Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #3 Cover Art (Dimension X variant by swadeart)

Next up is the Queen of Clubs, Windranger. A funny thing about traditional playing cards is that their hands are really small. We’re so used to the designs that we don’t notice but when you apply that to new art it becomes really obvious. I don’t like to be a slave to reference but in this case the issue was that larger hands need bigger weapons.  And a bigger bow would get cut off somewhere. The hair was something I tried multiple ways, obviously Windranger should have red or reddish orange hair.  I tried both red (the color of the hearts) and new tones. The problem with both was it was the only card with that many colors. So either it would stick out or I’d need to use accent colors for all the other cards. The trouble is that the accent for each card would be different.  Tidehunter doesn’t need red/orange for an accent, if anything he’d need a blue. I tested this idea on a set of finished designs and the result looked like a clown party. So it was a shame to lose the red hair but sacrificing the representation of any single hero was necessary to make the deck match.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers #3 Cover Art (Dimension X variant by swadeart)

So in the end I remembered that Dota2 uses the ‘eye’ icon to help imply vision/visibility and I thought that was a good balance and it helped give some symmetry to the design.  Version 3 you can see there is close to what the final design was (I removed the mottling on the blade but that’s about it)If anyone has any other questions about the cards feel free to ask, you can also see more in the interview I did with Valve here.tl;dr It’s Silver Edge :P

My official Dota 2 Playing cards are out now!  Check them out here: https://valvestore.welovefine.com/ti7-dota2-playing-cards-12334.html

Finally for this set is the King of Clubs, WraithKing. This was one of the more ‘obvious’ characters to include given the King in the name. I started him out in as the King of Hearts though because I felt like that matched thematically and I wanted to do a Skeleton King/Wraith King top-to-bottom flip. The first thing that happened was that Valve said that Skeleton King was a no-go (so heads up for other workshop artists considering something similar). The next thing was that Monkey King was announced and worked far better in the ‘red’ color scheme than WK did.  Unfortunately this did boot out Sand King from the King of Clubs spot which is why he didn’t make it into the deck. So this card wound up killing both Sand King and Skeleton King from appearing in the deck. T_T  RIP Skeleton King: He died the way he died; dead Tune in tomorrow for the Diamonds!

The anchors proved a challenge because you can’t run designs too close to the edge with playing cards. Half an anchor doesn’t look very good so I went diagonal with it but in doing so there weren’t any easy references to pull for the interior shapes. I did manage to include the blink-dagger motif; something I had in a very old Sand King card that I had to drop. Check in tomorrow for our next card, the Queen of Clubs, Windranger.

Finally sharing all my cover variants for the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers comic! This actually all started when I did the Green & White Rangers prints for Gallery Nucleus. Those were then turned into covers which then turned into a whole series of covers spanning 8 months. Lots of learning and challenges with these but I’m very proud to have contributed in a small way to something I was absolutely crazy about as a kid.