Creating MTG cards

As a Magic: The Gathering fan I've always liked the possibilities of creating my own cards.

Still, this is no easy task. First of all you need to have a good idea, then you have to think about mana cost, power and toughness (if it's a creature), and abilities, among other things.

One of the most important things you have to take in consideration is balance. This means that a MTG card must not be, in any way, ultra powerful, unbeatable or have a very low mana cost.

You have to think of a way in which a card will help mantain the balance of the game overall.

For example, if you have a very big creature (let's say it's a 6/6), it's mana cost can't be 1,2 or 3 converted mana cost. If it has skills or abilities the mana cost usually raises, unless you find a way to balance this with certain disadvantages. For example, that creature can't attack unless you sacrifice a land. Or, maybe, it comes with haste, but you have to sacrifice it at the end of your turn. There are many ways to do this.

You always have to keep in mind the advantage-disadvantage rate.

But creating a good card is much more than just that, you need to have knowledge of how the game works, and experience playing it. This way you'll know how a card can work, and how useful it could be.

Since I create my own cards just for fun, I experiment with many posibilities, and most of them are cards that, most probably, nobody would like to play with. Sometimes I even make card parodies or absolutely ridiculous cards (like in the Unglued of Unhinged series).

But I also try to create cards that could be useful, and try to make them as real as posible. Who knows, maybe some of those cards could be considered playable.

Tools

There are many ways to create cards, but I recently found a card creator program that I've found the most useful and I absolutely recommend it: Magic Set Editor.

This program offers many templates for cards (also for non-MTG cards). It also comes with a symbol creator, so that you can make your own sets, and there are many templates you can download from the page, and the forums.

It also comes with an ability and skill library, where you can find all the abilities found in MTG cards, and also the posiblity to automaticaly add the description of the skill on the card.

Probably one of the most useful features it has is the Statistics option, with many options to check how you're building your collection. Including card color, colored mana cost, converted mana cost, rarity, card type, and much more.

Plus, it's absolutely user-friendly. It's probably the best and easiest way to create cards.