chezkevin

Making Magic with chezkevin: The Evolution of Design + Resources

Welcome back to Making Magic with chezkevin, my series where I talk about design decisions for a recent Magic: The Gathering Commander reskin project.

Readers familiar with Magic: The Gathering may realize that this is named after Mark Rosewater's blog about Magic design. My apologies to him😉.

Today we're talking about just that: design, and how this project took root and bore fruit (the root is my brain and the fruit is cardboard).

The secret fun part about this was looking at all the Metroid fanart that exists out there -- and there's a whole lot. I really enjoyed looking at a piece of art and mapping it to a Magic card in my head. So instead of keeping it there, I put it in a Google Spreadsheet. The spreadsheet had numerous columns, notes on the Metroid analogue, links to the art, links to the Scryfall page for that card. Scryfall was invaluable as a database for existing Magic: The Gathering cards: I used card design webpages and I had to get the right frames, pinlines, crops, rules text and more. I was making last-minute tweaks even after I sent my cards off to print; there are just so many details.

I used Imgur to host art images, then applied them to MTGCardBuilder at first. You can find the MTGCardBuilder archive here. However, once I finished my initial 91-card decklist, I realized that I couldn't actually send them to print due to a copyright which MTGCardBuilder adds to every card. I looked to the mpcproxies subreddit which specifically calls out this issue, and recommends CardConjurer.app instead, so that is where I went.

I also used Paint.NET, a free image editing application (poor man's Photoshop), to edit any images as needed. Sometimes, it was faster to edit an image from Paint.NET using existing resources rather than pulling up another design on CardConjurer.app.

Finally, I used ChatGPT for numerous purposes: image upscaling, image editing (ie, removing the HUD from video game screenshots), flavor research, and QA passes for things such as transparent seams on cards. ChatGPT was a assistive tool, and all the creative decisions were mine. For example, ChatGPT would suggest 10 different flavors based on existing first-party lore alongside its own generations, and I would choose or iterate on them.

It was particularly helpful for keeping the spreadsheet updated, because that was a lot of hassle that I did not need. A small summary of my tools:

Deck Decision Ledger Google Spreadsheet
CardConjurer.app
Paint.Net
Imgur.com
ChatGPT.com
Worth mentioning: Pinterest/Deviantart for fanart

The spreadsheet evolved as I needed to reconcile 'cool cards that I found art for' with 'cards that actually belong in the deck I'm building.' Eventually I split out into a 'decklist' tab and a 'sideboard' tab where I could keep track of the collector #'s, and separate those two categories out while still designing both. You could say the process itself, mutated as I worked on it.

Special Treatments

I reserved treatment prints for the following, in general:

Pixel art
Vertical art
Exceptional art

That's where the card design can get fussy, but it can also give some very pleasing aesthetics. So it's often worth the hassle. I found that the biggest hassle for me was the Nickname frame. Some Nickname frames have complete opacity on CardConjurer while others only have partial. In general I restrained myself from re-naming cards for the sake of it. There's a certain classiness to it when you can do that. Of course, other times specifically name proper nouns so those have to be. I'll just close with a small gallery of cards I loved designing. I'll also list all of my assets below.

Chezkevin Assets (All Google Drive)

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Making Magic with chezkevin: The Creatures of Metroid: The Gathering

We already talked about the legendary creatures of Metroid: The Gathering, my fan reskin project for a Magic: The Gathering Commander deck. Today we're talking about everyone else!

I knew I wanted to include the Metroid lifecycle in my decklist. The primary line would all have some form of Infect, but there'd be enough room for others as well.

Production note: It appears that Gamma Metroid (Viral Drake) completely missed my card production transition between tools, so I never got Gamma Metroid to print. Sad. For the sake of continuity, it's produced here without a collector number.

Most of these images I had to AI-upscale/-modify, as I wanted to use screencaps from Metroid: Samus Returns, on the Nintendo 3DS. They're all a little bit dark and could probably use more tweaking, if I'm being honest, but it's nice seeing them all lined up. Zeta Metroid (Spinebiter) is in the sideboard and not the mainboard as it's quite a hefty mana value at 6 converted mana cost. I guess Gamma is in the sideboard too...

There is a decent amount of fanart for the Metroid lifecycle, but most of them veered toward 'creature concept art' when I wanted to really display the creature in their element, hence the Samus Returns upscales.

Metroid Treatments

I couldn't not have special treatments for the Larval Metroid. Come on. These four treatments depict the Metroid as it appears in 4 classic games that featured Metroids. I attempted to align the flavor for each card from its respective game, and got it mostly, except for one -- I don't remember which game unfortunately.

I'm absolutely tickled that my collector numbering lined up to make the first treatment print for Larval Metroid (Flensermite) # 100. Some of these images were manually doctored from video game screenshots. I was kind of hoping for a GameBoy-colored version of the Metroid, with the classic green and black pixels, but found some high-quality video using the Nintendo Switch Online version of Metroid II: Return of Samus.

The Boss Monsters

There are other bosses depicted in my deck, but I wanted to highlight the black Infect pieces. They each bring something different to the table and I look forward to throwing them at my opponents. Double points for being Metroid Prime bosses.

Honorable Mentions

Metroids have evolved over the course of the franchise's decades of history. I incorporated Mochtroids and Metroid variants such as Hunter Metroids in my mainboard/sideboard as well.

There's a plethora of fanart around The Last Metroid, depicted in Metroid 2 and Metroid 3. I chose not to depict it, because the emotional core between it and Samus is so strong, it would detract from the story that I wanted to tell.

There are some mini-packages that I wanted to call out: Beetles and Plated Beetles are depicted on Essence Symbiote/Gemrazer, for example. The evolving Muzby from Metroid dread is depicted as well as its final form Golzuna, in Glowstone Recluse/Auspicious Starrix. I really, really wanted to get Sheegoth on a card, but never found the right pairing or art. So Baby Sheegoths (Pollywog Symbiote) is stranded without a parent to protect it. Hey, I tried.

The rest of the creatures are mostly utility creatures that had a decent Metroid pairing. I'm particularly fond of Silent Arbiter, depicted as the AI from Metroid Dread which aids Samus on Planet ZDR.

The flavor depicts exactly Silent Arbiter's role, as well as the insidious motive of the Adam AI: It took the form of a supercomputer that Samus was already familiar with, when it was actually Raven Beak behind it. Raven Beak wanted to fully unlock Samus's Metroid DNA and claim it for himself, under the guise of the Adam AI.

Helper cards: Metroid tokens + Phazon Corruption

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Making Magic with chezkevin: Worldbuilding with Cardboard

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.

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Making Magic with chezkevin: The Legendary Creatures of Metroid: The Gathering

Welcome back to Making Magic with chezkevin. I'm writing about the design process for my reskin project of a Commander deck. The in-universe Commander is Brokkos, the Apex of Forever and it's reskinned as Metroid Prime, Corrupted Apex.

Don't know what a Commander is? Or a Metroid? Catch thyself up, little one.

Brokkos is a Nightmare Elemental Beast hailing from the magical plane of Ikoria, a realm of behemoths. It reigns supreme as an apex predator of its domain -- there are others, but this is the one we're choosing for our Commander deck, namely because it comes back from the dead using the Mutate mechanic, very similar to the way Metroid Prime adapts to destruction in the Metroid Prime series.

In the climactic boss battle of the original Metroid Prime on the GameCube, you encounter the Metroid Prime in its insidious lair, where it's been irreversibly mutated by the Phazon meteorite that smashed into Tallon IV. It feeds from within, getting stronger and stronger as its poison spreads across the planet.

Metroid Prime is a first-person adventure game where you shoot with different energy beam weapons. Prime vacillates between weaknesses to those beams, clearly marked by the glowing lines on its carapace. I chose to put that on cardboard via 4 different beam variants.

The original artist is HanageMissile, and I did use AI to re-draw his original art to convey the 3 other beam colors (Yellow = Power Beam, Purple = Wave Beam, Red = Plasma Beam). I considered the icy cool blue of the original as the Ice Beam. The largest legs still reflect some blue in each of the AI-generates images, but I chose not to fuss over that -- it could be reasoned that they're merely reflecting the blue of its Phazon cave. Of the 3 variants, my personal favorite is the purple, as it pairs very well with that Phazon blue, as well as the red of its eyes. The red variant, while delightfully intense, goes a little overboard with the red. Each print is accordingly attributed.

I considered other artwork for this creature, but none of them had the quality of HanageMissile's. I also fussed around with the tiny Samus just above the center of the typeline. You can see it in some of the variants; others you can't.

A special note: Mutate creatures actually have a special frame, even on their standard prints (see Brokkos up top). The 'Mutate' portion of the rules text is semi-transparent, allowing you to see more of the artwork through the rules textbox. I considered using this semi-transparency to accurately convey the small Samus in the art, but concluded it was too much work for too little gain. I did mock up a version with that transparency, but ultimately decided against it, since it sacrificed too much for the sake of source material consistency. Considering I had 10+ other mutate cards to design, it wasn't going to be worth it.

Metroid Prime went through several iterations over the course of my 3 months of design, and each one was worth it.

Alternate Commanders

I took inspiration from the Ikoria commander decks, which had these two as Partner Commanders:

Cazur, Relentless Stalker and Ukkima, Stalking Shadow.

These two are clearly meant as 'partners' in the truest sense: they hunt together and rely on each other as partners. When Ukkima connects in combat, Cazur rewards it with a +1/+1 counter. For these two, I looked to the final phase of the boss fight with the Metroid Prime. After you defeat its initial form, it rolls over and falls into another dark cave, filled with pools of Phazon. You realize that the Metroid Prime has shed its outer carapace, and you see what's inside: the essence of Metroid Prime.

For this pairing, they are still 'partnered' as Partner Commanders, however it's in a completely different way: they are paired in an evolutionary arms race between hunter and hunted. I wanted to evoke that final battle with these two cards, and so the other is portrayed in each of their cards, just in the background. Samus hunts down the Metroid Prime; it adapts. Samus gets stronger to chase it; the Metroid Prime adapts.

And even in Ukkima's last ability, when it leaves the battlefield, it lashes out and deals damage to a target player. That's exactly what happens at the end of Metroid Prime, when the remaining blue blob of the Metroid Prime essence reaches out at Samus and steals the Phazon suit, becoming Dark Samus as seen in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Other Legendary Creatures

I knew I wanted Toski in this deck. Toski is an indestructible creature and made for a perfect Mutate target for Brokkos. While not a 'perfect' mapping, it was the best I could determine after some deliberation. I mapped Toski onto the Etecoons of Super Metroid: when Toski or any of your creatures connect in combat, you draw a card. Effectively, combat = knowledge. That maps pretty well onto the Etecoons, who teach you how to wall-jump in Super Metroid. Hence, Wall-Jumping Wayfinders.

Skithiryx is a powerful Infect card that goes in pretty much any deck with Poison. He was an easy map onto Ridley. In particular, I chose the Metroid Prime version of Ridley: Meta Ridley. It worked out very conveniently that Skithiryx's typeline includes 'Skeleton,' when Meta Ridley is named as such because he's reconstructing his body after losing to Samus in the original Metroid.

Ridley took me several iterations to get right, and I'm a big fan of his flavor text.

Honorable Mentions

Fan reskin projects tend to get bloated with a litany of legendary creatures, reflecting the wealth of original characters in that particular universe. I'm happy with the restraint shown in my project. Instead, I showed characters in numerous non-legendary cards.

The original flavor for 'Cold-Eyed Selkie' mapped well for Samus as 'Cold-Eyed Stalker': I simply mapped the merrows onto the Chozo. Raven Beak as Baleful Strix is a little bit cheeky, and I think somewhere there is a legendary creature that would map even better on him. In general, you just can't not have a Dimir deck and omit Baleful Strix.

Evil Twin has that same level of delight: I could have mapped any old shapeshifter onto the SA-X of Metroid Fusion, but I particularly enjoyed its activated ability of destroying the creature that it copied -- something that many players of Metroid Fusion have likely encountered firsthand.

Samus x Tinkerbell mashup? Yes please. This is exactly the kind of crossover that sparks joy, and while it never made it to my main decklist, it was perfect sideboard material. Alongside the intentionally playful art, it maps onto real Metroid play patterns of copying your fallen enemies' abilities. Some other titles I workshopped for this representation of Samus:

Samus, Missile Magpie
Samus, Pickup Artist

You have to imagine that out there, somebody's drawn Samus hitting on someone at a space bar. I just know it exists already.

That does it for today. Next: Worldbuilding with Cardboard

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Making Magic with chezkevin: Introduction

Well, well, well. Look who came crawling back. Me. I'm still here; haven't gone anywhere. Where were you?

Anyways, I'm still reading comics and watching comic-inspired paraphernalia. It's just my life has become a lot more full since you've seen me last. A couple little ones of school age, a few pets here and there, a household to run. But this blog hasn't gone anywhere. Still waiting.

I wanted to document something that's been the top of my mind the past few months. As you may know, I play Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game created in 1993. The earliest I tried it was roughly grade school age around 2002: the release of Onslaught. My friends and I each bought a beginner deck and we mucked around with it. My interest waxed and waned, and I drifted between other TCGs like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon. I even became a Pokemon judge around 2014, and travelled to Regional championships solely for judging. COVID put a short end to that, and Magic never really went away.

Credit: Shutterstock.com Creator: DavidFerencik

I've been at it for the better part of a decade now, and it's the kind of thing that I always come back to, kind of like comic books. Enter: July this year, I was hit by inspiration after viewing various fan reskin projects for Commander decks featuring the Metroid series, published by Nintendo. That's...a lot of words if you're not familiar with them.

Commander is a social way to play Magic: The Gathering. It's not necessarily about defeating your enemies more than self-expression via cardboard. If your deck 'did the thing,' then that is victory in itself, rather than being the last man standing.
Metroid is a sci-fi video game series published by Nintendo. It features a bounty hunter named Samus Aran, often alone, usually on a mysterious planet. Samus was orphaned by a nefarious group called the Space Pirates and raised by a bird species named the Chozo, and employs various Chozo weaponry to defeat the Space Pirates. Metroids are jellyfish-like parasitic creatures often exploited (or attempted to be exploited) by the Space Pirates to disastrous effects.

Metroid is another property integral to chezkevin's childhood. Metroid Prime on the Nintendo GameCube was one of the first video games I actually bought myself. I got it for Christmas, and it probably took teenage me the course of a couple of seasons alone to beat the game. You played as Samus Aran, alone on a planet named Tallon IV. As you go deeper in the planet, you unearth the history that the spacefaring Chozo had been here. There was a civilization here, before the 'Great Poison.' You encounter all kinds of creatures, full ecosystems also affected by The Great Poison, and by the end of the game, you learn what it actually is. It was a transformative experience for teenage chezkevin, and it still stays with me.

I'm not actually a huge fan of Commander. The social aspect is enjoyable but can detract from some parts of the game that I feel are central to playing. But Commander is an ideal format for grafting these other properties. You can tell a full story with a commander deck in ways you wouldn't otherwise be able to do. That's what this project sets out to do: use existing Magic: The Gathering cards to tell a particular aspect of Metroid.

Metroid has decades of history as a video game, and while the lore can be seen as sparse due to its silent protagonist, it can also be deep and meaningful to the right people. I'm one of them. There are 5 entries in the 2D mainline series, and 4 entries in the 3D mainline series, with a number of spin-offs and guest appearances. Samus undergoes various transformations and their relationship with the creatures they hunt becomes increasingly ambiguous. My project follows the footsteps of various other Proxy Designers, listed below (there are likely more).

I hope my addition is worthy of this list. My Commander is Brokkos, Apex of Forever reskinned as Metroid Prime, Corrupted Apex. I used existing Magic: The Gathering cards, but mapped them onto different creatures, characters, moments or other items from the Metroid series to represent those Metroid moments on a card.

Brokkos is a huge trampling mutate creature that can return from the graveyard by mutating. Destroying it does not solve the problem. It only gives it a pathway to mutate on top of a new creature and adopt new characteristics. That's the story of Metroid Prime (the creature). Even after Samus defeats it at the end of the eponymous video game, it lashes out and steals Samus's Phazon Suit. It adapts and becomes Dark Samus, seen in Metroid Prime 2: Echoes.

Brokkos resides in the Magic: The Gathering plane of Ikoria, a realm of behemoths. It's basically the kaiju world of Magic: The Gathering. There, the flora and fauna are just as important as any human beings. That aligns with the world of Metroid Prime, and other Metroid games. The world is the main character just as much as the main character. I emphasize that with the creatures and lands in the deck.

Every deck needs a way to win. This deck wins with Poison: if a player has 10 or more poison counters, they lose the game. The idea is that we mutate Brokkos (Metroid Prime) onto a creature with Infect. When a creature with Infect deals combat damage, the defending player doesn't lose life, but rather gains that many poison counters. Hit with Brokkos (Metroid Prime) enough, and they lose.

This Magic idea of poison maps pretty well onto Phazon, the radioactive poison that leaks out from a meteorite and infects the inhabitants of Tallon IV, mutating them into corrupted versions of themselves. The Chozo were alive during this period, and attempted to contain the poison underground, using various special artifacts. As Samus, you collect these artifacts and fulfill their prophecy: that the 'Newborn' will descend from the sky and put an end to the 'Great Poison.'

The poison of Phazon is represented with various game mechanics of Magic: Infect, Poison, Toxic, and Mutate. With decades of history between both franchises, there was a wealth of art for me to use on existing Magic: The Gathering cards. I'll be using this series to discuss my design decisions and talk about the process. It was a very enjoyable creative process that gave me a lot of sleepless nights. I hope to share that with you here.