The Prototype
Wannabe Game Developer
Here is a Mega Evolved Koraidon card I made for my own set, Legends Zero. I worked really hard on it, and I'm proud of it!
Custom Pokemon Cards
- Thread starter The Prototype
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Here is a Mega Evolved Koraidon card I made for my own set, Legends Zero. I worked really hard on it, and I'm proud of it!
Wouldn't a Mega Koraidon be a Basic Pokémon? Mega Pokémon ex replace their normal counterparts in evolution chains, so since Koraidon is a Basic Pokémon, Mega Koraidon would also have to be a Basic Pokémon. Speaking of, the "Mega Evolved form" field is pretty strict in its contents. At least official-wise, it should contain "The Mega-Evolved form of Koraidon".
I've got a few lying around from contests I particpated in a TCG Discord server. (I think I have the rights to them?) I made them using PokéCardMaker.net. Lets see... three should be fun. As you'll quickly learn, I love messing with the boundaries of the TCG's rules engine.
Behold, the only one of these I drew manually! (I'm a terrible artist, no? The art draws from Hyper Rare Luminous Energy.) This one was from a prompt to make cards that involve players guessing, Blaine's Quiz Show style. I went with the weird approach of doing such an effect on an Energy. Its Rainbow Energy because a Toolbox deck is the best kind of deck for keeping the opponent on their toes. The unique mechanic is how players have to guess Energy Costs, which hasn't been used on a real card. This is a full art card mostly because the text is too long for the textbox of normal cards. (PokéCardMaker doesn't have a font size selector.)
Since I can't draw, my approach for these contests was kitbashing together existing art. Usually, all I did was pull a public domain background and combined it with a depiction of a Pokémon from Bulbagarden Archives. Tera cards are the exception because the dorky hat is of critical importance to the concept. And failing easily available screenshots of the dorky hats, have a public domain rock picture. This one has some additional context, as it is drawing from the mechanics of the roulette game from Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. (Which I read about from the linked Cave of Dragonflies article.) Shroomish plays directly into those mechanics in a very surprising way.
Mechanically, this is from a contest about the Confused condition. Instead of inflicting Confused, checking if a Pokémon is Confused, or enhancing Confused, this card benefits from the effect of being Confused through the unique templating of the Play the Odds attack.
Let's conclude this trip into Salmancer's head with something less mindbending. (And easier to look at.) This card was created for a contest about cards that search for Pokémon Tools. As someone who loves the card type, I find myself in situations where I have to attach the wrong Tool just to get it out of my hand. (The Pokémon TCG loves "discard your hand, then draw" and "draw until your hand has X cards in it" effects, both of which favor emptying your hand of cards before using them.) Tricia resolves the problem in the simplest way possible: letting the player put Tools in play back into their hand after the search, so that the player can attach the Pokémon Tool they just got out of their deck. I'm floored an effect his simple hasn't in the TCG yet. (Tricia is probably overcosted, but that's what you do when breaking new ground.) The art is just assets from Bulbapedia. The background is Rosa (Special Costume)'s Sync Move mindscape.
I've got a few lying around from contests I particpated in a TCG Discord server. (I think I have the rights to them?) I made them using PokéCardMaker.net. Lets see... three should be fun. As you'll quickly learn, I love messing with the boundaries of the TCG's rules engine.
Behold, the only one of these I drew manually! (I'm a terrible artist, no? The art draws from Hyper Rare Luminous Energy.) This one was from a prompt to make cards that involve players guessing, Blaine's Quiz Show style. I went with the weird approach of doing such an effect on an Energy. Its Rainbow Energy because a Toolbox deck is the best kind of deck for keeping the opponent on their toes. The unique mechanic is how players have to guess Energy Costs, which hasn't been used on a real card. This is a full art card mostly because the text is too long for the textbox of normal cards. (PokéCardMaker doesn't have a font size selector.)
Since I can't draw, my approach for these contests was kitbashing together existing art. Usually, all I did was pull a public domain background and combined it with a depiction of a Pokémon from Bulbagarden Archives. Tera cards are the exception because the dorky hat is of critical importance to the concept. And failing easily available screenshots of the dorky hats, have a public domain rock picture. This one has some additional context, as it is drawing from the mechanics of the roulette game from Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. (Which I read about from the linked Cave of Dragonflies article.) Shroomish plays directly into those mechanics in a very surprising way.
Mechanically, this is from a contest about the Confused condition. Instead of inflicting Confused, checking if a Pokémon is Confused, or enhancing Confused, this card benefits from the effect of being Confused through the unique templating of the Play the Odds attack.
"roulette" by midiman, 2013 openclipart.org
Amethyst from Siberia. Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology of the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Photograph by Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart. Cropped by me to remove background.
Stanford Advanced Materials "AG6100 Silver Balls" Cropped by me to remove background.
Shroomish Sitting Cuties Plushie
Amethyst from Siberia. Gallery of Mineralogy and Geology of the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris. Photograph by Marie-Lan Taÿ Pamart. Cropped by me to remove background.
Stanford Advanced Materials "AG6100 Silver Balls" Cropped by me to remove background.
Shroomish Sitting Cuties Plushie
Let's conclude this trip into Salmancer's head with something less mindbending. (And easier to look at.) This card was created for a contest about cards that search for Pokémon Tools. As someone who loves the card type, I find myself in situations where I have to attach the wrong Tool just to get it out of my hand. (The Pokémon TCG loves "discard your hand, then draw" and "draw until your hand has X cards in it" effects, both of which favor emptying your hand of cards before using them.) Tricia resolves the problem in the simplest way possible: letting the player put Tools in play back into their hand after the search, so that the player can attach the Pokémon Tool they just got out of their deck. I'm floored an effect his simple hasn't in the TCG yet. (Tricia is probably overcosted, but that's what you do when breaking new ground.) The art is just assets from Bulbapedia. The background is Rosa (Special Costume)'s Sync Move mindscape.
I've seen people hate all types of AI. Chat AI, Music AI, Image AI, etc. I find it pretty annoying, but I guess AI gets a bad stigma because people are using it irresponsibly.
It is stigmatized because of the unscrupulous and unethical ways the most readily-available models of these things are trained. They take data stealthily scraped by bots, scanned unlawfully from emails and backdoor info, obtained from obtuse and undisclosed entrapment deals. All of it gotten through means that aren't easily traceable or don't have any protective legislation in place, so artists have no way to fight back reliably. "You didn't take the opt-out option we've hidden inside 30 pages of legalese, nested behind 4 levels of a settings tree, so you've forfeited your right to withdraw consent".
A few months ago, one of my friends who is a prolific artist himself had had an image generation module trained on specifically his data, so it would spit out images that look specifically like he drew them. This was done against his will, without his consent, and any apparent consideration for his own feelings. Some bloke just randomly decided "well I like your work, but honestly I hate you. Your dumbass is too slow and you don't even draw the characters I like, so I've trained this robot to replace you. You're obsolete now, anything worthwhile you've ever added to the world has been separated from you and made replicable, so you can just get fucked and die now, lol." Feels great to have people try to rip the "result" part out of you, so they don't have to feel inconvenienced by the minor annoyance that you're a living being with wants and needs.
In a way, I count myself lucky than I'm too shitty and inconsistent of an artist to have the same recognition factor he does. It means it hasn't happened to me yet. I don't know what I would do if it did.
We all have to live in this shitty, broken, depressing world that beats you down with some new atrocity that's committed in it every day, to have to stave off the realization that everything is bleak and hopeless, and none of it will get better in your rapidly-declining lifetime. Artists take these crushing feelings and try, against all sense or reason, to channel them into something productive, to give others something to maybe ease their burden a little bit, or leave a tiny mark on this world that despises them. These personal crafts are cultivated over years of their lives, often at great personal effort. I myself have been an artist for more than 15 years now. It's given me strength and kept me sane (enough) to survive to the point I am currently at.
Do you know then, how it feels to have this one recourse--the one singular means you had left to fight against this miserable downpour and retain some sense of individuality--taken from you? To have your life's work be ripped away and fed into a blender against your will, so it can be compressed and commodified? To be re-sold by corporate entities who hate you, your existence, and everything you stand for? Who would be quite happy if you just vanished but left your work and money behind?
It's just another way to corporatize art, to devalue and dehumanize artists and spit in our faces.
It's nothing new, to be honest. The corporate process has been trying to erase us for years. It's the "product" they desire, and the "worker that makes it" is an undesirable factor slated to be excised. That contempt corporate has for artists was always real and inevitable. I just never expected them to be able to get this close to that goal, in this existentially horrifying way.
That's why people do not like generative AI. They don't always realize the full extent, but on an instinctual level, they pick up just how fucked up this thing that's being done to artists is. If you want to make something, pick up a pen, or keyboard, or instrument and learn how to do it. It is not some mystical skill you need to be blessed with by a higher deity, it just requires time, persistence, and for you to put the work in.
...
But don't get me wrong. I don't "hate" people who use AI. I have contempt for the people who trained theirs unethically and continue to erase creatives and destroy their livelihoods (just as those people have contempt for me). The general end users of AI are much less of a concern for me, provided they don't act maliciously, like with the scraper who targeted my friend, or corporations who fire their creatives to save money. Like, if you want to generate some funny picture of your two favorite characters holding hands, or getting crushed by a giant egg or whatever people do nowadays, I personally don't really like it, but it's your decision to do that. Whatevs, I'll live. Just in that moment, know what you're doing and the kind of tool you're using, and be aware how and on whose broken backs it was created.