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Custom MTG Cards (Savor the Moment, Azure Lightning, & Enigma on the Open Road)

Despite my lack of uploads, I do still have a number of Custom MTG Card designs I’ve been keeping under my hat. For the most part, the reason is simply that I have been lazy in uploaded them, but that ends today.

You may also notice the image quality of these custom cards is significantly better than my previous uploads. On recommendation of a friend, I have switched to using Card Conjuror as my tool for rendering custom cards. I still use Magic Set Editor to flesh out the raw concept and save the text, but from now on I will be using Card Conjuror to create higher resolution images of my proxy cards.

And we’ll start with:

When thinking of a good way to represent Az and Volpes sharing time together, Magic the Gathering already had the perfect design for it with Savor the Moment. Between the fact that it’s already been used to represent gay love, and that it’s effect harmoniously reflects the idea of truly opening one’s eyes of the beauty of a singularly moment in time by giving the player an (limited) extra turn, it’s a slam dunk.

But additionally, Az and Volpes are characters that usually have blue in their color identity, and both of them have effects the operate either on upkeep or at the end step, meaning that Savor the Moment gives us another bite at the apple. Doubly so if we combine it with effects that allow up to untap in other ways.

Most importantly, it’s a great card to showcase Marsel-Defender‘s incredible art of the two old lovers.

Next up:

This one ties in to my most recent story about young Edmund using combat sports as a means to finance his escape from the corrupt city of Oplentis.

I wanted to represent young Edmund as a scrapper who, like in the tale, isn’t trained enough to truly fight, but able to take hit after hit, with an almost inhuman level of stamina and endurance.

The Dash mechanic was ironically the thing I settled on first, taking inspiration from former Modern all-star Ragavan. For flavor reasons, I wanted to contain this within the realm of mono-red, so that meant getting a little creative with the way to represent Edmund’s ability to keep getting back up. Red doesn’t get access to innate indestructibility, and regeneration is a retired mechanic, so after talking it out with some friends we settled on this design.

Perhaps not the strongest card, as a Legendary aggressive 1-drop with no evasive keywords, but flavorful.

And lastly:

This design actually came about around the time of Aetherdrift, but I didn’t have art for it until I found the perfect YCH from, once more, Marsel-Defender.

Something I’ve been fond of in more modern planewalker design is the reminder that Planeswalkers are also people, capable of doing things outside their suit of magic. Similar to how new Kaito is a creature during your turn, and new Chandra can crew vehicles on her own, I wanted to make my own take on this idea with a version of Enigma who can ride a motorcycle.

Obviously, I took myself queues from Chandra’s card, but I added my own Dimir/Investigate spin on the concept to give it a unique flair, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.

Hopefully, I’ll be less lazy about upload my custom cards in the future.