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How to Make a Planeswalker Cool
How to Make a Planeswalker Cool
Written by Janahwhamme
Making a planeswalker card is relatively easy. Making a planeswalker character? Especially an interesting and notable one? That’s a lot harder. This guide to making planeswalker characters originally appeared in Season 3 of MSE Survivor and has been updated here for a modern audience.
Character Pitch
The starting point for any character is the pitch. This is basically the one-sentence description of the character and what makes them interesting. It’s really valuable for a planeswalker to have a succinct, explicit identity that’s easily ascertainable (even if it’s a shallow identity), because you want any viewers to understand them from only one or two cards without needing extra context; you cannot assume they see everything you want them to see. Here’s some examples of canon planeswalkers’ character pitches: some of them are better than others. Which ones are the good pitches?
A brutish beast master who prefers the untamed wilderness over people and civilization.
An ancient vampire lord who has done terrible things for the greater good of the Multiverse.
Twins: one’s an assertive, reckless lightning mage, and the other’s a calm, rational ice mage.
A living enchantment and master of fate magic, created by the God of Destiny in order to return another wayward Planeswalker to the Underworld, developing his own spark in the process.
Three of these pitches are simple, and evoke resonant tropes that are familiar to the fantasy genre and similar media (such as superhero comics) that are clear and obvious on the surface level. The fourth pitch is… not that. It requires a lot more contextual understanding and in-depth knowledge of the story and setting that isn’t clearly apparent on the character’s card, which creates a dissonance.
This often comes at the cost of originality: it’s fair to say that Calix is the most unique concept of the four pitches, but it has also made him the weakest of them. A pitch is much better being intuitive and explainable than it is being original, even if that means using tropes and character stereotypes (like “big dumb warrior”). Characters develop depth through use and story; starting with it means we the viewers see less of the character and need to do more work to know what their deal is. Jace, for example, was originally a very generic dour, sarcastic mind-mage and earned his earnest leadership position and hot gorgon girlfriend by developing new traits and interactions through the stories he’s appeared in.
The pitch is the single most important part of the character. Everything should flow out from this original statement: powerset, motivations, allies, backstory, quests, etcetera, all can be derived from the character pitch and should be built from the pitch. It’s much like set design in that way; you start with a strong premise and expand it outwards as needed to draw the rest of the owl.
Characters often grow out of their original pitch as they develop. Liliana’s now rather far from her original pitch. That’s good, but it’s out of the scope of just creation—judge as needed, when needed.
Motivation and Mannerisms
Character pitches become supplemented by motivations. All people have motivations that guide what they want, and what they do to get it; this is similarly true for fictional people. Giving characters goals is essential, as they provide the reason for why this character is here and what things they’re involved in, and provides the primary vessel for plot development. If they didn’t have goals, they wouldn’t be out here having a story and there wouldn’t be much interesting to write about.
We’ll do the exercise on looking at existing characters’ motivations again. What are good motivations? Which of these are strong goals that encourage interesting things?
Hunt down four powerful demons in order to escape an infernal contract for power.
Find a world she can call home: a peaceful place of comfort, order, and sanctity.
Destroy the Phyrexians, an evil force that is corrupting and destroying his homeland.
Go around the Multiverse spreading chaotic destruction just to see what happens.
Some characters can have proactive motivations, and some can have reactive motivations, and these motivations will change over time. But having concrete, specific motivations helps make the characters have more purpose and reinforces their pitch identity while providing an avenue for effective storytelling. Our fourth example here is a much less compelling character than the others, because he has no purpose: he exists aimlessly, to be dropped in as a convenient antagonist if needed for someone else.
Mannerisms
These are the follow-up to motivations. How does a character go about achieving their goals? Do they bust down the door and start blasting? Do they try talking it out and finding compromise? Do they do it alone, or do they get help? Do they follow the laws, or follow their conscience, or neither? Exploring the basic aspects of a character’s thought processes—this should be a shallow investigation; depth comes from use—helps ground them in the world and influence how they interact with the people around them, and what they’ll do in response to the conflicts in their story. This process should also expand to literal mannerisms when they’re used as characters within a story, such as their voice and appearance. For example, Vivien and Garruk are both animal-loving nature mages, but they look, sound, and work very differently, and that justifies them as two independent characters.
Origins
This is a small side-note for planeswalkers specifically. Almost always, planeswalkers spark because of revelation or trauma. Something large and imposing, that changes their world in an emotional sense just as much as it does a physical one. This can be something relating to their current motivations, or it can be backstory (especially if it happened a long time ago) or something to be addressed as the character develops. But it’s good to have an origin in mind and see how that relates to their pitch and their motivations: a character’s sparking is often a massive part of their identity, especially “recent” sparks.
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