So me and my friends have come up with some ideas for our own hero/villian decks to add to the game, and I was just wondering if anyone had a template or a program I could use to make copies that actually resemble SotM cards.
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I’d suggest looking and asking on BGG here https://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102652/sentinels-multiverse/forums/69
Crush your enemies, drive them before you, and laminate their women! - Guise, Prime Wardens #31
In working on my own prototypes, I use a program available on Steam called CardCreator. It costs about $20, is particularly user-friendly, and produces quality finished designs.
The following page has links to all the templates, fonts, etc. you need:
https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/813176/card-templates
As for me, I use GIMP to actually make the cards. It took a while to get things just right, but if you want I can send you the .xcf of one of my later cards with all the formatting done fairly well. I don’t have the gradient in the title text, though- there’s a way to do that, but I haven’t bothered, since my cards don’t even have real art.
And for font needs for titles and such, I use 1001freefonts.com.
And lastly, some design notes: if you don’t have art, please use stock photos. It makes a world of difference in keeping your cards visually distinguishable from each other. Secondly, don’t worry too much about balance on heroes- there’s a very broad spectrum of power levels in SotM heroes. Focus on just weeding out infinite loops and getting to a general power level. Villains are another story, and you may need to playtest and tweak them nonstop for several iterations. My suggestion is to already know what difficulty you want. Environments also have a broad spectrum, and are the most contentious. Some people like environments that do a lot and force you to deal with them; some people hate those kinds of environments and think that environments should only have a few “oh no” cards.
Lastly, playtesting in this game is based mostly on “feel.” With only a few trials you can’t get Sentinels-Statistics-Project levels of data. So when balancing, try to focus on how your deck feels. Remember- it needs to not only be balanced, it needs to be fun. I’ve had to take more decks back to the drawing board because they weren’t fun than because they weren’t balanced.
That does look interesting. I've used Koga's Illustrator templates in the past, but I don't know Illustrator so it's a challenge to not mess it up. :-(
Does Card Creator have templating available? Or would a new user have to layout SotM cards for themselves?
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Creating a template that mirrors SotM is fairly easy, actually. Effectively, it's just a block for image, a text block for keywords, a second text block for card text, and a third text block for flavor text. Very easy to recreate, if it isn't a default template.