Creating a cardgame

From Childhood Imagination to Magic: The Gathering Creation

Since childhood, I’ve been an avid gamer. Growing up in the Netherlands, I couldn’t read or understand English, which turned every game into a thrilling mystery. Every moment felt like an adventure, driven by trial and error as I navigated these new worlds. This sparked my imagination, and I often found myself recreating those fantastical realms using LEGO, a space I could control and shape into my vision of adventure.

As I grew older, my passion for games expanded to board games, a love that has remained with me to this day. I’m grateful that I’ve never lost that adventurous, playful spark. In fact, it has become a core part of who I am. I now bring it into every aspect of my life: from gamifying the classroom to inspire my students, to incorporating progressive overload and stat tracking into my workouts. Gaming principles infuse my life in ways I never could have imagined.

Eventually, this love for gaming and creativity led me to an ambitious project: designing my own variation of Magic: The Gathering. Let me share the journey of how I brought this idea to life!

The Idea: Combining Fantasy and Friendship

Magic: The Gathering is more than just a card game; it’s a universe brimming with fantasy, strategy, diplomacy, luck, and personal expression. You can be a commander of dragons, undead armies, colossal living mountains, or perhaps a clever spell-slinger weaving deception and magic. You can even summon snakes, or squirrels! In Magic, the possibilities are as limitless as your imagination.

Naturally, this inspired me to ask: What kind of cards could I create? For me, the answer was clear, I wanted to design something personal, something that captured the essence of the people around me. From that spark of inspiration, my project was born.

Here’s how I turned that idea into reality:

The Process: Turning People Into Cards

Crafting the Concept:
I began by asking ChatGPT to create 10 questions that could transform a person’s personality and quirks into a unique fantasy character.
Gathering Input:
I shared these questions with friends and family, collecting their responses to serve as the foundation for their personalized cards.
Visualizing the Characters:
Using the answers, I collaborated with ChatGPT to generate detailed text-based descriptions of each character, ensuring their fantasy personas came to life.
Designing the Cards:
This is where the real magic happened! I spent countless hours tweaking the visuals, refining the text, aligning the elements, and ensuring that each card matched the aesthetic and thematic essence of Magic: The Gathering.

I generated art prompts for each card and ran them through MidJourney, refining the results along the way. Midjourney is a simple to use program, in my opinion the best out there, but it also costs some fiat currency, I don't think they have a free version anymore, but the images it can create a realisticly epic, some random results and their prompts to create them:

Prompt: "The most powerful anime character ever, on a plain white background"

Prompt: "a cat in a very ultra modern symmetry using abstract shapes for a shoulder and negative space to create a cat"

Prompt: "cat head warrior swings axe"

You can explore more here: https://www.midjourney.com/explore

You see, it's quite powerful and the sky is the limit. It's text prompting for art. You ask something and you can generated it. When you are using Midjourney you have some edit options: These tools allow you to refine and customize your generated image outputs:

Vary
- Subtle: Makes minor changes to your image, keeping the overall structure and details intact while introducing slight variations.
- Strong: Creates more dramatic changes, altering the style, composition, or key details of the original image.
Upscale
- Subtle: Enhances the resolution and detail of the image while maintaining a natural, subtle finish.
- Creative: Adds a layer of artistic flair or interpretation to the upscale, often pushing the style or detail beyond the original scope.
More
- Rerun: Generates a completely new set of results based on your original prompt. Useful if you want fresh variations or a restart.
- Editor: Opens the image in a tool that allows for further manual adjustments.
Use
- Image: Lets you use an existing image as a base for further prompts or inspiration.
- Style: Allows you to apply or carry over a particular style from one image to another.
- Prompt: Reuses or adapts the original prompt used to generate the image for new creations.

Using these tools, you can bring your creative vision to life! I used them to design my very own Magic: The Gathering cards. For privacy reasons, I’ve blurred out the names on the cards, but here they are in all their glory!

Prompt: "Felix is a versatile and strategic creature that embodies both the fluidity of shapeshifting and the delicate balance of life and death. His powers hinge on adaptability, turning the tide of battle with his coin-flipping Yin-Yang mechanic, and offering both offense and defense through his unique abilities."

Prompt: "NAME, Silent Radiant, is a quiet, powerful leader who guides with purity and strength. He empowers allies through subtle actions, offering protection and direction without speaking. Her ability to remain unseen and command silence allows him to lead by example, always shielding others while radiating pure, unwavering light."

Prompt: "NAME, Sunlit Dreamer, is a charming and elusive Elf Mystic. Bringing sunlight with his Sunstone and dancing in and out of sight with Dance of Disappearance, he mesmerizes opponents through his Enchanting Rhythm. With his unique Headphones Groove, NAME remains untouchable, embodying light, rhythm, and creative joy on the battlefield."

Prompt: "NAME, The Adaptive Enchanter, is a gentle yet fierce fairy who reads intentions with ease. She crafts protective shields from Knitting and gathers gems and mushrooms, weaving art and magic into each piece. Beneath her calm, creative exterior, a powerful, hidden beast emerges when provoked—a force of unexpected strength."

Prompt: "NAME, The Unstoppable Creator, is a versatile wizard who excels at adapting to any challenge with creativity and enthusiasm. A natural mediator and teacher, he brings balance and humor to the battlefield, controlling chaos with strategic moves and protecting allies with his indestructible will."

The Results: A Custom Commander Deck

Creating these cards wasn’t just about art, it was about balance, cohesion, and mechanics. I invested over 30 hours crafting 10 unique cards, building a full 100-card Commander deck around them. I tested the mechanics to ensure the cards worked harmoniously, balancing power levels to avoid anything too overpowered (or underwhelming). But there pretty powerful! Every detail, from thematic consistency to gameplay synergy, was carefully considered to make the deck as engaging as it was unique.

This project was more than just a creative exercise; it was a way to bring my love for gaming, imagination, and the people I care about into a single, unforgettable experience and as a special gift towards them.

Bringing Fantasy to Life

Through this journey, I realized how much gaming elements permeate my life, from the adventures I dreamed of as a child to the worlds I build today. This project was a celebration of that creativity and connection, and I’m thrilled to have turned my passion into something tangible. What you learned in this blog post: AI Amplifies Creativity: Tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney can transform your ideas into fully realized creative projects, bringing imagination to life with incredible speed and detail.

Personalization Through AI: By using AI to generate prompts and character concepts, you can create highly tailored and meaningful projects, such as personalized Magic: The Gathering cards.
Iteration is Key in AI Workflows: Generating, refining, and tweaking AI outputs, whether it’s art or text, is essential to achieve polished results. Don’t settle for the first attempt; iterate until it feels right.
AI as a Collaborative Partner: AI doesn’t replace creativity but enhances it. Combining your vision with AI’s capabilities allows you to explore new possibilities and tackle ambitious projects!!
Understanding AI Tools: Features like “Vary” and “Upscale” in MidJourney provide ways to fine-tune outputs, ensuring the end product matches your vision. Learning these tools unlocks more potential.
AI Saves Time But Requires Input: While AI accelerates processes, quality results still demand thoughtful input, direction, and careful adjustments to prompts and outputs.
Storytelling With AI: AI can turn abstract ideas into compelling narratives or visuals, helping you share your passion and connect with others through storytelling.
Practical Applications of AI: Beyond art, AI can help with mechanics, balance, and thematic consistency in games or any creative endeavor, proving its versatility in problem-solving.

Conclusion This journey, from puzzling through video games as a child to designing a personalized Magic: The Gathering Commander deck as an adult, has been a testament to the enduring power of creativity, imagination, and connection. What began as childhood adventures of exploration and creation with LEGO has grown into a lifelong passion for gamified experiences that permeate every aspect of my life.

Creating a custom Magic: The Gathering deck wasn’t just a nostalgic return to fantasy, it was a modern celebration of creativity, relationships, and technology. With tools like ChatGPT and MidJourney, I was able to combine the essence of my friends’ personalities with the limitless possibilities of the Magic universe, bringing fantasy to life in a way I never dreamed possible as a kid.

This project taught me that the playful spirit of gaming doesn’t fade with age, it evolves. Today, it takes shape through AI tools, collaborative storytelling, and the joy of sharing my creations with others. I hope this story inspires you to embrace your creativity, explore the endless potential of AI, and find ways to bring your own passions and connections to life.

Because whether it’s through cards, pixels, or building blocks, we’re all just trying to craft our own worlds, ones filled with adventure, meaning, and a little bit of magic.

If you found this interesting or have any questions,

don’t hesitate to reach out! I’d love to help, contact me today!