Create Your Own Magic Cards

four stars:

So I am a huge fan of Magic: The Gathering. I have many cards and still play regularly, as do many of my friends. So I was super psyched to see that there was an assignment where we get to create our own. I made four cards, all creatures.

The first is Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro. I made him a medium power creature, but gave him flying because he can fly in the movie. As a forest spirit, he can summon saprolings, like the garden scene in the movie, and then , with the help of four other creatures, he can grow a huge tree elemental (again, like in the movie). I tried to make his abilities work together, so you could make the small tokens, then use them next turn to make the big one. The other three are from the movie Tekkonkinkreet, which actually has many elements of noir. I would recommend that everyone watch it. The characters White and Black work best together. White can sort of float/fly during more surreal moments in the movie, and he also one time sets this big assassin guy on fire, which explains his abilities. Notice that the burn ability isn’t enough to kill a creature on its own, but it could help Black kill anything with power 4 to 7. White is kind of head-in-the clouds imaginative. He likes to make believe and speaks what sounds like nonsense a lot. But he also can sort of float when he’s meditating/chanting and he has visions that come true, so I made him a Prophet. Black, without White, is also just a pretty good creature. But with White in play he gets +2/+2 and vigilance because he’s White’s protector. He is fast and fierce and chooses his battles, so I gave him first strike and the ability to force a blocker, basically to target a creature. When White has been out but now is gone, like when he almost dies in the movie and Black leaves him, Black sort of loses his mind and gets really angry and reckless. He gains haste and a lot of power, but he loses some defense/health and vigilance. Even still, he is fearsome, perhaps more so. Finally we have The Minotaur, the legendary terror of Tekkonkinkreet. The minataur is strong and intimidating, so naturally I gave him intimidate and 5 power. But he’s not indestructible. His low health and 5 mana, 2 of them black cost sort of balance out his power and abilities. His activated ability is taken from how he tries to turn Black to “the dark side”. He allows you to sacrifice your living creatures to make them like him; high power creatures of darkness (zombies) with intimidate. He exhorts you to “free the darkness.”

For all of the cards, I not only designed them to reflect the characters, but also tried to keep in mind the real mechanics of the game. These are all abilities that you could easily expect to see on a real magic card, and I tried to balance all the elements to create cards that are not only easily playable, but also not so wildly powerful that they would break the game.