Armies United
Custom Magic: the Gathering Card Redesigns
Prompt
I am a long time player of the trading card game Magic: The Gathering (MTG for short). For some time now MTG has done a series of special printings of cards called Secret Lair, offering unique looks on a variety of cards. I liked the idea of this as a prompt for myself, and so I took to adapting some of my favorite cards and pitted them against each other visually. With four cards total, being two separate pairs, each pair has a "leader" and an "army" which follows it. The cards chosen also represent two factions which have thematically conflicted with one another at times.
Examples of Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair cards. Images from secretlair.wizards.com.
Research
Given the two sides I chose for this hypothetical Secret Lair and the nature of the "Boros Guild" in MTG Lore, I decided that a propaganda style poster would fit the aesthetic best. Playing on those themes helped me determine what I wanted the composition to be both armies facing each other, with the "Boros Guild" being the light and the Zombie faction as the dark. The MTG lore is all about different worlds, referred to as "Planes," fighting each other in various wars and confrontations. Both factions chosen here represent two different "planes," making this a hypothetical skirmish.
Screenshots used for reference. Images from Scryfall.com.
“I run the maze alone, but I fight with the full might of the Legion.”
Redesigns
For the cards, I used a color palette that matched both their original colors and were reminiscent of the most famous types of propaganda posters. I wanted to take a reduced, graphical approach to the cards as opposed to the usual highly detailed illustrations that MTG is known for today. Along with this, I chose fonts that reflected this propaganda style with condensed, blocky characters. Another notable change to the traditional MTG format is the location of the name of the card, to which I placed it closer to the text so the image becomes relatively unobstructed.
