#mtg fan character

[allhailklisz]

decided to finally jot down my half baked phyrexian oc concepts and also give them names (which I made basically by just ramming random phyrexian phonemes together, seeing what syllables I liked, and then trying to anglicize them by vague analogy to the praetor names and to the correspondence of φyrx-phyrexian itself)

Iphiqua (^’yφq.)

Formerly a priest of the Machine Orthodoxy, the sort who could recite the entire Argent Etchings from memory. Became disillusioned with the Orthodoxy for [reasons to be decided later, it’s not like there aren’t options] and has defected, and is now the sort of jaded ex-religious type who never misses an opportunity to make a jab at their former faith (frequently quoting the Etchings right before flagrantly violating the quoted verse, that sort of thing). Has deep-seated self-hatred because of having once been a tool of Norn’s, but is simultaneously in deep denial of this.

Chovex Parsk (^čovx-paʁsk.)

Dissident Gitaxian, who has come to emphasize the whole “anyone can become anything they want to be” bit of blue’s ethos – still wanting everything to progress in the process of perfection, but also believing that perfection itself is fundamentally subjective, and thus opposed to involuntary compleation purely for monoblue reasons (rather than the red-based empathetic reasons that Urabrask and his sort have for their own distastes for such).

[hopeless-knight]

Ink-Tail

Kamigawan Kitsune, Artist and Caligrapher, Aspiring Ink Mage and newly-discovered Planeswalker.

I wanted to share my boy here. Specially cus i’m really proud of this drawing and honestly, i wanna talk more about him.

i might try to look for a question game. i work better talking about my characters when i’m answering questions about them

[shardssystem]

Complete cheat hours over here, because I already have an OC who’s been compleated! Or at least, as far as Old Phyrexia could manage. And because I can’t remember if it’s been revealed or not, this is Vasil!

He’s all about using the weaker iteration of Phyrexian oil in combat, relying on the passive indoctrination it attempts to corrupt his opponents with; giving more openings the more it works.

Fandom Friday

Welcome to Fandom Friday! A day for the MtG community to come together and talk about our OCs, fanplanes, and favorite aspects of MtG in general!

Ok so you know the drill, I’ll give a prompt and you can respond to it by answering directly, doing a doodle, making a custom card, a little flash fic, or whatever feels right and most fun for you! (Heck, do multiples if you want, this is just for fun!)

Happy Friday!

Card design day! Create a card for your OC if they were to get compleated. Can be a planebound creature, planeswalker, or heck do a canon character that didn’t get compleated and see what you think they’d be like!

[threewaysdivided]

Hey ! i'm a longtime follower of your blog and I've read a lot of your YJ analysis and why the latter seasons totally flopped. I haven't seen you comment on Young Justice Phantoms, although I guess your opinion remains the same. However I'd love to read it one day.

PS : I do think Greg Weisman is a decent writer, but not that good at characterization and desperatly needs editors and not enablers *sigh*

Hey nonnie!

Glad you’ve found my YJ writing critiques interesting. 

The reason why I haven’t commented on Young Justice: Phantoms (or the final Targets comic) is that I haven’t watched it, haven’t read a synopsis and have no plans to ever do so.  My interest in the series went pretty cold as far back as Invasion but at the time I was willing to give the showrunners good faith on their claims that they had a plan to bring things together and that the problems were mostly production issues.  However, after how bad Outsiders was (and having seen similar awfulness from Greg Weisman in other franchises) I don’t have any good faith or trust left to give them.

I talked at length about how Outsiders left the show with no compelling narrative as part of this big Invasion breakdown (grumpier TL:DR version here), but here are the most relevant sections:

In terms of the Central Conflict, the Light are proved utterly correct: by Outsiders the Original Team are callous, hollow husks of their former selves, who have replicated a worse version of the same status quo the Team originally formed in response to. Dick, Kaldur and M’gann’s Anti-Light are a new upper echelon of older heroes who keep even more secrets from the next generations, who exclude the new generations far more strongly from knowing their plans, who give them even less reason to trust or communicate with them, and who do so for less just, less honest and less narratively justified reasons than their own mentors’ understandable (if condescending) desire to shield the proteges from the parts of the Life they may not yet have been equipped to face. Not only that but their constant lying with the intent to control others, and refusal to hold themselves accountable for those actions goes directly against both the League’s stated heroic ideals of “Truth, Liberty and Justice” and Red Tornado’s conclusion that caring is “the human thing to do”. By the end of Outsiders, even the existence of the Team itself is undone; decommissioned into the exact kind of safe training space that the Season 1 characters were desperate for it never to be. […] With Outsiders, any actual narrative set by Young Justice Season 1 is over. By their own standards the Team have lost, and lost entirely.

The meta-narrative of Young Justice Animated is that of a show that started with a promising initial season and strong sense of narrative identity, only to discard every part of that identity.  With Invasion the show discarded its original characterisations, themes and ideologies; replacing them with contradictory and often antithetical ones.  Outsiders would then shed even the surface trappings of its aesthetic (in favour of the more generic “modern DC” art-style) and mission-based narrative structure.  There is nothing left, save for some superficial proper nouns and call-back references: the textbook definition of an In Name Only Sequel.

I didn’t bother with Phantoms (and am frankly a little artistically insulted by its existence) because I knew it was doomed from the start to be a narrative stillbirth.  Having actively abandoned its original identity, Young Justice was left desperately scrambling to forge a new one, by clawing at the one thing it had left: people’s nostalgic attachment to the Season 1 iterations of the cast.  But this could never work because every season since has been engaged in a performative pretense of not acknowledging the character-breaking contradictions and hypocrisies forced upon the original cast by the poor writing decisions.  Phantoms would have to thread an impossible needle: wanting to be about the “journey” of the original cast for nostalgia reasons, while not being able to acknowledge that the last two seasons (and attaché comics) have resulted in all of them either actively failing or being tragically soft-locked out of their explicit character arcs without breaking that kayfabe of performative ignorance.  And, in trying to tell a story without engaging with that story's content or how broken it had become, what would they have left but to fall back yet again on canonical filler, sidequests and references held loosely together by contrivance? 

It could only ever be a zombie-fic of itself: having long-since concluded or abandoned any remaining character or plot threads, driven forward solely by the stream-of-consciousness compulsive-writing of a production team desperate to remain present, relevant and profitable.  And from the feedback I’ve heard from the general community and fandom friends who kept watching, it seems like Phantoms did indeed pull down the curtain on that empty, directionless, hollow-automaton-filled narrative for a lot of people.

As for Greg Weisman himself, while I agree that he is a particularly poor character-writer, I will respectfully but firmly disagree that he’s otherwise decent.  I think the fact that we have to caveat “he’s a decent writer” with the condition “so long as he’s surrounded by a team of strong editors and directors to keep him from being awful” kind of reveals that he isn’t.   I also don’t really accept the premise that the main fault lies with the people around him for not stopping that.  They certainly haven’t helped but he’s a grown adult who can make his own decisions. Enablers don’t generally induce behaviours; they simply amplify or become complicit in the behaviours that are already there.

In the video Plagiarism and You(tube), Hbomberguy did a great job of laying out the difference between “honest mistakes” – which can be easily cleared up by good-faith apologies and explanations – and “dishonest behaviour” – where the person(s) is aware that what they are doing is not appropriate and falls back on reputation-protecting deflections and “non-apologies” to avoid consequences when caught.  Weisman would not so-frequently disrespect his colleagues’ work with contradictions, or write patterns of misogyny, queerphobia, casual racism/ableism and abuse apologism into his stories if he did not fundamentally feel entitled to do so, was not comfortable and in agreement with those beliefs, or did not think he could get away with it.  And the way he has routinely responded to even gentle, good-faith comments by fans expressing frustration/confusion with inconsistent characterisation/structure indicates someone who knows he has done the wrong thing but resents being questioned or held accountable.  And then we see him continuing the same behaviours.  A “decent writer” should not need an editor to hold their hand and explain why directly contracting explicitly-stated characterisation is bad practice.  A “good ally” should not need someone to tell them that disproportionately subjecting queer/non-white characters to shock-value violence, writing minority characters to be dirty/dangerous/less valid in their identities, erasing/demonising/misgendering AFAB trans and bisexual identities, rewriting strong female characters to need motherhood or men to “tell them who they are”, writing gay men to be secretly misogynistic/racist, and framing victims as being equally responsible for their abuse is offensive.  All of which he has either directly done or tacitly allowed under his lead.  Multiple times.  Across multiple series.

These are not isolated incidents of “good-faith mistakes” from a newcomer learning the ropes (if they were, it wouldn’t bother me like this).  Weisman has had multiple seasons - multiple franchises even - and decades to show himself to be the kind of sincere ally and visionary artist of integrity that myself and his fans wanted him to be… and that he has so benefited from presenting himself as.  He has chosen not to. Say what you want about their stories, but you can’t claim that marginalised creators like ND Stevenson, Rebecca Sugar, Dana Terrace and allies like Neil Gaiman didn’t push back hard against their own publishers and make a lot of careful compromises in order to tell those stories in a way they felt was respectful. Weisman is in a very privileged position, with a resume that carries a decent amount of clout. He could have held himself to the creative standards he publicly expresses; could have worked improve his craft, could have examined his own biases and actually learned from the communities his stories speak about/over.  But he didn’t – because obviously it's easier and more comfortable to keep being lazy, keep relying on his colleagues to carry him, to not question his own biases/privileges and then lie when caught.  And with the money he makes, and all the second chances and new jobs he keeps getting handed, what incentive does he have to change that behaviour? 

So, personally I don’t buy his attempts to position himself as an UwU Nice Guy Ally whose haters are taking him out of context and whose nasty publishers keep forcing him to do incoherent bigotry.  He’s a grown-up, who can own his own behaviour.  And, even with a generous reading, this is at best the behaviour of a fair-weather sell-out who is willing to abandon his principles at the slightest hint of pressure from above.  That is not what respect looks like.  I wanted to give him good faith, but in light of all this, I find I can no longer trust him to keep his word or be honest about his intentions.

This is kind of the other reason why I choose not to support or engage with YJ Phantoms (or the revival in general): on top of being utterly disinterested, I just don’t want to incentivise this kind of creative behaviour with more money or attention.  I also can’t ignore what could be a pattern where Weisman makes grand promises that he likely never has a plan or intent to fulfill, then deliberately leaves holes/timeskips/inconsistencies in his narratives in order to generate ongoing demand for separate-purchase side content which promises to “fill those gaps”… but which never does because there isn’t actually a plan to facilitate that (thus creating an endless cycle of demand and profit).  To me that cuts a little too close to the potential for a privileged creator to be exploiting their clout and the good-faith belief of their fanbase in order to grift those fans out of their time and money.  I don’t find that acceptable.

So, yeah.  Not to deploy the GIF again but:

It'll be a big, fat doughnut on YJ Phantoms content from me 🍩. Sorry!

[teaspoonarts]

Commissions are open for Nerdy Valentines Day cards! Please DM me if you’re interested or email me at teaspoonarts@gmail.com . Prices range starting at $60 .

[starlit-mansion]

i think it was obvious that the mh3 prerelease was not important to us because we didn't even think about self-quarantining for 2 weeks like we did do for otj

(not that we were going to go sick, i mean we would have not been bothered having to miss it if we got sick while we would have been devastated not going to otj)

[inudono]

Fellas, is it cringe to draw your OCs defeating canon characters?

[thehamwarrior]

Drawn for a dude on instagram.

Phyrexian Prophet?

Yeah, that.

[hazel2468]

Jace flats are done!!!! I notice that people don't seem to draw him with his scars... And if you know anything about me, my characters, and my writing, I really like scars as a visual thing and as a storytelling device.

[boxkeith]

Video Games I Played in January 2025

Over quarantine I got used to the release drought, so now even relatively slow months feel like a constant deluge of new games to try. I bought six games on release this month, which is especially dire when I’m trying to catch up on my backlog even a little bit before Monster Hunter dropkicks my free time out a window.

Batman: Arkham Knight – After tearing through the two Arkham games I’d played on PS3 I started the one I’d never got around to and then almost immediately fell off it. Gone is the methodical pacing of the environments and the weighty momentum of Batman’s movement. Gone is the structure that’s equal parts Metroid Prime and Metal Gear Solid. Gone is the feeling like I’m playing as Batman. Instead I’m ‘driving’ the Batmobile around narrow streets and slamming into walls, before going into combat that’s overcomplicated the rock-solid formula of the first two games in favor of something that’s clearly been stretched to fit the other playable characters. I do need to retroactively reward this “worst car in a game about how cool and fun to drive your car is” from the previous title holder, Mad Max 2015.

Ruined King: A League of Legends Story™ - I’m one of the few people who goes to bat for Battle Chasers: Nightwar and Darksiders Genesis, so not even League of Legends was going to stop me from getting Airship Syndicate’s next game. However, it was going to make me twiddle my thumbs about playing it for two solid years. The game’s fine. I have no fondness or affinity for any of these characters, the setting is rote, the mechanics are simple, it’s all competent parts and reasonable polish. I still really like the overcharge system of using your basic abilities to build temporary mana and fuel your stronger abilities without leading to attrition. Unfortunately by the endgame I had a setup loop of 3 turns that could then chain indefinitely and kill mindlessly but required more fidelity than was offered by the autofight system.

Picross e8 – I beat Picross 3D: Round 2 and needed something else to hit buttons in during long meetings. It’s picross. I’m glad it has a third option that’s neither blank nor marked, but I really wish there was an undo function for when I accidentally wipe out a row and forget what was in it.

Hyper Light Breaker – Through Hyper Light Drifter and Solar Ash, Heart Machine has earned an immediate purchase from me of anything they choose to release. This game profoundly called that loyalty into question. It is not merely undercooked, though it certainly is an early access action roguelite with limited combat, shallow combat, and atrocious balance. It also carries forward absolutely nothing of what was beautiful about their other games. The randomized environments have none of the quiet majesty of HLD’s labyrinths. The movement has none of the grace or poetry evoked in Solar Ash. I wanted The Pathless with a bit more combat and better map design. I got Risk of Rain 2 circa 2017. At least one of the first patches rebalanced the health packs.

Heroes of Hammerwatch II – I play a lot of co-op games, and ones with more than a few hours of juice or that aren’t leaning overly hard on “fun with friends” vacuous sandboxes are exceedingly rare. Even rarer are games that are robust and interesting in their own right. I got 100 hours out of the first game, putting it into the top 25 non-idle games I’ve played on the platform. I don’t think this one is going to quite hit that mark, but it’s a game I loved with a lot more polish. Sadly some of that polish comes at the expense of letting the roguelite elements really hit critical mass in absurd ways, and the isometric roguelite has come a long way since 2019 (to say nothing of the Survivors subgenre), but honestly this gets two thumbs up from me for having the confidence to actually release completed rather than trudge in early access for eons like all of its cohorts.

The Roottrees Are Dead – Putting this here is somewhat disingenuous because I played the tutorial for 45 minutes and then set the game down. I really don’t want this to be like Obra Dinn where I get partway in then lose my place and never beat it, but in setting it aside for a special occasion to prevent that I might never lock back in at all. At least not until I finish my taxes.

Blade Chimera – I love 6/10 metroidvanias. I love stories about emotionally unstable inhuman companions. I have a begrudging respect for Team Ladybug’s game design experiments despite their sometimes-subpar execution. As a result I snapped this off as soon as I saw it. A metroidvania where you can fast travel to any map tile is certainly a choice, but it was implemented well; rather than the map feeling like a maze to navigate it felt like a jigsaw puzzle. Once you knew what was in a zone you could always return there, so keeping everything top of mind was important for sidequests and hidden secrets. The core combat loop of ghost sword attacks costing mana but restoring health as you built up a combo, and your basic attacks restoring MP as you built up a combo but often requiring positioning that caused you to take damage lead to a really aggressive and self-sustaining system. A lot of the pieces were fairly rote and the map design was overly reliant on long castlevania hallways full of random goons,  but I’m excited to see what they do next.

Slitterhead – I had the mistaken impression that this was Prototype 3. Despite its body-hopping and various grotesqueries of the flesh with weapons of blood and bone, it’s very much not that. It’s mostly wandering around a Japanese city trying to chase down rumors and going through mid-mission conversations as a time-loop story gets denser and denser. I feel like there’s some game in 2004 that’s the progenitor of the myriad games with this stilted kind of mission structure (Drakenguard, Stranger of Paradise, etc), though while I was writing this sentence I looked up if that was Siren. Keiichirō Toyama was director and writer for both, so yeah I’m putting this on him I guess. Here’s to you and your weird-ass opinions about game design. Make Gravity Rush 3 ya bastard.  

Settlemoon – I almost forgot to write about this which I feel terribly about as it’s an extremely charming game. I got it because I love the artist’s pixel art, and while the game is very pretty it’s also exceedingly strange in a way that didn’t click with me. I have little patience for games that are systems-driven and gated by player knowledge of opaque systems, as although I’m the type to fuck about I’m not really the type to formally experiment. I’d be down for a chill little idle game about making a town for bug adventurers but this feels more akin to The Gnorpe Apologue where it’s a puzzle game where you wait a few hours to find out if you fucked up your answer.

ENDER MAGNOLIA: Bloom in the Mist – Ender Lilies was fine. I appreciated the horseshit I could get up to by using various attack combos to maneuver in the air, and the reliance on summons for offense lead to a unique combat positioning and cadence. Ender Magnolia bafflingly released in early access, so I feel like a lot of its character and texture was lost from excessive feedback. Metroidvanias need friction to be interesting, and this is just kind of a game. No major complaints but no major takeaways either. Parrying was OP, the list of summons was too bottlenecked with most of them coming in the lategame, and the lore was simultaneously esoteric and shallow. I miss Nine Sols I guess.

Mark of the Deep – Unlike many people my age, I didn’t really have a pirate phase. I skewed more towards ninjas in that old turf war. Death’s Door was pretty good though, and a game clearly inspired by it interested me. Unfortunately what Mark of the Deep really does is demonstrate how Tunic rode the razor’s edge between obtuse difficulty and transcendent clarity of vision, and even it fell prey to overly difficult bosses and overly fiddly puzzles. Here I have far less patience for the isometric camera tricks and corridors stuffed to the gills with lethal enemies, as the combat is front and center. Even the grappling hook introduced after a few hours can’t save the game, as it’s slow to launch with no invincibility, and is frustrating to aim. I want to support outsider art particularly for devs outside the US/Japan, but for all its potential this game was just frustrating and poor quality.

Super Roboy – I have oft complained about how the metroidvania genre takes almost everything from Castlevania with only lip service to Metroid. Certainly things like high jump and grapple beam have become standard upgrades, but nothing embraces its treatment of enemies of environmental obstacles with multiple solutions and the centrality of movement as the guiding principle of map design and combat design. Super Roboy is an ambitious solo project and so it doesn’t solve that problem, but it finds a new place to put the seam. There’s ~100 upgrades that range from new weapons to double jump to immunity to individual status effects, but each of them is gated both by a quota of kills for particular enemies/bosses and gemstones of various colors hidden in the environment. The resulting gestalt has both the enemy-based power progression of Castlevania and the boss and puzzle progression of Metroid. I have my minor quibbles with the game overall but I love when a game has a clever system I’ve never seen before.

[vielle-art]

i wanna come back to this au/design/visuals but idk what specifically??? ;;;;; every time it gets rb’d again i wanna revisit it but i’m just idea-dry rn.

exist to serve.

[bluetodraw]

Little different from the commissions I’ve been doing lately but the client wanted their friend’s cat mixed with their favorite magic the gathering card.

Was definitely unsure about how well I could pull this one off but I am so happy with it, especially the different lighting and texture effects

[markrosewater]

Hey, Mark, I'm not to make another UB-related request. This isn't coming from an anti-UB place, and it's just one Goose's opinion, but I'm sure there are others who feel this way.

Can we get rid of flavor words, please? I haven't seen a single upside to them presented, just downsides:

For decades, one of MtG's biggest strengths was capturing the ludonarrative. Having to spell it out makes it seem like you all have lost confidence in your ability to make card design that makes sense with the captured flavor.

If a design is intended to be funny (the Street Fighter cards come to mind), it feels like you're pointing at the "joke" and saying "See? Please laugh." As a person who has a comedy background, I'm sure you understand why killing the frog is bad.

Death of the epithet: The most minor of the criticisms, but I really think "Ian Chester, Science Teacher" reads better than "Ian Chester" and then calling his ability "science teacher." (I may be mixing up the WHO teachers, but this applies to both, luckily.) Epithets also make it easier to depict multiple "moments" of a character without giving a card up as the "definitive" version of that character.

It feels like you don't trust players to get why the card text is what it is. Telling your audience you don't expect them to be smart (or rather, literate) enough to "get" it doesn't really help. I've seen people say they add flavor to the cards, but the flavor isn't diminished by removing the flavor words (flavor is when things are fleshed out and living, not when things are spelled out). If it's for fans of the IP, then they already get it (Oh, the activated ability that grants flying is referencing this character's rocket propulsion). Non-fans of the IP aren't benefited either, as they will sus out said character has rocket propulsion or be left completely in the dark (see Cult of Skaro: These words do nothing to tell me about the ability. If you were to leave them out, I'd still be able to sus out that each ability corresponds to one of the four Daleks depicted).

Lastly, they make cards harder to read. When trying to grok a card, there should be as few words as possible I'm supposed to ignore.

I understand some people will go "I recognize the thing" and a bulb in their brain will light up, but something being easy like this doesn't mean it's better or that we actually like it more.

I guess there's the potential upside that you could slot in numerals to power up my Baron von Count deck, but I don't see any real tangible upside to them. Obviously I'm missing something. Can you say what it is?

(Also, even if you don't answer it,thank you for taking the time to answer this book of an ask. These are feelings I've been sitting on since AFR and keeping an open mind on in case I changed how I felt from my initial reaction.)

Flavor words can do some things that we can't replicate elsewhere. I agree they can be overused, and are not always used optimally, but I don't think we want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

[leafdrake-haven]

Happy Fandom Friday! ^_^

Prompt for today! Make a vehicle or mount card for one of your characters! :D

[ernstiggroteadelaar]

MTG LORE FANS, please tell me about (random) characters from mtg stories you're obsessed with/a fan of/you just think they're neat, i'm trying to find the most fun bits of mtg lore

[jacebeleren]

Your posts and essays have inspired me to do my own digging into the MtG lore. Do you have any recommendations on where a fledgling Vorthos should start? Is it better to pick a character and trace their journey through the stories? Or should I try to go as far back as possible to start with some of the very first stories and work my way chronologically?

I am SO GLAD YOU ASKED!! I've been waiting for an ask like this.

You guys probably don't know this, but I'm a co-admin on MTGLore.com, the BEST resource for any fan who wants to get into Magic lore. It's basically like Scryfall but for Magic Story.

For fans new to Magic Story, we have a convenient "Where to start" page. This can give you some direction for where to start, depending on what you're interested in.

There's A LOT of Magic Story out there, so I wouldn't recommend starting from the very beginning to literally anyone. Personally, when I got into Magic Story, I also took the "comic book" approach (picking one favorite character and only reading all their stories), and then I went back and read all the other ones.

To find the stories with your favorite character, you can use our VERY robust search tool. You can search by characters, authors, time period, setting, type of article, set/expansion, etc etc. It'll list all the results with most recent at the top and oldest at the bottom.

But if your favorite character is Gideon, Jace, Liliana, Chandra, or Nissa; Origins is a perfect place to start. That's where the modern era of Magic Story really starts, with the Gatewatch arc. If you want to read starting there, we have a very cool "Origins to Present" page, which is a complete timeline of all the Magic Story web fiction from Origins onward.

A lot of those characters have stories from before Origins, too. So I think it's also worth it to use the search tool to go back and find those too!