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How to Make Good-Looking Cards (in MSE)
How to Make Good-Looking Cards (in MSE)
Written by Cool Beens
How does one make a good custom magic card? All custom designers strive for good mechanics and good flavor, that much is obvious. But as the saying goes, we eat with our eyes first. It’s my personal belief that the most critical portion of custom card design is also the least discussed: card aesthetics. Magic players, through years of exposure, have a sort of sixth sense for what a magic card is “supposed” to look like, and (unintentional) deviations from this can cause a dissonance that is difficult to get past. The platonic ideal of what a magic card looks like is very specific, and there are numerous pitfalls to avoid- in this article, I’ll be going through these pitfalls and addressing how to catch and avoid them, leaving you with a series of checks that can turn any card into a beautiful polished jewel. Many of these pitfalls may seem obvious to experienced designers, but everyone falls for something every once in a while (myself included), and an extra reminder never hurts. And if you read to the end, I wrote you a poem!
To begin, let’s start with the Ur-What-Not-To-Do example, my magnum opus:
This card has just about every error imaginable, so we have a lot of work to do. Let’s get started.
#1: Fonts
Probably the most jarring thing about this card is its lack of Magic’s classic fonts. Luckily, if your card images look like this, the solution is simple. Inside your MSE download, there’s a folder called “Magic - Fonts”. Open that folder, install those fonts, and you should be good to go. If that folder is missing, you can also type $fonts in any server with Lackeybot to get a separate install.
Ah, that’s better.
#2: Art & Art Credit
Finding suitable art for your cards is, for many, the most difficult part of custom designs. The art (ha) of art hunting is complex enough for a separate article entirely, but the main tip I’d give is always use the common sense check: if WoTC printed this art, would that be strange? Figures with no backgrounds, unexplained departures in art style, and all-around low quality are all things to avoid on your hunt for art. As an aside, if you’re finding a specific concept difficult to art, my secret tip is to simply give up. There are an infinite number of good designs out there waiting to be made, and picking one with an easier-to-art concept isn’t cowardice, it’s common sense. Especially before you have large art files established, no one will fault you for traditional fantasy if the cards are well designed.
The other important consideration for custom card art is artist credit. If you’re used to it, it’s a no-brainer, and if you’re in the Custom Magic server, it’s mandatory. Occasionally you’ll find yourself with an art with no obvious artist. In this case, reverse image search can help you, and failing that there’s users in #art who are always around to find artists with their magical powers (it’s really incredible what these people have been able to find for me).
Anyways, the only real art issue that falls under my jurisdiction for this article is aspect ratio; occasionally I see someone post a designer with squashed or stretched art, and I just wonder, why? If your art doesn’t fit in the frame, don’t use it, and if it does fit in the frame, leave it be. Let’s unsquash the art here and see how it looks:
Okay, that’s better, but the crop is a little off. It’s always good to try to frame the figure in your artwork nicely—I find that a useful strategy is to note points on the edge of the figure and keep them equal distances from the border. Let’s try again.
Wonderful! Now we can finally start to look at the text on the card.
#3: Typeline
Aside from generic typos, there’s only really one thing you can get wrong on a typeline: type order. The first and most obvious rule is “supertypes, then types, then subtypes”, but order within that also matters. Here’s some helpful tips:
Type order: Artifact > Enchantment > Creature, Planeswalker
(If you’re making an Instant Artifact or a Creature Planeswalker, I can’t help you.)
Subtype order: Subtypes appear in the order of their types, first and foremost. (That’s why Lion Sash is an Equipment Cat, not a Cat Equipment.) For noncreature subtypes, go in alphabetical order (I’m like 90% sure.) For creature subtypes, the order is “species” types before “class” types, though within these categories things get pretty strange. As far as I can tell, species types are just ordered by vibe; types like Phyrexian usually come first, types like Horror tend to go last, everything else is a bit wishy-washy. In these cases, check canon precedent on Scryfall! I had no idea whether it would be Snake Horse or Horse Snake, but Caustic Bronco is a Snake Horse, so that’s what I’d do.
This typeline also has a double space between the types, which is an error. I’m not sure why but this happens to me a lot, so I figured I’d put it in here. Check your typelines for double spaces, folks, it could happen to you.
Fixing the typeline leaves us here:
#4: Cardname
I probably should have done this first, but I forgot! Other than making sure not to capitalize certain words like “the” or “of”, the main concern with card names is avoiding canon overlap. After finishing my project Bee Cube, not one but three canon name overlaps were found by the people in less than a week. Luckily, this is incredibly preventable with just a quick search. Let’s change the name of our card to something unique:
#5: Abilities
5.a: Chops
Uh oh, it’s the classic Cool Beens classic “list article but most of the article is subpoints of a single item” trick. Unsurprisingly, the textbox is the part of the card where the most errors appear, but the first one doesn’t even involve what the text says, just where it is. You’ll notice that on this render, the text at the top and (to a lesser extent) the bottom of the text box is very close to the edge of the frame, which doesn’t look very good. We can fix this by going into the style tap and increasing the “Chop top” and “chop bottom” settings; many designers default to a chop of 5/5 on all of their cards, though sometimes you’ll need an especially large or small chop to make the text box sit right. Trust your instincts on this, but working from a default of 5/5 never hurts.
While we’re here, we’ll also clean up that extra line break between the keywords and the ability. I’m not sure why people have these from time to time, but it's a simple fix. There is never any scenario where you should have an empty line on your card, ever.
5.b: Keywords
Though they seem like the simplest part of any creature’s abilities, there’s actually a good amount that can go wrong when adding keywords. First and foremost, certain keywords need to appear on a separate line from others. These include flash, which always comes first, and ward, which always (except in certain cases with mana cost wards, but this is very rare) comes last. Since this ward cost is more complicated than just a mana cost, it will need to be put on a new line.
Next, even the normal keywords must appear in a certain order. Here it is: defender, flying, first strike, double strike, vigilance, reach, trample, menace, deathtouch, lifelink, hexproof, indestructible, haste. Some say that this order resembles the order in which things happen during combat, but I don’t really see it. Anyways, this card has flying and trample in the wrong order, so we’ll need to fix that. Also, a common mistake is to capitalize each keyword, as you see on our example render. This is wrong! Since keywords are basically one long sentence, you only need to capitalize the first one.
Finally, special costs like “Pay 3 life” on an ability change the way that ability is formatted. The formula is this: “[Keywordname]—[Special cost].” note the period at the end, and the lack of spaces on either side of the em dash.
Fixing all of our keyword related issues gets us here:
Now, lets deal with that nasty second ability, starting with the
5.c: Ability costs (and other notes):
There’s not too much to say about costs, it’s a pretty simple formula: “[Mana costs], [T], [Nonmana cost 1], [Nonmana cost 2], [Nonmana cost N]:” The tricky thing to note here is that despite being one sentence just like keywords, each nonmana cost still has its first letter capitalized as though they were separate sentences. Moving [T] to where it belongs and capitalizing that S gets us here (there’s another error in this cost still, but I’ll get to it later):
5.d: Modal stuff
Modal abilities are inherently complicated, and so have a few places to go wrong. Let’s start with the introduction of modes. If your card is as simple as just choosing some number, the formatting is “Choose [number word (eg “one”)] —” note the space between the number word and the em dash. Once your mode choosing gets more complicated, like when you have “You may choose the same mode more than once”, just end that clause with a period.
Now, for the modes themselves, the critical thing to remember is that modes use soft breaks rather than full line breaks to separate themselves. MSE will usually do this automatically these days, but if it doesn’t, you can get a soft break manually by hitting shift-enter. In this case, the automatic code was broken by the lack of space between the bullet point (generated by typing “->”) and the first word of the ability. Adding those spaces, fixing the size of the breaks, and adding the space between “Choose one” and the emdash gets us here:
Notice how the modes sit a little closer together now. This is very good!
5.e: Miscellaneous little problems
5.e.i: Subtype Capitalization
Subtypes get a subpoint, you see what I did there? Anyways, while types and supertypes like legendary and creature are always lowercase when they appear in a text box, subtypes like Elf and Arcane are always capitalized. This can be easy to forget, so… don’t.
5.e.ii: Numberz
Sometimes, like in “Choose one” or “draw two cards”, numbers are written out as words. But whenever it comes to damage or life, numbers should be real numbers. Remember this helpful rhyme: “If your life gets worse or better, never ever use a letter.”
5.e.iii: To And or Not to And
Sometimes it's unclear whether one should have two clauses like “draw a card” and “scry 2” be separated by “and”, “then”, a period, or a line break. There is likely a set of underlying rules determining this, but its far easier to just check canon precedent on Scryfall than to try to memorize some algorithm for it. In our case, the first mode should use “and” rather than a period.
5.e.iv: Gets and Gains
For temporary buffs, creatures “get” stat increases/decreases and “gain” abilities. For auras and equipment, creatures “get” stats and “have” abilities. This one’s pretty simple.
5.e.v: Reminder Text Mixups
MSE automatically generates reminder text for mechanics, which is great, but it’s not as smart as we are and can make mistakes, which we never ever ever do. For example, in a case like our example card, the reminder text for rampage should say “that creature” rather than “this creature”, which MSE doesn’t have the context to realize. There’s no way to edit automatic reminder text, so just copy it, turn it off, and paste it back in for an editable version.
Phew, I think that’s everything. Let’s apply those changes and see where we end up.
6: Flavor text
Flavor text for the most part uses normal English grammar, which I’m not going to address here. For our purposes, there’s a few things that people often get wrong. Firstly, flavor text with attributions uses soft breaks, which you can generate with shift-enter. MSE is getting good at doing this automatically, but I still see renders that mess it up all the time. Secondly, for attributions, there is NO SPACE between the em dash and the name of the attributee. This is probably the single most common mistake ever made, so much so that this helpful image was made for use in the MSE Survivor design competition:
Fixing this mistake on our render gets us here:
Now, for the most subjective and most difficult part of this process.
7: Textbox Aesthetics
While this is a field with many subsections, solutions often create or destroy many problems at once, so I’ll address all of it at the same time. Looking at this textbox, two things pop out to the experienced eye. First, there’s an orphan on the fifth line. An orphan is a line with only one or two short words in it, which adds a huge amount of white space to a card and generally looks pretty ugly. While not technically an error, orphans are still an aesthetic problem to be solved. You can avoid orphans by changing your card’s chops as I described earlier, or by adding or removing abilities or flavor text.
The second issue is that this card is currently ten lines long. As a general rule, it’s best to keep your cards at or below six or seven lines, and you never want a card with more than eight. This problem is easy to solve in theory by cutting abilities or flavor text, but difficult in practice, as we as designers have a tendency to get emotionally attached to each and every part of the cards we design. This is where we need to “kill our darlings”.
Now, to address these concerns on our render, let’s think. We need to remove text in any case, which might fix the orphan on its own, so let’s start there. I love my OC Stip Crunglis more than I care for the rampage ability, so I’ll start by cutting that.
Wow, look at that! All of a sudden, this render is made beautiful. I’m thinking that flavor text could be shortened a bit more to save an additional line, so I’m just going to keep on cutting. Generally, never stop cutting! Your cards always want less text than you think they do. Here’s a render with simpler ft:
EEK! By cutting, we’ve introduced a new orphan. We could go back to the previous version, but lets remember our principles and instead go deeper into simplicity. This Ward cost isn’t doing very much for this design, and frankly additional protection on a removal engine feels unnecessary. Let’s cut that too, which will bring us to (spoiler!) our final render.
Wow. The simplicity, the elegance, the beauty. Everything in its right place. This is the power of considering aesthetics, a card design begins to seem good before you even know what it does.
So there you have it! A (very) detailed guide of every mistake to avoid and trick to assist in making your designs the best looking versions of themselves. In case all this is too much to remember on the fly though, I’ve prepared for you an easy-to-remember rhyming poem on the subject. If you’ll indulge me…
Check your fonts–do they abhor?
Has your name been used before?
Is your artwork squashed or stretched?
Is the artist’s credit etched?
Are the types all set in place,
With class types not preceding race?
Are your chops as they should be?
Are you clipping the p/t?
Is your text too close to border?
Are your keywords all in order?
In the costs and subtypes space,
Are those all in uppercase?
Are your modes formatted well?
Are your line breaks soft as hell?
Numbers all as they should be?
Sometimes three, and sometimes 3?
Have you checked between your clauses?
Have you checked your em dash pauses?
Is reminder text all good,
Talking ‘bout the things it should?
Is your attribution right?
Are all your mechanics tight?
Anything that you could cut?
Yes there is, now don’t say “but”.
Any orphans lurking ‘bout?
Fill 'em in, or cut' em out!
Is your card still undefeated?
Now it’s time to actually read it!
Thanks for reading,
—Cool Beens
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