Remember back in the day, on the last day of the elementary school year? Remember how useless it was to try to get the kids to do anything? Summer was a day away, report cards had already gone out, and it was impossible to grade you on anything. So generally speaking, we had parties. No lessons or tests, we just watched movies and brought in snacks.
Those were some good times.
We interrupt your regularly-scheduled How I’d Do It to bring you something a little different!
When the fan previews were first announced, I had just started working on this article series, and I made a semi-joking request that when LH got its preview card, could it PRETTY PLEASE be on a Tuesday, so that I could form my article around it, designing cards to go along with it? I didn’t expect anyone to listen… and maybe they didn’t. Maybe this is just pure blind luck.
But hot damn, it happened that way, so I’m going to take advantage of it! Now, a fairly obvious caveat here: the stuff I show you today is almost guaranteed to be proven completely wrong. In fact, it’s likely that we’ll see cards before the end of this week that contradict one or more items in this article. And that’s fine; I’m just having fun here. 
For those of you just tuning in: this is week 2 of a 3-week series, wherein I’m trying to cobble together an Invincible Essential Collection using all the combined strategies and techniques I’ve talked about in my previous articles. Last week, we covered the good guys; this week, we cover the bad ones.
I ran into a problem with these guys right off the bat: which bad guys do I even pick? There isn’t a single enemy group in the Invincible universe who can be justified as anything more than a six-character team. So, it seemed like the best solution would be to bring them all into one big “umbrella team” that would contain all the various bad guys from the IP, but still keep the groups distinct by unifying them with versions.
Aaaaaaaand we’re back. Sorry about last week, but I’ve been doing this non-stop for three months and kinda needed a break.
The subject matter for this little excercise will be my favourite ongoing series: Robert Kirkman’s Invincible.
Take a look at these cards:
What do all of these card have in common? If you said “They’re all legacy cards!”, then congratulations, you proved that you’re capable of reading this episode’s banner.
But you’re only half-right.
This week, we’re going to cover some dry, boring theory.
Yaaaaaaay!
So, yeah. Our topic today is the delicate art of balancing effects. It’s not glamorous or tremendously exciting, but it’s something every card designer needs to know.
Disclaimer: This is true of any article I write, but this week especially so: Nothing I make for these articles is tested. These are only initial ideas, the pack of test cards I’d bring to a full group discussion if I was actually making them for real. No “values” are final– if there’s a 3 on a card, it might be broken and need to be dropped to a 2. But that’s not what I concern myself with. I’m only spitting out ideas, I leave it to my nonexistant playtesting team to figure out if they’re any good.
With that said, let’s proceed with the article.
When the Coming of Galactus raid deck first came out, a thread popped up on the Realms where people started brainstorming new ideas for other comic threats that could be justified as a Giant Size. There were several valid suggestions– everything from Magneto to Imperiex. Basically, people were looking at the Galactus starter and thinking of characters who could fill the same role; they were looking to recreate the Galactus experience with new faces.
I found the excercise unsatisfying.
I don’t have a full article today, because I spent most of last week and the weekend working on something else for the blog. Instead of delving into a bunch of theory, this week I’m just going to share with you some random (well, not all that random…) cards I tossed together last week for fun. Considering my word-tastic episode from last week was universally reviled (or so I must assume, given the lack of comments), I don’t imagine you folks’ll mind a shorter installment this week. 
Without further ado, let’s take get started! Read the rest of this entry ?
First of all: sorry this is so late. The article just kept growing bigger and bigger, ending up a good 50% longer than usual. Plus, I wrecked my clutch yesterday, and had to deal with that instead of finishing this up.
So, yeah. Moving on.
This week, as promised, we’re looking at Keywords. This is going to be a more technical excercise than the last few; the last couple times, I talked about mechanics just so that I could show you some cards. This week, I made some cards just so I could talk about mechanics. This article is one of three I eventually plan on doing that were the original reason I decided to start this column; there were three major issues I saw with the vast majority of fantasy cards and that I really felt other designers could benefit from reading about, and “bad keywording” is the first (though, the least pressing, now that I think about it). I’ll try to limit these “nag rants” to one every couple months to avoid alienating my readership.
This isn’t the topic I originally planned to cover this week. My original plan was to write about the whys and wherefores of inventing new keywords, but partway through last week I had a great surge of inspiration on a different topic, and, ADD being what it is, I couldn’t let go of it. So, I’m going to postpone the keywords article until next week, and instead, I’m going to completely gut and rebuild from scratch the central theme of a team that’s always just felt wrong to me.
That team is, of course, the Sentinels.
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