★Indie games by Greg Lobanov & friends★
If you're the kind of person who reads niche game developers' blogs, then chances are you're the kind of person who's heard of Magic: The Gathering. I've never been a huge Magic player myself, but I learned quite a bit about it while working on Beastieball. That's because Magic is one of, if not the, most influential and longest-running competitive strategy game that still gets regular "balance patches," eg. new cards and mechanics, and that history has left a rich record of game design choices that are worth studying for folks like me making a competitive strategy game like Beastieball.
There are countless tiny genius design ideas embedded in Magic that I've picked up on and borrowed in countless ways; just to highlight one, Magic's iconic "color" system filters every card in one of 5 major playstyle categories, categories which I took direct inspiration from when constructing the basic game design for the 3 Beastie "types." I could probably write forever about all the ways that game is influential, but, again, since you're here, you probably already know...
Anyways... Last year, an enthusiastic fan named Zonk made an entire Magic the Gathering card set themed around Beastieball. As far as I know, they made it purely for fun, ultimately designing more than 150 different cards. As far as fan works go, this is pretty high-effort and nerdy... So of course I loved it!!! Not being a big MTG-head myself, I shared the project with my MTG-head friends, and they were inspired enough that they decided to organize a full-day draft using the Beastieball set (which I joined for). And here's how that went!!!
This is where I really need to shout out Sarah Northway, who put a kind-of-ridiculous amount of personal effort into making this draft happen. With Zonk's PDF template of the cards, she tried and failed several times to find a printer who would print cards from it, before ultimately just printing them herself, cutting them all by hand, and then sorting them into individual booster packs so that they could be drafted. Not only that, but she expanded on the set design by adding a collection of existing Magic cards that synergized with Zonk's designed cards but also padded the size out enough so support 8 players building decks out of it. Thank you Sarah!!! This was such a special gift for me.
To make the set properly Beastieball-themed, Zonk added some brand-new mechanics of their own. One is called "Beastie bond," and it allowed Beasties to link with one another when they entered the field, usually unlocking bonus abilities. The other, which proved to be much for impactful in our games is "the ball" - a new sort of game object that stays in play forever once it enters. Only one player can have the ball at a time, and when they do, it is mandatory for them to attack on their turn. Attacking also passes ownership of the ball to the target player, so essentially it's kind of a "hot potato" that forces players to attack each other rather than sit back and play defense. It was designed for 4-player "commander" style games, but it worked quite well for our 2-player "draft" style games (mostly*).
Although the card art is a mix of hasty screen grabs and asset rips from the game, the game mechanics and designs are all very thoughtfully done. Every Beastie's card faithfully recreates how that Beastie feels to play in Beastieball; some cards translate mechanics straight from the source while others, like Webbounce above, playfully use Magic mechanics to express the personality of the Beastie in completely original ways. I'd compare it to the way Super Smash Bros. successfully adapts characters from many different games and genres to all compete in a fighting game without losing their individuality. As a creator, this kind of "design" fan-work is really flattering and novel to get to see... you can tell Zonk deeply understood and cared about how each Beastie "felt." Their background as an active Beastieball PvP player definitely contributed to that understanding!
The actual card draft, where players were all secretly picking their cards, was very fun. Typically the challenge at that stage is quickly assessing what cards are valuable to take, a calculus that constantly evolves as you get a broader picture of what all is available in the set and how new selections might synergize with what you've already taken. Because the cards were so faithful to the designs in Beastieball, I had an easier-than-usual time understanding what every card actually did and how to use it. Conversely, my Magic-head friends were constnalty bamboozled with new keywords and game mechanics that they had to quickly learn and fit into their understanding of Magic. There was a feeling of cross-cultural exchange with questions flying equally about what each mechanic did in Magic, and what it was simulating from Beastieball.
The deck I wound up building was a 5-color deck built around Sprecko. Typically in Magic, you'll focus on 1 or 2 colors for your entire deck, which allows you to specialize and have all your cards share common energy. 5-color decks are kind of a meme that are challenging to actually make progress with. But a lot of the "main characters" in Beastieball had been designed around a 5-color theme, something I picked up on quicker than other players (...because I knew they were "main characters"), so I decided to gamble on building for it and trusted that Zonk would have left all the tools I needed somewhere in the set. The deck I wound up building was still pretty much a meme deck, but it was very fun to pilot. My skill issue was a limiting factor... it took me several games to understand how my drafted cards were best played. The combo I eventually discovered involved chaining Spreckos to spawn a god-monster from anywhere in my deck in just a few turns. I ultimately lost more than I won, but some of the wins I took were strikingly fast and decisive, even against much smarter opponents.
*Because of janky interactions with "The Ball" in 2-player games, my spoiler god-monster was actually often an auto-win once it hit the field barring some pretty narrow counterplay.
The players who went home with the most wins was Shane Neville... he has a deep history with Magic, having been a tournament player in the 90s who's credited for at least one iconic deck from that era, so he tends to win our drafts more often than not. What was pretty funny was that he won using a combo of Bandicraft and Airblast, something very iconic and familiar to any Beastieball players in the early-2025 meta that Zonk designed their card set around. Bandicraft's ability to generate action economy and push offense, combined with Airblast's ridiculous trade of power and mitigatable downside made for a deadly combo that no player could compete with. Shane's exceptional card-reading ability led him to discover this on the fly... and it was just as broken in Magic as its counterparts were in Beastieball.
If you're curious to browse the full collection of cards, you can see Zonk's original PDF here! This comes with an extra guide for the 2 keywords Zonk created. And if you ever want to actually draft and play with these cards, then Sarah helpfully shared the PDF she made to print them, which includes multiple copies of different cards based on their rarity. I know I'm biased, but it's surprisingly well put together, and the DIY vibe/creative mechanics added a lot to our fun in learning this set together.