Making a Magic Set: Origins
Written By: Jay Edwards
With the upcoming release of the Spiderman Universes Beyond set, I have been toying around with a long standing idea: a custom Magic set. Back in university, I made a set based on my gaming club at the time and I remember really liking the process. So, why not try it again, but this time based on an existing property? It might also be interesting to document my progress, talk about choices, and preview cards kinda like a spoiler article for a set that doesn’t really exist!
The first hurdle to making this set is figuring out what property to adapt. I could easily pick something random that I love, but that would likely lead to an absolute failure because it’s not a great fit for making a Magic set. I’d love to make an Oddworld set, but there’s just not enough to make anything beyond maybe a Secret Lair. To make a full Magic set of around 200 cards, there needs to be a few things: a strong world, a wide variety of creatures, a decent selection of legendary creatures, and enough of all of those to balance all the colours. Oh, and one last thing: I have to be passionate about it. Sorry Undertale fans, it seems like a great series, but it’s just not my thing.
For the world to be considered “strong”, I’d need something that has a variety of locations and settings to help represent different colours of mana. I could have a set based entirely in a single area, but then each colour risks losing a degree of identity. The more varied environments to pick from, the easier it will be to fill in holes later on in the process as those areas will naturally lend themselves to certain colours, both visually and philosophically. An extra bonus to this is that varied areas will help prevent each colour from being monotonous and stale.
Having a breadth of creatures at my disposal is also going to be critical for this endeavour. When I was designing my set in university, this was the problem I ran face first into. I thought that having around 40 when I first started would be good enough and I was extremely wrong. You can definitely have a set with a ton of variations on the same creature type, but I don’t really have a tribal theme in mind for this. Building a tribal theme into a draftable, balanced set can be a major challenge and I would rather have a wide spread of creatures to pick from for something like this.
Alongside the nameless hordes of creatures, having a decent variety of legendary creatures is critical for a set. There’s a very fine balance to strike though, because having too many legendaries can be an overload of the type and makes it feel pointless. The property itself can’t have too many major players either because you run the risk of missing a character and just having someone whose absence is really noticed in the overall set from a flavour standpoint. As much as the set is going to be a standalone collection that’s meant to be drafted, there will still be notable characters that have to be there. The inevitable Star Trek set needs Captain Kirk because you can’t have a Star Trek thing without referencing him at least once.
The last step in this whole process is figuring out what property I’m passionate about that fits all of the above criteria. I don’t want to pick something that already has a tabletop game, so that excludes Malifaux from the mix. I would also want to avoid any kind of modern settings, so that means Call of Duty, Splinter Cell, and the entirety of the James Bond series are off the table. I’d love to do a Redwall set, but Bloomburrow exists and I fear that adapting that series would just result in the same set but with fewer frogs (which would be a crime). Lastly, making an Elden Ring set would be a major challenge since both white and green would be difficult to give a fair shake as The Lands Between don’t have a ton of those qualities. All those things considered, I’m left with one option: Legend of Dragoon.
Since 90% of readers won’t have any idea what LoD is, I’ll give a quick rundown here. It’s a JRPG from the Playstation 1 that has never received a sequel, remake, or remaster. The game itself is quite well written with a good number of named characters, a huge variety of random encounters, and the party travels around a sizable map throughout the game. The basic plotline is very JRPG: the main character, Dart, has his village razed and his childhood friend is kidnapped, leading to the main quest. There’s nothing super complicated about the story and it evolves naturally as Dart has never left his small town, so all the lore that’s given is done fairly organically and it makes sense in the game world. There’s also not anything super complicated, so getting the main storyline across should be fairly simple in card form.
In my next article, I’m going to talk more about the main characters and designing their cards, which should set the overall flavour for what each of those colours will represent in this set. Hopefully I’ve intrigued you enough to stick around to see what I end up developing!
