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.
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).
- Dark Samus as Captain N'Gathrod
- Samus as Cloud, Ex-SOLDIER
- Dark Samus as Etrata, the Silencer
- Samus and The Last Metroid
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 you enjoy reading about the process here.
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