I have, including double-sided cards and tokens, illustrated 206 cards for my cube with custom Magic cards. I printed them, cut them, and put them in sleeves. There are 14 cards shown here, illustrated by other people that I covered. Some were illustrated by my niece and nephew and one by my own child.
Putting them next to one another really let it sink in why this took a year of work.
It feels so strange, this. It's not world changing, I would go so far as to say it's not even that important. I did this to have a fun day of magic with my friends and to try out if I can come up with working mechanics that are fun and don't break anything.
I am proud of myself. But after this, I feel kind of hollow. I have squeezed so much of myself into this. Into a project that will probably entertain 8 people for an afternoon. Afterward, it will probably fade into the background.
Strange how the time a creative process takes is in no way related to the time it takes to consume it.
Start your engines! Now that Aetherdrift has been out for a bit I thought it would be fun to ask around and see what sort of vehicle or mount Dancing-Hands, Arega, Jaspar, Ranek, Jibea and Madaya would have piloted if they have theoretically participated on the race?
Alright, that's a lot of people. So in addition to some descriptions and the card designs, I'll also have a rating for how close to reality this is, ranging from 0 (no part of this exists and it's pulled from some alternate reality), to 1 (the vehicle/mount exists, but they haven't heard of or wouldn't participate in any Ghirapur Grand Prix races), to 2 (they might actually have considered participating with that mount/vehicle). So, in the same order as in the ask...
Dancing-Hands
Reality Rating: 0 (this Vehicle doesn't exist, AND Dancing-Hands likely wouldn't participate in the race)
Dancing-Hands isn't exactly a racing type. The most likely way to get him there would be as part of efforts to support the Amonkhetu effort. But even there he'd likely not want to undermine their endeavor to show their own skills and abilities. This vehicle, the Psicycle, is one that would likely be born of Kamigawan tech, harnessing Dancing-Hands' powerful short-range telekinesis to power the entire vehicle. As a result, he'd likely be riding it fully laying down in a small cabin to have the engine as close to him as possible.
Arega
Reality Rating: 1 (the ?vehicle? exists, though I don't know if they were even aware of the Grand Prix)
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Yes... And also a tree?
Arega recently designed and cultivated for themselves a bioship to travel the Space-y plane of Sicarius at their leisure. Of course, they're Simic, so the "ship" is a living organism, though not one that's typically independently aware. Arega doesn't quite ride or pilot it in conventional ways, since they can just inhabit it as their own body, just like they can most of their creations. But it is a ship since it was made to be able to transport their main body as they inhabit the ship... And potentially passengers! There are technically two nested organisms in the full ship, a personal craft that can only carry Arega (or one cramped passenger for a short time) depicted on the card here, and a much larger one that has actual room for up to two passengers as well as living amenities, production of fruit to feed them, and some manual controls.
Built to drift on aether currents or propel itself with wings that power it via photosynthesis, it's unclear how well it would fare in a race, and if it could keep up in speed. But Arega's inhabiting of it as a body would make it much more reactive and intuitive than any Vehicle or Mount/Rider combo.
Jaspar
Reality Rating: 1 (Jaspar can and does occasionally summon echoes as mounts, but wouldn't be interested in a race, nor would these echoes be very suited to one)
Jaspar can bring forth echoes of animals from parts of them, and he's been known to use antlers in the past. While those echoes are temporary until the life left in them is consumed by the magic, they can be pretty versatile, and it's not difficult to imagine Jaspar switching to a few different echoes along the length of the race. That is, if he cared any about all that. Or if they were fast enough to compete, they're mostly as fast as the animals they're summoned from the echoes of. Though they are tireless as long as they last.
Ranek
Reality Rating: 2 (I'm sure Ranek has built an extension to the Stormplate for speed at some point over the last couple centuries. And if he's not, he might if he heard of the race, could get there and thought it a fitting test. He did not actually participate in the race.)
Ranek already has his Stormplate, which is closer to a mech suit than a typical suit of armor. Given his tendency to create magical wonders, the Stormframe Sprinter is an extension to it built for speed and maneuverability. Likely able to shift the bipedal gait to a more effective quadrupedal one for bursts of acceleration. It would be a fearsome contestant in any race it entered, leaping to speeds on par with wheeled vehicles on the road but able of much more agility in rough terrain.
Ranek, who is fond of occasions to prove himself, might even have joined the Grand Prix... But he's currently desparked, mostly retired, and living back home on Kaldheim. He might not have heard of the race, or not in time, or maybe he simply didn't have a ready Omenpath to join it, or lacked a team... Whatever the reasons, he didn't show up for the event.
Jibea
Reality Rating: 0 (Any tech Jibea might have to help their gravity magic would be wearable, not a vehicle, this tech doesn't exist on their home plane anyway, and they'd be unlikely to want to participate in the Grand Prix, even if they might watch it)
A Gravity Slider is designed to help you maneuver while in freefall, and survive any collision or landing. Maximize and minimize terminal velocity both depending on what you want at any given moment. The idea is to redirect gravity into whatever direction you want to go and simply fall towards your objective. Different parts are also designed to minimize or maximize contact friction with any object that passes by (typically the ground). Using the mass of a plane and gravity as its propellant, no fuel is required besides the magic that shifts those forces, that usually comes from the pilot. Something Jibea would very much be able to do, along with using their magic to mess with nearby contestants (or their weaponry) that are NOT made to handle shifting gravity fields.
With that said, as was mentioned in the Reality Rating, this kind of tech doesn't exist on Jibea's home plane, and they certainly didn't have it custom made elsewhere either. They're not really a racer, and there isn't much of a point to participate in those races for them, so it remains very much in AU territory. They do value the display of it and of all these different techniques and technologies and have followed the Grand Prix when possible. They were keeping an eye on the Endriders in particular, sharing some of their plights.
Madaya
Reality Rating: 1 (The Mirage Machine may have existed, though it wasn't a racing Vehicle, and would have likely been sold off at some point. And Madaya isn't a racer)
Back in the days where she was a magician (as in, a stage magician), Madaya may have bought or commissioned the mirage machine from one of the many ambitious inventors on Avishkar. Both something to store her equipment and something capable of projecting room-spanning illusions for her to integrate into some of her more involved spectacles. Sadly, times became rough, she might have had to live off of her mirage machine for a bit, then when the situation became untenable, she likely had to sell it off years ago, before she hit rock bottom and sparked.
But, as an Avishkari girl, she of course is aware of the Ghirapur Grand Prix. Not a contestant herself though. One can imagine that while an illusion van is not really a racing vehicle, she'd be able to wreak quite the havoc on the road by making other racers veer off-course, crash into terrain or each other, or worse.
Hey, have you heard me call a card an Everythingamajig? Yeah, this is about that. Here, lemme explain.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
The term while broad, is a way I refer to a particular kind of custom Magic card where the designer has made a card that will never not be useful. I don’t want to show you a specific example someone made because that seems like I’m trying to address a person rather than addressing a design pattern. Here then is an example probably inspired by someone but trying to not just replicate another person’s work:
This card protects itself, it supplies itself with more cards, and it makes those cards castable. For a knight deck, it’s an obvious inclusion since it both helps you cast them and draw them and it’s also a knight that enables the other knights you can cast. This isn’t to say this card is overpowered — after all, it’s just a 2/2 that attacks and blocks.
What I want to complain about here is that Syr Everythingamajig is a card that does everything on its own. It presents a question for what to put in the deck with it and then it answers that immediately: It wants knights. It obviously wants knights. It wants knights and then you want to attack with those knights and that’s all the card is for. It might have some interactions with other knights but by default, just putting knights on the field is what this card wants.
This isn’t even a pushed example! I’ve seen stuff like this that’s better.
Everythingamajigs aren’t overpowered. They aren’t a design sin, per se. What they are is, in my opinion, boring. A good way to consider a card an everythingamajig is if it does all three of the following:
Converts resources from one thing to another (colloquially called ‘engine’ cards)
Protects itself (ward, hexproof, and, if the card has an on-hit trigger, evasion abilities)
Accumulates more resources (such as drawing cards or creating tokens)
There are cards, real cards, that live in this space somewhat. It’s not quite like the Pack Rat problem as I describe it, where the card represents a first-order strategy that supplants almost all everything else you could be doing. It’s that no matter what you’re doing, an everythingamajig shows up and does something for every choice you could make after its arrival.
Modern Horizons is a space where Wizards are happy to print cards that are if not actual Everythingamajigs, certainly closer to it than I like. Cards like Ocelot Pride and Psychic Frog get close — the Pride enables you gaining life, it is made to be challenging to block, and it enables and improves the arrival of tokens. Psychic Frog is similar in that it both benefits from cards in the yard, can put cards in the yard, and protect itself in the process.
Now, note that none of these are themselves that Everythingamajiggy. These are cards where the designers of Magic: The Gathering have pushed the cards for competitive play, and that means they pack a lot of value in, but they don’t quite do everything. There are angles to attack these cards, because, again, an everythingamajig is not a broken card. It is not inherent to the form of the card that an everythingamajig is going to be overpowered or even polarising around itself when you play with it or around it. In some cases, an everythingamajig can be pretty innoccuous — the card Astral Slide was capable of behaving like an everythingamajig (once you built the whole deck around it), and it’s hardly a card that seems overwhelming now.
Alright, that’s the problem, how to fix it?
One thing that helps to fix everythingamajigs is to be mindful of space on the card. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce and keep adding to a card while you have free space to do so — but when you remember that keeping a font a legible size is important, you can focus on instead making it so each card does something interesting rather than needing it to do several different interesting things. This particular idea is, yes, building on a previous thing I’m habitually pointing out (the single most retyped sentence I have in my history on Reddit is, I’m sure, the phrase ‘the normal maximum number of lines of text on a card is nine’), but it doesn’t stop it from being true. If you focus on making a card that’s got a specific purpose and aim, then it’ll help you to stop making cards that try to make themselves desireable before they’re interesting.
This is something Wizards are really good at, by the way. There are a lot of cards at the mythic rarity that present a kind of high power, high prestige, oo-you-want-it kind of desireability (like look at all three versions of Trostani) but in the process the cards aren’t the kinds of cards that distort the game around them. If you have a deck which wants anthems, tokens, and doesn’t like theft, Trostani Discordant is some seashells-on-the-seashores really really want ’em, but it isn’t a card that goes into every deck that does one of all three of them.
A part of all of this that I think helps the most is to when you’re designing a card, consider the card’s purpose. Know what the card is for and know why it matters that it serves that purpose. Do you want a card that is used for aggressive attacking, or defending on controlling decks? Do you want a card that meets a need for a particular play experience? Or do you want a card that represents the flavour of a particular creature or person? These purposes are a place to start, but they also let you underscore what the most important thing about that purpose is.
Wanna see a time I think Wizards completely botched that?
Umezawa's Jitte was made with a purpose of being a big, impressive rare equipment when Wizards hadn’t really dialled that in. It’s a publically stated fact that the Jitte’s design is a mistake and there was something wrong with the costing or the imagined triggers, and the result being an oppressive card that every deck with creatures wanted to run is one part of that. Note that part of the problem was also that the Jitte was itself so good that it meant you wanted to run creatures to have Jitte swinging going on and the best decks of that format were concentrated around optimally making the Jitte work.
That is, the Jitte, an everythingamajig, was so good that it made it so you wanted to be the best everythingamajig deck.
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
Another WIP round of the Rain World/Magic: The Gathering custom card project.
Fixed up artist credit and created a set symbol. It's not very good, but I got tired of trying to figure out how to make Karma 10 into a set symbol and just stuck with what I first created - next time I'll definitely be making any symbols much thicker with the black and white outline.
Still having some trouble aligning the back with the front. I used regular bright-white paper for this, but the finished product will be on card stock so hopefully the colors won't be so pale.
There are more cards than this, with a set of 35 (I deeply regret making the set so large...), but these are the ones I got printed in color first.
Next time I post about this they should be in their finished state.
This started as a top-down Maenad (a group of women from greek mythology connected to Dionysus) and was to start a red/green card with madness since Dionysus like cards from theros are red green. However, when I settled on this haste text it has now, it didn't really feel like it needed or wanted to be green, and so I made it mono red. And then as I did, I realized how well this would fit in modern horizons 2, to help both the madness archetype and the delirium archetype and so I was pretty happy with mono red since it couldn't fulfill that purpose as a multicolored card.
Before I get to the commentary, I need to thank everyone both submitting a card and also for the extra lore or stories that come with them!
Etherium Artist - @misterstingyjack Tremendous flavor text and it translates really well with the effect. Transmute is a forgotten mechanic but it felt very natural for what you were going for! Also I can’t help but associate the card with one of my favorite cards of all time Master Transmuter, which is also from Esper. I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but I now ship those two cards.
Etherium Mines - @dimestoretajic I really like the idea of a “mine” card that also shows you what it produces. I am not sure if the middle ability was needed because I think the selling point is that this land creates something on top of producing mana. But this is just nitpicking, I dig this card (sorry I had to lol)
Etherium Translator @mardu-lesbian Love that many people got creative with the colored artifact matters theme! Translator is an incredible mana rock on its own right, and it also comes with a mana sink ability! I appreciate the limitation because infinite mana is a thing, and usually some artifacts are part of the combos. I usually don’t care about the rarity of the cards but I think it’s too good for an uncommon. Ending, it’s great to see Breya’s climbing the ladder of Esper politics in the flavor text! #Breya for Hegemon
Silver border because of the can of worms that is mutate on any creature card.
Costly because of the nonsense second ability on top of the nonsense first ability. I’m a fan of this sort of text replacement thing, though it’s probably a huge pain to develop. But I think there’s potential in a couple of auras or equipments that change ETBs, upkeeps, attacks, dies, end of turn, etc triggers around.
Mark Rosewater as done a whole podcast about why doing vanilla matters as a set theme is a problem. It’s #444 and you can find it here (just search for the word vanilla). But what if I told you all your prehistoric dreams could come true?
Mark goes over a number of issues this has as a theme, but I think it boils down to two overarching obstacles. The first is ASFAN--making sure enough cards show up in packs that the theme can work, especially in limited. The second is that vanilla creatures just aren’t much fun, to be perfectly honest.
Now before we get to my solution, Mark offered the following solutions:
Make the threshold for caring about it one. That is, you only need to control one vanilla creature for any cards looking to care about you controlling vanilla creatures.
More token making since tokens are often vanilla creatures as long as you don’t give them abilities.
Work with templating and maybe find a word that defines what vanilla means mechanically so instead of spelling it out you could just reference that word.
Make caring about all creatures a theme, not just vanilla creatures, since it overlaps and lets you put non-vanilla creatures in your deck.
Look at playing up tribal elements if possible but that likely fights the space you have to design cards that care about vanilla matters.
So how do you make a enough vanilla creatures to fill out a set’s theme while not making it the most boring, board-stalling set ever?
Prehistoric is a supertype specifically for creatures (though it could presumably work on other permanents) with the rules that prehistoric creatures lose all abilities and can’t have or gain abilities shortly after entering the battlefield. In effect, it makes them vanilla creatures after they ETB.
In addition to just making normal vanilla creatures prehistoric, we can now make any creature with a cast or ETB trigger a prehistoric creature. I did a count for Theros Beyond Death and found 17 creatures that would function normally with their ETB triggers but could be made prehistoric. I count 16 in Throne of Eldraine. Additionally, there are a fair number of creatures where this change would almost work except that the creature has an evergreen keyword like flying. So prehistoric will seriously warp how you need to design the set, but it allows you to significantly ramp up the number of virtual vanillas in the set and makes them function as vanillas with regard to the vanilla matters theme.
And since they’ve got ETBs to play with, that lessens some of the board stalling issues and makes them a lot more interesting to play. Now while this addresses a lot of the issues and I think would make the theme possible, there are still significant obstacles to it. First and foremost is the part where they can’t gain abilities. The big issue here is with stuff like auras or even just a common spell like Fervent Strike. You could still accomplish this stuff but at the cost of it being more complicated and spelling out the how it modifies the rules of creatures blocking/dealing damage rather than granting abilities. This is what I mean:
This effectively gives the enchanted creature flying, but it doesn’t say it gives the creature flying. So our Muragandan Crocodile could fly into battle this way. But Arcane Flight on the same croc would only grant it the P/T boost and not give it flying because prehistoric prevents it from having or gaining abilities. This is I think the most significant barrier to this idea now. It would warp how you want to design all the sets surrounding it, makes the thing fairly parasitic in the regard that no ability-granting effects work with prehistoric creatures, and the abilities you can do are things that were mostly errata’d away when these things became evergreen keywords.
I think the other issue here is that this creates a marker to care about more easily with fewer words. Instead of saying creature/s “with no abilities” you can just say prehistoric creature... EXCEPT then that makes it even more parasitic and doesn’t work with vanilla creatures in general. I think you could still do some caring about prehistoric specifically, but players are going to be disappointed if most of the stuff here doesn’t specify “prehistoric creature or creature with no abilities.” Oh, yeah, I’ve actually created a new problem with regard to wordiness here. For all the good the prehistoric does, a card like Muragandan Crocodile does have an ability except for just after it enters the battlefield. So if you want to tutor or filter for vanilla creatures and include all prehistoric creatures in that (since that’s the point of prehistoric) now you have to specify both to make sure you hit everything.
Really all this is to say that the barriers to the vanilla matters as a theme are pretty much insurmountable. I could see a few more “creatures with no abilities” relevant cards being printed here and there, but there are not many good slots for even those. Like you’d almost certainly rather print a devotion pay off or energy enabler or tribal matters card in that space in relevant sets. So I’m also not surprised that we haven’t seen any more designs in that space.
But if we really wanted to play in this space, I’d look at the prehistoric supertype. I’d also want to consider if it could be adjusted in some manner to be put on more card types, particularly instants and sorceries. But that’s beyond the scope of what I’m doing today.
