Punk Magic

So I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with the Magic: the Gathering for well... most of my adult life. I play commander games every month or so. I played Magic: Arena a lot for a few years, then didn't, then did again, now don't at all after I found other digital card games that respected my time and money (RIP, Legends of Runeterra).

I have a bit of a collection. Nothing amazing, mostly just bulk stuff I accumulated from pre-constructed commander decks, the occasional booster, and a year or so of working in a hobby shop and getting products for cheap.

I've always been a bit frustrated that all this cardboard is mostly useless and worthless. At best it may be mined for a few dozen worthwhile cards to either sell or put into a deck. Dozens out of hundreds.

On top of this I've been wanting to put together some sort of single-player RPG using magic cards. I've had a couple of false starts, nothing really took off. But I figured I wasn't alone wanting to explore a single player game that used magic cards. There's surprisingly little out there for solo play MtG stuff.

Then I read about Jay Dragon's magpie cube, and something unlocked inside my brain.

What if instead of using cards as they are... you just used those cards to make new ones. Better ones. Weird ones.

So I started playing around with an idea I'm calling Punk Magic.

It's a single player RPG and Magic format that uses cheap magic cards as a base. You play as a young punk trying to live and find justice in a world ruled by the Wizards of the Citadel. There's several different mini games (gig worker stuff like delivering packages and killing monsters) that give you coins, which you can use to augment cards and add cards to your deck. This includes editing text on cards, pasting keywords and other rules onto other cards, and cutting cards up for later use. With this upgraded deck you try to take on the five wizards of the citadel in difficult boss encounters that can let your character level up and get even better boons.

As your deck gets bigger and bigger, you can use it as a cube, a constructed draft set you can use in competitive and cooperative games that use the familiar rules of Magic, with very, very different cards.

I have a prototype that I'm futzing with right now, and today I got inspired to do a mock up of a sort of cover image, hence posting it here for all of you before anyone else. Once I have something a bit more solid, I'll post it here for you all to check out.

How do you feel about cutting up cards and pasting them together to make new ones? What kind of synergies and archetypes would you make with the draft chaff you've collected? I've noticed I've got a lot of wyrms and lizards... that could be fun.

-Michael