I first got interested in custom Vs. cards through the work of my friend Joey Tufo, who makes custom foil versions of cards for the original Vs. System. I've written about his work before, way back in August of 2014. It all began innocently enough. I had been unable to find four copies of Spider-Man, Ultimates, and it was preventing me from finishing my Spider-Man deck. I asked him if he could make some custom proxy versions for me, and after seeing the results I was hooked.
I started making custom versions of lots of other cards, and after a short while I started focusing on designing custom versions of our favorite decks, notably Crisis Doom and X-Mental, with the intention of having Joey create all-foil decks when I was done.
While I was working on X-Mental, Joey came up with the idea of doing a special version of Emma Frost, along the lines of the classic foil version from MXM.
I liked the idea, and I spent many nights working on it. LOTS of Photoshopping was involved, because at the time I knew nothing about Magic Set Editor templates, so I had to create the card in stages. First I created a regular card with some colorized art.
Next I created an artless version of the card and colorized everything else as I had the original image, made it a layer on top of the card above, and merged the two together.
That looked pretty cool, but Joey had the great idea to change the border to give it a metallic silver look, so I created another layer with a silver border, and then merged everything together.
I can't begin to tell you how long I spent on this one card. It's embarrassing...
Fast forward almost two years, and I was beginning to work on the new A-Force set for 2PCG. At the time, no one knew what was going to be in it, but I was expecting that they would try to do versions of most of the major female characters. In particular, I was expecting them to do another version of Emma besides the one they did for MNB, so I started thinking that maybe I should do a new colorized version of her.
I realized that since I now have custom MSE templates for making 2PCG cards, I could create a custom template for doing Emma cards far faster than I could Photoshop something together. And I was right. Basically I just needed to make a copy of my regular template, colorize all the components, and then I could make a colorized card from any Emma art I wanted just by colorizing the image.
Whereas my earlier efforts took days if not weeks, this project took about two hours tops. I can now experiment with different artwork quickly, and knock out a new custom Emma card in just a few minutes.
Unfortunately, Upper Deck didn't come through with a new version of Emma, so for now all I can use the template for is making custom versions of the MNB card. Nevertheless, it was a fun project, and I have been able to make some cool versions of the card, my favorite being the one at the top of the blog post. But here are some others for comparison. Of these, I think the first one is my favorite.
