More Fun With Custom Cards

The addiction continues. I've spent a lot of spare time recently working on a variety of custom card themes. Several Power Girl cards.

Lots of Flash cards.

A few Hulk cards.

A bunch of Fantastic Four cards.

Some Captain America ones.

Not to mention Wolverine.

And cards for my X-Mental deck.

But things really got crazy once I started Photoshopping cards. It all started innocently enough with an attempt to simulate the silver colored Emma Frost Easter egg card, which turned out pretty cool.

Then my friend Joey suggested that I color the frame silver as well. That led to the card at the beginning of the article. Which in turn led to this variation on the theme. (I like Emma better.)

Those were plenty challenging, especially Emma, but by then I was ready for an even bigger challenge. A couple of the guys in the Facebook group who design custom cards, Steven Williams and Chris Tillison, had been experimenting with "3D cards," where portions of the card frame were replaced with portions of the underlying image. I decided to give those a try. The first one was relatively easy.

Not so, this one.

And most definitely not this one, by far my most ambitious.

Anyway, that's what I've been having fun with lately. I expect I will burn out on this pretty soon, and then I'll go back to actually playing the game and writing about the decks I'm playing with. In the meantime, here are a few more of my favorites. I hope you enjoy them.

My Other Strange Addiction

Before I got hooked on creating custom cards, I started having some custom mats made. I had had a couple made years ago, but I was ready for some new ones. My initial order was four. Then I was so happy with how those turned out, I had another three made (although one was for someone else). I was particularly pleased with the one pictured above, although all of them turned out just as nice.

If you are interested in having one made, I can highly recommend InkedPlaymats.com. They charge $24.99 apiece. Shipping is about $10 for two. If your order goes over $50, though, shipping is free. Hence the reason I ordered three on my second order.

The key to getting good results is to start with a really large original image, at least 1024x768. When searching on Google, I like to use the Search Tools option and set the size to >=1024x768. Anything smaller than that is going to look slightly fuzzy when it is resized to the desired size of 3675 x 2175. I used Paint Shop Pro to crop and resize the images, but there are any number of other options available if you don't have Photoshop.

Below are the images I used to have mats made, along with links to the full-sized images, for anyone who wants to make their own copy of one of mine. I highly recommend that you make one that is all your own, though.

Wonder Woman Link

Superman Link

Cap/Cyclops Link

Sentinels Link

Phoenix Link

Flash Link

Sinestro Link

My Strange Addiction

Late last week I came down with a bit of the stomach crud, and found myself with a lot of time on my hands. As I indicated in my last post, I had become very enamored with this concept of custom Vs. cards (not new cards, really, but custom designs for existing cards). All the software needed to design these cards is readily available for download, and I'm a software guy myself, so I thought, "I can do this." I downloaded and installed all the files, then started looking for documentation for Magic Set Editor 2. If there is any, I couldn't find it. But when I Googled "magic set editor tutorial," I found a YouTube video that showed how to design a simple custom Magic card. After watching it, I was off and running. (There is also a written tutorial available, but the video was sufficient for me.)

It took a little while to figure certain things out, since the workflow for doing a Vs. System card is not the same as it would be for a Magic card, but only the first card is hard. After that, they get progressively easier to do. I was pretty happy with how the first one turned out (the Batman card, pictured above), so I did another one. Then another. And another. After a while, I was ready for another challenge: a slider. These are pairs of cards that are designed as one. I'm not sure how many cards like this UDE did back in the day, but I know there were some in Justice League and Legion, maybe Heralds as well? I can't remember. Anyway, the slider concept allows you to create a pair of cards that are intended to look good on their own but even better when they are placed side-by-side. Here's my first one:

By this time I was absolutely hooked. I had done maybe a dozen regular cards and this slider, and as soon as I finished one card I already had at least one idea for another. By the end of the weekend I had done over 70 cards, and that's not counting the ones that I scrapped after finding better images.

Speaking of which, if you decide to try this yourself, here are some tips for finding images. First, use Google, comicvine.com, and Pinterest to find the images. Second, when using Google, use the Search Tools option so you can filter by size. Use 800x600 or larger if possible, since you will need to crop quite a bit to fit the image in the card frame. Third, add "comic" to the search criteria if you are getting a lot of movie-related images, as you will when searching for things like X-Men, Batman, Avengers, etc. Finally, if you know artists' names, search by artist when you can. That will filter things out considerably. Searching for "david finch art" or "michael turner art" on Pinterest will get you a lot of high quality hits, for example.

I've posted all my designs on Facebook in the Vs System Custom Designs group that I mentioned earlier, but here are a few of my favorites. The Crackshot card got a big assist from Joey Tufo, who suggested using the tip of the arrow as the A in Crackshot. The sunshine effect at the top left of the San card was pure serendipity.

Update:

Here is some more information about how to install and set up Magic Set Editor to create cards like these. First, here's a link to a README file with instructions on how to set MSE up for doing Vs. cards:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30144584/Read%20Me%20First.doc

There is a link in the README file to the installation program. You will also need these two files:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30144584/fonts.rar
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/30144584/data.rar

Once you have everything installed, when you create a new set, select Vs System as the game type, and New EA as the card style. Once the set is created, click on Set info and set the logo to Marvel or DC, set the Set rarity to Promo, and set Automatic card numbers to No. That should get you started.