Making a Magic Set: MAIN CAST

Written By: Jay Edwards

Now that we’ve got our main colour sketches, we can start looking at integrating some main characters from Legend of Dragoon into the set. For these, I want to tackle them in the order in which you meet them in the game so it feels more organic. I also want their mana cost to represent this, with later game characters costing more. This way, your starting characters aren’t running into end-game bosses right away.

Probably a minor thing to consider, but it’s a flavour thing that I want to keep intact. I also want to give a few characters multiple cards to represent their growth throughout the game, with their early versions being uncommon and their powered up version being rares or even mythics.

A final note, from here on out there are going to be spoilers for the game, but if you haven’t played this RPG from the original Playstation, I doubt you’ll mind that much. With all that said, let’s begin with the first character we play as: Dart Fein.

Dart is the main protagonist of LoD. He’s your typical mid-90s anime lead character - spiked hair, tragic backstory, optimistic. Something else that he has that gives him a little spice is that he’s angry. Not “throwing fists in the Waffle House parking lot” angry, but reasonably angry. When his village is attacked and his childhood friend is kidnapped, he’s understably upset about the whole situation. Same goes for when Lavitz dies, when Lloyd does… anything, and when his dad reveals himself to be the ultimate bad guy. That rage leads him to be a little rash too, running into things and only being tempered by older and wiser members of the party.

Since he’s the first character we play as, this version of Dart should be 1 mana and fairly aggressive to reflect that, in the beginning, he is an angry man rushing into danger without much regard for himself. I think that a simple design with a nod to his risky behaviour will work best. Here is what I came up with (thanks to CardCraft for being a great tool for making custom cards):

For his updated version from later in the game, Dart is still angry about what he keeps discovering about Emperor Diaz and the machinations for the end of world, but he has focused his anger and tempered it after spending time with his party. He has also developed his Dragoon powers more and is quite powerful. He’s still in red, but has much more of an impact when he hits the table:

Now, I’m not going to write 100+ articles going over every card that I design, but I wanted to go through my thought process on these two to give some insight into how I design cards. Here are a couple more members of the main cast to demonstrate these:

Future articles will be similar to this one; I’ll talk about my process in working on a subset of cards specifically, do a little walkthrough on one or two, and then show the rest from that category that I’ve developed. If there’s an interesting card, I’ll highlight it specifically, but outside of that, I’ll be doing a few spoiler articles as the set is developed. Hopefully this little taste has gotten you interested in future cards and I’ll see you in the next article!