wrapup_part/
There’s also a wiki that may or may not have more information: https://jojos-fan-tournament.fandom.com/wiki/Jojo%27s_Fan_Tournament_Wiki
Enter at your own risk. I’m just telling you what I know.
