Welcome back to Making Magic with me, chezkevin. I talk about my Commander reskin project, crossing
Metroid over with
Magic: The Gathering.
You can
start here if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Today, we're going to talk about worldbuilding.
With these fan projects, the world already existed. The fan is there to put them together. Phazon Corruption becomes Poison counters. Ridley becomes Skithiryx. That carries over throughout the whole project, and you still want to put together a deck of 100 cards that you can play at the table.
When possible, I tried to preserve the title of the original card. That gave me some clear mappings.
However, other cards didn't exactly fit, or had named proper nouns that I simply couldn't use. So those were given nicknames.
I'm a fan of the alliteration I chose for the re-name of 'Karn's Bastion.' Also, I looked into the history of this as well, and Karn's Bastion was actually first printed in War of the Spark, a Planeswalker-themed set. The idea was that you would proliferate the counters on your planeswalkers. However, the Proliferate mechanic was first printed in Scars of Mirrodin, originally intended as a way to proliferate Poison counters. In a way, my take on it is bringing the Proliferate mechanic back home, to poison.
Together, these cards tell the story of a world that was poisoned, a civilization that fell with it and the ecosystem that survived. The Chozo clearly map onto Green in this deck: they provide Samus a sense of heritage, and attunement with nature and community. That's represented in many of the green cards in my reskin project. They might be the one 'bright' spot among the bleakness of the poisoned world of Tallon IV. The world is still beautiful. I tried my best to represent that with the lands.
I'm particularly happy with Misty Rainforest, as it captures the feeling when you begin Metroid Prime. You're here on a specific mission, and you have a job to do. But when you land, everything is just so beautiful you have to stop and admire it. It reminded me of the choral music that plays when you land on Tallon IV: a little bit wondrous, a little bit grand, like you've stepped into something that's bigger than yourself, but it's inviting you. I never even realized that the song was a riff on the original 8-bit theme used for Brinstar, in the original Metroid on the Nintendo Entertainment system.
Later, I found amazing horizontal art by LightningArts that I turned into a triptych:
It captures that sense of wonder, and as you read it from left to right, it gives you a sense of dread: what is this world hiding? I had a lot of fun with the lands, and believe there is yet a plethora of more landscape art of Metroid waiting to discover their Magic: The Gathering counterpart. To close out, please enjoy this mega-collage of Metroid basic lands.
What I enjoy about the standard print cycle (the top row) is that they're all from the same artist, DigitalFrontiers, who used software to 'freecam' from the video game
Metroid Prime Remastered, allowing him to get angles of the video game you wouldn't otherwise be able to get. Each image contains a creature from that particular area on Tallon IV. For example, the Metroids in the Phazon Mines represents the swamp. A beautiful pairing.
The full-art Island, Swamp and Mountain are from a series by the same artist, and I tried my hardest to match the style for the other full-art basic lands. The full-art forest matches exceedingly well, while the full-art Plains certainly lacks the certain full-art concept. It's a good thing my deck only uses Sultai colors -- Blue, Black, and Green.
