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Keef's Guide To Making Great Cards On MTGCardsmith + JadeFire Wisdom
Hello aspiring cardsmiths and vets alike! I'm TheKeefMan, or Keef for short, I'm a newer cardsmith but I have been accredited multiple times for my cards for their formatting. People have asked me how I put so much detail and professionalism into my cards, and here is how I'll teach you, step-by-step, so follow along!
Part 1: The Concept, Art And Layout
The first part to making a card is to well, have a card to make. Now when coming up with a card, dont try too hard, or you'll end up with a card that's too complex, or tries too hard to be unique. Not every card has to be a mind-blowing revelation, gracing the community with its outstanding beauty and creativity. If you shoot too high, you'll almost always miss, not to say you can't try new things. Even I experiment with complex cards from time to time.
Now, you have a card in mind, an idea you are satisfied with and you're ready to make your card. You go to MTGCardsmith.com, press "Create New Card", press M15 Card, and then, you see this:
Uh-oh, you need art! Now where do you find you right artwork for your card? Theres a few sights to look: Artstation, DeviantArt, Pixiv, Imgur and maybe Gelbooru. (Word of caution: Gelbooru has great art, but there is a LOT of nsfw, tread carefully, unless of course, you're into that
. )
Ok, now you're on your website of choice, how do I find the art I want? Try using keywords that relate to your card. Making a land? Look up keywords like "Landscape" "Majestic" "Forest" "Mountainview". Or, making a creature? Look up "Wizard" "Goblin" "Mermaid", or just flat out "Fantasy". Looking up just "Fantasy" and looking around, is a way too find a lot of good art, and it's what I do a lot!
Now, you've got your art, and you select it and you press "Next", you'll see this screen:
Now, this is a lot, so lets look at what we got here. From top to bottom we have the following: Card name, Frame color, Card watermark, (optional) Card type, Card subtype, Card rarity, and Card's set icon. These are the easy ones to fill out, and are basically self-explanatory. Now look below, you have the meat of the card, what the actual card is gonna do and be! Now hold your horses, what are all these buttons for?! Let's walk through this together.
The top box is full of silly symbols, if you've ever played magic before (Which you most definitely have) you'll recognize most, if not all these symbols. When you press one of these silly symbols, it'll insert that symbol into the Card Ability textbox. But wait, if you look, that's not the symbol, that's just some weird gibberish! Yes, it gets inserted as some weird sting of text, usually a letter inside of indented brackets "{ }". Think of these as commands the website reads to know what symbol to insert. When the website sees a "{T}", it knows to insert a "Tap" symbol in the card. Cardsmith has about every ruling symbol you'll ever need, and they are as follows:
{t} Tap symbol {X}, {1-12} universal cost symbols, (Note, only {1-10} are actual buttons on the website, but you can manually put in {11} and {12} and it'll register, but not {13} and higher. This is the same for the actual card cost too.) {w}, {u}, {b}, {r}, {g} and {c}, white, blue, black, red, green and colorless mana symbols, {e}, energy symbol, {ut}, untap symbol, {w,u,b,r,g/w,u,b,r,g}, dual mana cost symbols and {p/w,u,b,r,g}, life/mana cost symbols.
Now, that was a lot on paper, but in practice, its pretty simple. Now with that, lets get to these bigger buttons. All these buttons are the same as the others, except one, and we'll get to that last. You have three buttons that are just the same as the last:
{Bull}, insert a bullet point.
{Dash}, insert a dash.
{Line}, Add a long dash.
Now, we have the last button, "Italics", If you just press the button, you'll think its broken, but what you have to do is, select all the text you want italicized, and THEN press "Italics". You'll probably see these two symbols at the beginning and the end of your selected text. "<i> ... </i>" These are what tells the website to make the text between these symbols to be italicized.
And finally, these last two buttons on the side, "Small text" and "Large text". MTGCardsmith only have two font sizes, small and large. Which you will have to use for your card will usually require you to preview your card first before knowing which one you need. Unlike all the other buttons, these don't insert a keyword into the text box and is just an external toggle.
Part 2: Making The Damn Card!
Now, we've gone through all that, lets make the freakin' card!
Putting together your concept and the tools you've learned you can make a great card! But, how do I do that? One thing, wording, wording wording! This is probably the hardest part of your card, even I struggle with it, yeah I know, crazy. Now to get your best wording, cross reference cards with similar abilities or the same abilities to see how to word it in your card.
Now before we finish our card and press that coveted "Preview card" button, you might see this little checkbox: "Include power/toughness?". If you have a creature card, select it, and you'll see this prompt popup:
And below this you'll see two more prompts, "Artwork Artist" Let's you credit the artist of the artwork used, (Always do this!) and "Card Category", not very important when all is said and done but it's useful enough ig, and it doesnt impact the card at all.
Pretty self-explanatory. Now that we have all that done, lets finally do it, press that glorious "Preview card" button!
"What?" you might ask, "Why does my card look like crap?"
This is where step 3 comes into play.
Part 1: The Concept, Art And Layout
The first part to making a card is to well, have a card to make. Now when coming up with a card, dont try too hard, or you'll end up with a card that's too complex, or tries too hard to be unique. Not every card has to be a mind-blowing revelation, gracing the community with its outstanding beauty and creativity. If you shoot too high, you'll almost always miss, not to say you can't try new things. Even I experiment with complex cards from time to time.
Now, you have a card in mind, an idea you are satisfied with and you're ready to make your card. You go to MTGCardsmith.com, press "Create New Card", press M15 Card, and then, you see this:
Uh-oh, you need art! Now where do you find you right artwork for your card? Theres a few sights to look: Artstation, DeviantArt, Pixiv, Imgur and maybe Gelbooru. (Word of caution: Gelbooru has great art, but there is a LOT of nsfw, tread carefully, unless of course, you're into that
. )Ok, now you're on your website of choice, how do I find the art I want? Try using keywords that relate to your card. Making a land? Look up keywords like "Landscape" "Majestic" "Forest" "Mountainview". Or, making a creature? Look up "Wizard" "Goblin" "Mermaid", or just flat out "Fantasy". Looking up just "Fantasy" and looking around, is a way too find a lot of good art, and it's what I do a lot!
Now, you've got your art, and you select it and you press "Next", you'll see this screen:
Now, this is a lot, so lets look at what we got here. From top to bottom we have the following: Card name, Frame color, Card watermark, (optional) Card type, Card subtype, Card rarity, and Card's set icon. These are the easy ones to fill out, and are basically self-explanatory. Now look below, you have the meat of the card, what the actual card is gonna do and be! Now hold your horses, what are all these buttons for?! Let's walk through this together.
The top box is full of silly symbols, if you've ever played magic before (Which you most definitely have) you'll recognize most, if not all these symbols. When you press one of these silly symbols, it'll insert that symbol into the Card Ability textbox. But wait, if you look, that's not the symbol, that's just some weird gibberish! Yes, it gets inserted as some weird sting of text, usually a letter inside of indented brackets "{ }". Think of these as commands the website reads to know what symbol to insert. When the website sees a "{T}", it knows to insert a "Tap" symbol in the card. Cardsmith has about every ruling symbol you'll ever need, and they are as follows:
{t} Tap symbol {X}, {1-12} universal cost symbols, (Note, only {1-10} are actual buttons on the website, but you can manually put in {11} and {12} and it'll register, but not {13} and higher. This is the same for the actual card cost too.) {w}, {u}, {b}, {r}, {g} and {c}, white, blue, black, red, green and colorless mana symbols, {e}, energy symbol, {ut}, untap symbol, {w,u,b,r,g/w,u,b,r,g}, dual mana cost symbols and {p/w,u,b,r,g}, life/mana cost symbols.
Now, that was a lot on paper, but in practice, its pretty simple. Now with that, lets get to these bigger buttons. All these buttons are the same as the others, except one, and we'll get to that last. You have three buttons that are just the same as the last:
{Bull}, insert a bullet point.
{Dash}, insert a dash.
{Line}, Add a long dash.
Now, we have the last button, "Italics", If you just press the button, you'll think its broken, but what you have to do is, select all the text you want italicized, and THEN press "Italics". You'll probably see these two symbols at the beginning and the end of your selected text. "<i> ... </i>" These are what tells the website to make the text between these symbols to be italicized.
And finally, these last two buttons on the side, "Small text" and "Large text". MTGCardsmith only have two font sizes, small and large. Which you will have to use for your card will usually require you to preview your card first before knowing which one you need. Unlike all the other buttons, these don't insert a keyword into the text box and is just an external toggle.
Part 2: Making The Damn Card!
Now, we've gone through all that, lets make the freakin' card!
Putting together your concept and the tools you've learned you can make a great card! But, how do I do that? One thing, wording, wording wording! This is probably the hardest part of your card, even I struggle with it, yeah I know, crazy. Now to get your best wording, cross reference cards with similar abilities or the same abilities to see how to word it in your card.
Now before we finish our card and press that coveted "Preview card" button, you might see this little checkbox: "Include power/toughness?". If you have a creature card, select it, and you'll see this prompt popup:
And below this you'll see two more prompts, "Artwork Artist" Let's you credit the artist of the artwork used, (Always do this!) and "Card Category", not very important when all is said and done but it's useful enough ig, and it doesnt impact the card at all.
Pretty self-explanatory. Now that we have all that done, lets finally do it, press that glorious "Preview card" button!
"What?" you might ask, "Why does my card look like crap?"
This is where step 3 comes into play.
Comments
Before we look at the text of the card, take a quick look at that border. It's just plain gold, when it should be gold green/white. If you have a multicolored card, MTGCardsmith automatically assigns the standard gold border, you have to manually insert the color combo of choice yourself. It's just something to always remember. So lets press "Edit" and fix up this card.
First, lets change that border, so press the "Alternative Card Color/Frame" dropdown, and in the search bar, lets type "Gold" and the top result will be the "Split Colors" section, and lets scroll until we find "Green/White/Gold", it should be at the bottom of that column, and lets click it.
Now that we've done that lets preview our card again and see it now!
That looks better, but there's still something off. If you look at the first line of the card ruling and the second line of the flavor text, you'll see some of our lines are going off the card! Us cardsmiths refer to this as "Text Spill" or "Line Bleed". We need to manually put that word down a line, It's pretty simple to fix. We go back to editing, and at the beginning of the word, in this case the beginning of the word "cost" we're going to delete the space seperating it from the word "mana", and then, if you're on PC, press Shift+Enter, and it'll create a line break. If you're on mobile, just press Enter. And then we'll do the same for the word "Real" in the flavor text.
Not that we've done that, lets look at our card now!
That already looks a lot better, but not perfect. You'll notice that we still have some line bleed in the flavor text. One fix isn't going to fix all your issues, so its really just trial and error. But if you look, it looks better, but, not perfect. What else can we do? More line breaks of course! We can do more line breaks between the main ability, attribute and the flavor text to make it look better, lets do that now, and fix that line bleed while we're at it.
"Wait, now it looks worse!" You're probably saying, now this is where the 4th step comes in. (Also note: If you're wondering why the mana symbols in the text is on a different line. I don't really know. MTGCardsmith it kinda fickle with its symbols if it's close to an edge and will just throw it off to another line. There isn't many ways to fix it and it kinda sucks.)
Step 4: Revisions, Revisions, Revisions
Now, we need to revise our card, and we have a choice, 1: Rewrite the flavor text to accommodate the space we have better. Or 2: Just remove the flavor text all together.
For the sake of this tutorial we'll go with num. 1, but either choice is valid. So let's rewrite our flavor text to better suite our space. And lets rework the ability to better work with the jank of MTGCardsmith.
Now that's a handsome card! Give yourself a pat on the back for a job well done and press that oh-so beautiful "Publish" button. You sir, are on your way to become a great cardsmith!
This is a bonus for those who want to add some flair to your card that will make it stand out from the rest, and is what I'm usually known for. I'm of course talking about text centering. This is fairly advanced and is only really known by very experienced cardsmiths, but I'll show everyone how I do it right now!
This is fairly hard to do and takes a bit of practice, or atleast how I do it. There are probably better ways to do this that I don't know, but this is how I do it. I have a specific Google Doc saved, that is just a paragraph break. To do this, open Google Docs, on Start a New Document, press "Blank" and simply, press "Tab". Name it and save it and we can move on. Then select this paragraph break and copy it. It should look a little something like this.
And now we have this, lets make a card!
We have our base card, it doesn't look pretty now, but it will in a moment. Out first step is to separate the main ability into three equal, or as close as you can to equal lines.
That looks good, now here comes the tricky part, centering the lines. Now that we have this paragraph break copied in our clipboard, we go back to editing, at the beginning of each of our lines were going to paste these line breaks until they are centered. It's going to look a lot different when your editing than when you preview. When your editing it'll show up as full paragraph breaks, but on the actual card it only shows up and a single space. This is really just trial and error until it looks how you want.
Now that looks good! Lets do the same for the card's attributes now too!
Now this card is really shaping together, now as the last 2 steps, lets center that separating line for the card ruling and the flavor text, and then center the flavor text itself.
And vualà! A very beautiful and professional card, with the love and attention that drive us cardsmiths crazy! Now press that publish button and wait for the favorites to come rolling in!
By looking at real cards, you can find the WotC-approved ways of wording things, or at least get into the right neighbourhood if you're doing something novel. You can also see what the best practices are in terms of formatting, capitalizaiton, and the ordering of abilites, both in terms of keywords vs. static vs. triggered vs. activated abilities and also among the various keywords.
I could do a point-by-point breakdown for Carnivorous Greatwurm or I can just point to Bramble Wurm or Vorinclex and the official layout for that combination of abilities will be right there for the attentive eye.
When inserting horizontal lines to separate rules text from flavour text or to create a grid for abilities like Level up and Prototype, use a line of underscores (_) to evenly split an even number of rows and a line of hyphens (-) to evenly split an odd number of rows. The lines below are the correct length and can be directly copied and pasted into the card text editor:
Splitting even lines (Large text) = ____________________________________
Splitting odd lines (Large text) = ---------------------------------------------------
Splitting even lines (Small text) = _________________________________________
Splitting odd lines (Small text) = -------------------------------------------------------------
Also, make sure you're completely happy with the size and positioning of the card art before you move on to edit the other parts of the card. If you choose to Re-Upload Artwork, you'll lose all the other work done in the MTG Card Maker.
If you set a cards' P/T to 0/0, go to Preview Card, and then decide to Edit again, the checkbox to include Power/Toughness will become unchecked. You'll need to check it again before you finalize your card (it will remember the values once you check the box). This only ever happens for 0/0 P/T combinations.
If you pre-type your card text in a word processor before copying and pasting it into the card text editor, you may find that some of the characters are replaced with "â". This is because the word processor's font for quotations (" ") and apostrophes (') isn't recognized by the editor, which replaces them with the generic placeholder â. Manually re-enter the punctuations or do your work in Notepad. Generally, â means that a character has been deemed unacceptable by the editor.
EDIT (8/2): If you insert one or more blank lines before the first line of rules text to vertically position the text, the best practice is to add a paragraph break (Tab space copied from a text document and pasted into the card text editor) to each of those lines. If any leading lines are left completely blank, every time you go back into Edit mode from Preview Card, you'll lose one of them automatically.
EDIT (8/2): When using a paragraph break to horizontally shift text to the right, you only need to include one to act as the first character in the line. After that, you can insert regular spaces between it and the start of that line's rules text (i.e., you're allowed any number spaces in between characters, but each line with text must have its first character in the leftmost position).