Now that I’m working towards an amateur production run, I’ve adjusted the size of the cards to fit in standard card sleeves, which of course meant I had to update the design since I’ve hopefully learned a thing or two about typography and layout in the last 5 years. (for reference here are the old cards)

I went with black borders, ’cause they’re going in black-backed card sleeves. That also allowed be to achieve a pseudo full-bleed effect with the art. I mocked some up, but decided not to go with crazy beveled borders partitioning everything off (like a magic card) and just used a plain white box for the text. The typeface is Adobe Caslon (because it came with Photoshop CS and has all the ligatures and shit). I did the titles in italics so I could use the sexy swash-caps. Notice how utility/laziness drives my design?

The other big change was to duplicate all the essential information at both ends so that you can hold the card either way to facilitate faster play (once you know the spells and maneuvers well enough that you don’t have to read them).

I’ve also assigned new combat values to each of the spells, sometimes based on feedback, sometimes based on whim. Some of the numbers are intentionally experimental (Justice is 11, and Blank is 0) so that we’ll just have to play them and see what happens.

Here are a few sample cards so you don’t have to go digging for them:

Poor Void Pocket, one of the few spells that got stuck with 8 point text. I’ll have to get some help from somebody to tighten up the wording.

And while you’re helping me with the wording, here’s another mouthful. Maybe it just needs to do somethnig else that’s simpler. So many options when you’ve got dragons getting zapped by lightning.

Here we have the evolution of the Dragon Pieces, from pewter miniatures (purchased), through silhouettes of various sizes designed in photoshop and then prototyped in paraffin wax, ending up (for now) with a wooden dragon carved using 3 different blades on my Leatherman Wave. Next up: Paint!

Realizing that I need a place to collect all the game production resources that I can find, and here is a good a place as any. I’m looking for the cheapest place that has the smallest required production run for custom game cards, custom dice, and custom miniatures. Please post your links in the comments.

• PlayingCardsIndia.com: Custom Printed Card Games
• Colortone: Game Cards
• Chessex: Custom Dice
• Smith Wood Products Ltd.
• Cartamundi Playing Cards
• Yaquinto
• De Lano Services