Narrative Collapse - Custom MTG Cards
I love Magic: The Gathering. There are a million and one controversies or design decisions that hardcore fans may complain to each other about, but at its core, the card game is a work of brilliance. If you’re unfamiliar, the purpose of the game is to use a deck of your own design constructed from a pool of printed cards - over 24,000 unique cards have been printed over the game’s nearly thirty year run at the time of writing - to defeat an opponent wielding a deck of their own. Each player starts with a pre-determined amount of life points, with the most popular formats giving a player either twenty or forty life, and the primary win condition for the game is to reduce the life total of your opponent(s) to zero before your own life runs out.
To aid you in pursuing that win condition, you have access to a variety of card types, each of which ties in thematically to different fantasy tropes. Creature cards can attack your opponent, reducing their life total through dealing damage equal to the creature’s defined power value, and can defend your own life by blocking creatures sent your way. You can wield spells (Sorceries and Instants) that allow you to destroy creatures, trigger various one-time effects, or most important of all, draw more cards. Enchantments, Artifacts, and Planeswalkers round out your repertoire by providing a means to create persistent or repeated effects that provide benefits to you or detriments to your opponents. Finally, you pay the cost to use these cards during the game by using up Mana, a renewable resource produced primarily by Land cards.
Magic’s Mana system is a standout feature, and I argue one of the major appeals is the Color Pie that supports it. Mana typically has a color, one of five: White (W), Blue (U), Black (B), Red (R), or Green (G). Each color makes up a slice of the “pie” and has their own set of mechanical and philosophical characteristics that make them unique from one another. Most cards require one or more specific colors of Mana in order to pay their casting costs, and this restriction plays a role in defining what those cards are capable of. White, philosophically focused on the collective good, excels at efficiently putting many small creatures onto your side of the battlefield. Green, on the other hand, encourages the survival of the fittest, and consequently has the largest share of the most gargantuan, physically powerful monsters in the game.
Cards, and the characters on them, are designed with these differences in mind, and this fusion of thematic flavor and game mechanics have inspired many custom fan designs in turn. One popular domain of custom cards focuses on translating existing characters from other intellectual properties into Magic form - questions like “What colors would Spider-Man be?” have kicked off the creation of a huge ecosystem of custom cards using tools like the Magic Set Editor or MTG Nexus Card Creator (the tool I used).
Inspired by other fans’ work, I created some custom cards of my own, intended to transform three major characters from my novel Narrative Collapse into Magic form. Coincidentally, these are the same characters that I happen to have artwork for!
Warning: some minor spoilers ahead for an early section of the story that features these characters.
Mocen the First Sentinel
In text form:
Mocen the First Sentinel {2}{R}{W}
Legendary Creature — Human Warrior
First strike, vigilance, haste
Whenever you scry, create a token that’s a copy of Mocen the First Sentinel, except it’s not legendary. Sacrifice it at the beginning of the next end step.
{T}: Mocen fights target creature.
3/2
With her empty eye, she peered into countless futures. With her blessed spear, she embodied them all.
Mocen is a warrior who led her people in an uprising against the Primevals, the natural overlords of the world of Cormand. With the aid of her spear Heuristic, she is able to not only predict the outcome of her actions, but is able to create copies of herself that can perform those actions. She is driven to slay the Primeval owl named Coro by both a dream of freeing her people from his tyranny and a personal vendetta founded in an emotional loss - as such, it felt appropriate to philosophically represent her with the colors White (community-focused) and Red (freedom-loving, emotionally-driven).
The keyword abilities First strike, Vigilance, and Haste are meant to mechanically convey her prowess as a warrior, and her ability to Tap in order to Fight an enemy creature displays her readiness to duel any who stand in her way.
The remaining ability is one that provides you a benefit whenever you Scry, which is a mechanic that allows you to manipulate the cards at the top of your shuffled deck and is often flavored as seeing into the future. With the aid of something that lets you scry repeatedly, you could make a multitude of Mocens to battle any potential foe that may lay ahead, and if you have enough, you may even be able to slay a foe of epic proportions…
Coro, Heart of the Coil Wood
Coro, Heart of the Coil Wood {B}{B}{G}{G}
Legendary Creature — Plant Bird
Flying, trample, ward {2}
Coro, Heart of the Coil Wood is a Forest land unless an opponent has sacrificed a permanent this turn. (It’s not a creature.)
At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice two other nontoken permanents.
{T}: Add X mana in any combination of {B} and/or {G}, where X is the total mana value of permanents sacrificed this turn.
8/8
Coro is hungry, and all creatures, whether man or beast, who reside in his domain may one day end up serving him as a fine meal. He rules his domain, the Coil Wood, with absolute authority, and in a sense is its cruel heart. He is a natural feature of the land (Green), and he cares for no one’s needs other than his own (Black). The great owl flies over his domain, crushing all that stand against him, and is exceedingly difficult to injure as he is made of a shifting mass of roots, branches, and brambles. He lays dormant and at one with the Land, demanding constant sacrifices to sate his hunger, and is a font of ancient power. Should Coro ever sense that a sacrifice was made to someone other than him, he would surely rise in anger and consume those foolhardy enough to not pay him tribute.
The Instructor
The Instructor {6}
Legendary Artifact — Icon
If you would put one or more cards on the bottom of your library, exile those cards instead and put a +1/+1 counter on each creature you control.
You may play cards exiled with The Instructor.
Discard a card, Sacrifice a creature: Scry X, where X is the sacrificed creature’s mana value.
One day, a group of entities descends upon Cormand from elsewhere. They are a collection of great and terrible Icons that grant extraordinary magical abilities to those who worship them, empowering them to slay many of the Primevals. The Instructor answers Mocen’s prayers for freedom from Coro, granting her the spear Heuristic and visions of a reality without the cruel bird. It is a massive stone sphere, an Artifact, that defies mortal understanding. Followers are empowered by the glimpses of potential outcomes It offers, though knowledge of the future always comes at a cost, one Mocen is willing to pay.