My experience with custom Magic: The Gathering design spans nearly seven years as of writing. I have owned the card design and production process from initial conception and many iterations thereafter, to character design and art direction, to playtesting and theorycrafting with many amazing Magic community members, and to copyediting and finalizing print files. This experience has not only been a fun and productive hobby for me, but also translated into my first professional game design work for Warsaken!

The following cards were designed top-down (starting with flavor before game mechanics) based on characters not originally intended to be on cards. Most of them are my characters that I wrote short biographies and visual descriptions for, and then commissioned artists to create references and other art for them. All artists are credited on my cards, and in art image filenames - my dearest thanks go out to everyone who’s worked with me over the years! Past that, I use Magic Set Editor to quickly sketch cards, Card Conjurer to format hi-res print-ready images, and MakePlayingCards.com to actually print them.

Ephemera the Ardent

Ephemera was one of the first characters I ever designed, years and years ago. She was originally conceived as the protagonist of an abandoned Strategy RPG concept (the diminutive form of Ephemera being Effie, in reference to Fire Emblem), and elements from that concept still float around in her and all my other characters’ (and world) designs. She’s a powerful empath and psychic, and one of scant few characters able to walk between the folds of a magically-partitioned world, and so making her card a Planeswalker seemed obvious.

Planeswalkers are bloody difficult to design and balance, and I don’t do them often. Magic R&D seems to agree nowadays, with most sets now around 0-2 planeswalkers. On top of that, as a hobbyist with only so much empirical playtesting data, I have markedly different design considerations and resources than if I were designing for, say, a Standard set or a preconstructed Commander deck.

With that in mind, this was designed around the time I was really into Vintage Cube and wanted to make cards that could enhance certain draft archetypes - in Ephemera’s case that was URW Spellslinger/Storm, which aims to cast a lot of spells in a single turn. This is mostly reflected in her +1 that scales with the number of spells you’ve cast (and the prowess mechanic which keeps the scaling going afterwards). For as high as the ceiling on it can get and as flavorful as it was with her original Fire Emblem-esque design and abilities, I think it was a big ask of these Storm decks to have a lot of creatures on top of maintaining a steady pace of spells to remain useful with Effie. As well, her -2 based on Angelic Arbiter can be critically disruptive and benefits from not being a static effect attached to a vulnerable creature, but in my experience performs much better in a slower Commander game where it can kneecap multiple opponents than it can in a fast-paced 1v1 Vintage draft game. As for her -7, it was meant to invoke “overwhelming and debilitating empathy”, which is a flavor win where her character is concerned, but has the same issue as the -2 where it’s wholly underwhelming against certain decks, especially in Vintage Cube.

I’m happy with the flavor of this card and how it translated to individual abilities, but they didn’t quite add up to the game piece I intended them to, making Effie of limited use to very specific kinds of decks rather than uplifting the archetypes in general like I wanted. I think her abilities are much better suited towards Commander gameplay, and were I to retool her in the future I would also take notes from Tarkir: Dragonstorm’s approach to URW go-wide spellslinger with Elsha, Threefold Master.

Empath’s Lament

Discerning MTG fans might notice that this card’s artwork is by Magic art alum Carly Mazur. I won a charity auction for a custom, painted commission from her, and put it to use on this card! She did an amazing job!

Continuing with the idea of “overwhelming and debilitating empathy”, this is effectively a red riff on the likes of Grave Pact and Massacre Girl.

Usha, the Showstopper

Usha is a professional wrestler who developed from a worldbuilding exercise where I designed the Infernal, a magically-modified human subspecies with four arms, high endurance, and shorter lifespans. I’m not satisfied with her character, but I still adore her visual design and the pro wrestling kayfabe, and want to keep her around for something… Also, many thanks to patrol_toroid for the incredible rendition of Usha used on her card!

This is a pretty simple but effective red rare intended to pay off with extra combat damage triggers from double strike and additional combat phases. I had not originally intended for her to be printed with haste - I made a version without it out of fear that she was overtuned, and accidentally used the old one when printing - but then Knuckles the Echidna rolled in with very similar hands to throw, and I no longer felt bad.

Throw

Toughness-based Fling is a concept I have personally wanted for awhile, partially because it seemed so simple and not terribly broken, and partially just because I had this sick art of Usha doing a four-armed suplex. However, I have to acknowledge that R&D hasn’t opened the floodgates on the idea in the way they have with Fling, likely because power being used for damage is obvious and easy-to-balance in a way toughness-as-damage is not, especially in Red of all colors that has little precedent for toughness-matters. Likewise, it could cause unforeseen and unwanted design restrictions on future cards that might otherwise be fine without Throw’s existence. I do not have such restrictions as a hobbyist designer, but if I weren’t I would think a lot harder about how to introduce such an effect to Magic canon in a satisfying way. Anyone else remember when red walls were a thing…?

Wampus, Prodigal Pilferer

Wampus is the second Infernal character I designed - an affluent and ostentatious young businessman who moonlights as the cavernous city of Sulveria’s resident cat burglar extraordinaire. Accordingly, he takes cards from your opponents when he hits them which you can then either play or cash in for profit in the form of a Treasure token. This is mechanically riffing on Specters, a type full of evasive 3-4 mana creatures that force a discard when they deal combat damage to a player.

Lily, True Spirit Exile

Lily is a young psychic and cleric who was indoctrinated into the Hands of the True Spirit cult by her parents in her early teens. At this point in my creative exploration I was starting to seriously explore Belief As A Tool being a central mechanic of my setting’s magic system and where that could lead. Accordingly, the Hands are a zealous monotheistic cult that worships the True Spirit, a “god” of their own creation, forced into tangible existence through collective, fervent belief. Lily, in spite of this jealous god and cult, practiced psychic abilities to serve her own means and in the process developed a headmate named Toshiro whom aided her explosive departure. I am still compelled by Lily and Toshiro’s characters, but knowing what I know now about Plurality and DID (and moreover, how much I still don’t know), I would really want to revisit them with that in mind before doing anything else with the two.

Mechanically, she bears a stark resemblance to life doublers like Rhox Faithmender, and the niche-but-fascinating Tainted Remedy that encourages you to force your opponents to gain (but actually lose) life. Since she was designed, cards like Astarion, the Decadent have been printed that lean on this playstyle, but there are still scant few ways to force an opponent to gain life to their detriment (and that are easier than just dealing damage the normal way). I’m sure you can do some untap combo with her, but given the activation cost, I don’t see it being a problem.

Maisie, Prodigious Mind

Maisie is a spin on Cayth, Famed Mechanist, giving up proliferate and populate in favor of granting all your artifact creatures a beefed-up Fabricate 1 that’s actually Modular 1 in all but name. I imagine there are reasons why “everything gets modular” hasn’t been printed in Magic, though by 2025, modular is all but unplayed and the terrifying Affinity decks of yester-decade have been thoroughly kneecapped by bans and the passage of time. In the context of playing Maisie as a custom commander, and especially now that the Commander Brackets system exists, I can’t help but see Maisie (or any custom commander) interacting with something in some unforeseen way to be less of an issue with her, and more about managing expectations with your playgroup about the deck you built. Countless combos exist in Magic at varying degrees of speed and effectiveness, and at some point I think you can say “okay, this mechanic fundamentally combos with this other game piece and I can’t really change that about either, so at what cost and in what situation am I okay with the combo happening?” Or even, “do I just not put the combo in this deck to target a lower Commander bracket?”

Guest Characters

Aiko belongs to .less, the artist for this and the other cards in this section. She’s not directly related to any of my characters, but I put special effort and pride into this as .less and I have worked together for years now on cards and art beyond what is shown here. Also, this art is too good for the card not to also be thoughtfully designed.

Aiko is the half-angel, half-demon child of Haohi and Akai (pictured below), and inherited volatile and potent dimensional powers as a result. This card depicts her after some time spent maturing and learning how not to get lost from blindly planeswalking across the multiverse, similar to Magic’s own Wandering Emperor. Mechanically, I chose to represent this somewhat chaotic dimension warping with three effect: Cascade, Oblation, and her ultimate that acts as a souped-up version of Future Sight and allows you to pick through your opponents’ scraps. I’m currently building and testing a deck that acts similar to the infamous Lantern Control decks of yore, though with much less of an emphasis on brutally locking down the game and more on manipulating topdecks to steal or capitalize on them in interesting ways.

Another of my favorite designs that I think encapsulates some really interesting aspects of white and black planeswalkers, while also leaning into Akai’s character a lot. 2 life for 1 loyalty is a fairly steep cost, but one that the most ambitious planeswalker decks will happily pay (and that I enjoy making them pay and plan around). His -3 is an atypical theft effect not usually seen in WB, but that I think fits quite well - black is tertiary in theft effects and gets them based on common black costs like paying life, while white makes it additionally conditional on Akai’s continued presence. That might seem like a lot of hoops, but Akai’s 0 ability allows you to exile a stolen permanent and return it under your control - permanently, without Akai needing to be there. This is, of course, on top of all the other obvious utility his 0 has. I’m very happy with how this design came together.

Haohi’s design was largely top-down but also arose from a not-so-hidden desire for a Kaalia of the Vast effect specific to Angels that both differentiated itself from Kaalia enough to be relevant and interesting, but wouldn’t draw quite as much ire as Kaalia infamously does. To that end, simply removing black from her color identity, limiting her to Angels, and increasing her cost to 5 mana does a lot of heavy lifting to make Haohi less of an flashing neon sign saying that everyone should kill you first. To make her still have some relevance over Kaalia, though, I decided to also have Haohi discard then draw (a challenge for any Angel deck), and gain life if it’s not an Angel. I feel the pull to continue iterating on this card, but I think it’s in a pretty solid spot as it is.

Grace, Marsupial Mechanist

It’s me! I want you to cast artifacts a lot, and during your opponents’ turns! If you’ve met me in-person, I might have given you a business card with this on it!

Death Knell

And that’s my time! You’ll undoubtedly hear me yap about Magic more later, but if you’re itching for more, you can find my card and art archive here!