I dabble in a little Magic The Gathering. Nothing serious, mind you. I have two or three hundred cards at most, but I’ve always thought it would be fun to make my own card battle game. However, short of artistic talent, what better tool than AI image generators? Can I actually use ChatGPT to create my own card game?

MTG, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and similar games are really just number manipulation according to a set of dynamic rules. However, since Numbers: The Mathening Probably won’t sell very well, the rollset is given some flavor by using art, louvers and tasteful text.

Now, if you just want to create custom cards for your home games and personal enjoyment, you can just use the existing rules and regulations of the games you already play. However, if you want to create your own original game instead, a tool like ChatGPT is great for coming up with a template for your rules.

In this case, I asked:

Please come up with a basic ruleset for a TCG game, without any lore, just the mechanics of it.

As a result ChatGPT gave me a basic TCG rundown.

From here you can change things as you wish, but for the sake of this conversation, I’m going to leave it as is. Of course, you should also check that it actually makes sense, but as with all game rules, problems can only emerge when you test it in-game.

Establishment of Lore and Settings

If you have the principles you want, then comes the Sunnah and order. If you don’t want to create one yourself, you can give ChatGPT the broad strokes of what you’re looking for. In this case, I started with the prompt:

OK, let's establish lore and a setting. I want a cyberpunk setting on the planet mars.

From there you can tweak it with more conversations, but here we already have a base and factions.

This should be enough to work for demonstration purposes.

Creating card flavor text and art

Now we come to the fun part, I will ask ChatGPT to create some cards. Maybe let’s start with a creature card. Here I asked for a Martian Syndicate soldier. ChatGPT gives me its stats, some art and flavor text.

If you are using the free version of ChatGPT, you can just create Two pictures Every day, but there are so many Free optionsSome of which will produce better results, in my opinion.

Assembling cards for printing

We now have all the pieces needed to make the cards, except for the card backs and frames. Now, you can easily create them using something like Canva. I tried to get the AI ​​generators to make the card frame, but it’s not reliable. Card back art, on the other hand, works well. If you don’t want to make your own frames, you can just search the internet for “blank TCG cards” or something similar, and you’ll find plenty of templates ready to use. In this case, Canva’s element library already had some usable TCG cards.

Now all you have to do is bring them all together in the design software of choice. Personally, I like to use Canva because I’m a big dummy when it comes to graphic design, but use whatever you’re comfortable with.

Once you have the cards looking the way you like them, print them onto card stock and cut them out. When you have enough cards for two decks, you can play! Based on this experience, you can decide whether your ruleset or cards will actually work. Hey, even professionals who make them for a living have to constantly improve things. nerf Cards, but it’s a start!