I play a collectible card game—nay, the original collectible card game1—Magic: The Gathering. Some of its cards call for a player to create a token, a game piece which is not itself one of the cards from their deck. Early on, players were encouraged to use dice, coins, or other objects. Later, some booster packs began to include a token card relevant to the set printed on the back of the ubiquitous disposable advertisement cards people would otherwise throw away.
Most players eventually collect quite a stack of tokens, but there is no guarantee you will have the specific ones needed for a given deck. I have several white 1/1 soldier tokens, 2/2 green wolf creature tokens, clue tokens, and so forth, but sometimes I have a card with no corresponding token, or I may have only a single copy of a given token card, but need more than one to reference different creatures under different effects. What can I do?
After weighing some options, I decided to open Canva and try out a few ideas. I have some basic criteria:
- No A.I. slop art
- Try using real photos
- Provide attribution
- Make them resemble official token layout
I used photos from Pexels because I liked what I found there better than my usual sources on Pixabay, and they have a similar permissive license, so I hopefully avoid stepping on any uptight intellectual property toes. Copying is not theft, but avoiding legal bullshit is a good idea, and attribution is basic courtesy.
I may make a template in GIMP and use some tools to play with the images a bit. Filters can make them look more like a painting, for example. This is a relatively quick-and-dirty trial run. Here are the results before I take things further.
1/1 green Squirrel
I have a card called Scurry Oak, a Treefolk creature which says, in part, "Whenever one or more +1/+1 counters are put on this creature, you may create a 1/1 green Squirrel creature token."
This card creates a combo loop with Ivy Lane Denizen, which reads, "Whenever another green creature you control enters the battlefield, put a +1/+1 counter on target creature."
This creates a sequence of token-counter-token-counter cycles as many times as I want. Maybe another effect like Impact Tremors pings my opponents as these squirrels swarm. Maybe I have a card in play like Crashing Drawbridge which lets them all attack immediately and overwhelm my enemies with lethal cuteness damage.
In any case, this is absolutely broken, and I can't wait to unleash this arboreal menace, but I need tokens, so here we are at the inspiration point for this project and this post. But I went ahead an made more as well.
Also, SQUIRREL!
1/1 black Assassin
I have another card called Vraska the Unseen with no corresponding token in my collection. She is a planeswalker, and her ultimate ability creates three assassin tokens with the special rule, "Whenever this token deals combat damage to a player, that player loses the game."
I mistyped the rule on this card. Oops.
I also had a more difficult time finding suitable art. Many of the photos of people have, for lack of better terminology, unnatural "artistic" poses. I don't want someone casually holding a weapon like a prop, I don't want someone trying to look sultry,2 and while I can accept taking liberties with historical clothing in a fantasy setting, I didn't want it to look too weird. I think this turned out well enough.
It sure would be a shame if these assassins also could not be blocked...
Copy
I have many cards which create a copy of another creature as an effect, but no copies of the Copy token. It took a while to find anything even close to what I had in mind, and this is still a placeholde runtil I find something better.
I tried searching for double exposure, reflection, and many other terms I hoped would find something I liked. No luck. I decided to just pick one that worked well enough for now and get on with it.
Of course, I could also take an image I like and create a duplicate layer, or two photos from a set and play with layering, and use transparency to come up with something.
I also moved the text box to the bottom of the card under the assumption this would be placed under whatever it had copied, with the label protruding from the bottom, and I could just use dice if there were more than one copy.
3/3 red Ogre
The last token I'll share here is for a card called Kazuul, Tyrant of the Cliffs. This is a great defensive card because whenever an opponent attacks, they have to pay 3 mana per attacking creature, or else I get free ogre tokens. Remember those assassins? If they were sent my way, and nothing was paid, they would be blocked, and I would have a solid counterattack ready on my turn.
Finding a picture for this was a challenge. I finally decided to use a photo of someone's Krampus costume, even though it's more like a devil than an ogre. Again, this is placeholder art until I find something better.
I also thought about diverging from my Pexels photo theme and trying some old art that was now in the public domain, but for now, I'm keeping everything the same
In Conclusion...
If you want to use these tokens, just save the images, print them at 2.5"x3.5" (or 63x88mm), and cut them out. For best results, tuck them into a cheap card sleeve with a basic land card or one of those throwaway advertising inserts that isn't a token already as backing to give it some substance. If you put a different token image on each side, it can serve double duty!
Have you tried making custom cards for trading card games, or player/monster/npc pieces for role-playing games? What art or photos did you use, and why? Do you have any suggestions to update any of these cards, or image sources beyond Pixabay, Pexels, Unsplash, and Wikimedia? Do you want me to make a quick-and-dirty custom token in this style for your deck? Chime in with a comment.
Footnotes (or 30-centimeter-notes3 outside the US)
Genuine human user of the em-dash here. Slop jockeys can't hope to match my
parentheticalem-dash-enthetical remarks!Although a cheesecake or beefcake image could add a distracting layer of psychological warfare to the game, right?
one inch is defined as 2.54 centimeters. Technically, 12 inches = 1 foot = 30.54 centimeters, and I wasted a footnote in my footnotes to explain this egregiously bad pun.
I love that there's a bunch of words in your footnotes that I don't understand without Googling, and yet I still understand enough to get a good giggle out of them.
I do enjoy reading posts from people who have larger vocabularies than I do and who love a good play on words! !INDEED
Did you ever get any packs of Unglued? They always had the best tokens in them, and were just fun to mess with.
It's been a minute since I last played Magic, and even longer since I got the infinite squirrel generator up and running, can't even remember the names of the cards I used with scurry oak, but I always went the green/white route with gaining lives when creatures come into play getting you the counters to pump out the squirrels.
I wasn't playing yet when Unglued or Unhinged were released. I have a few unopened Unstable packs, and I opened a few of them when that launched.
Are you aware of anyone else who has made their own tokens in a similar way, or did you think that up all by yourself? Either way, it's quite creative.
I have seen similar options elsewhere. There are companies that print custom cards and tokens. Some card resellers include their own custom tokens as a sort of business card if you place an order, too.