Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Warhammer 40k spell and ability cards

As you may know, you may purchase spell cards for Warhammer 40k/Fantasy. This means that each pshychic power/spell is printed on a card, with all its rules and an illustration. This can be insanely useful if you have multiple psykers/wizards in your army, and you have to keep track of all their abilities.
However, for my Chaos Daemon army, they are not nearly as useful. Why not? Each spell is only printed once. I run all my Daemon Princes as level 3 psykers with full Biomancy. This would mean a stack of cards for each DP I intend to field... And now imagine a Tzeentchian  army, with multiple Heralds and units of Horrors, each going for as many Change powers as possible for maximum firepower. Since there are only 4 Change powers, this means a lot of overlapping. Therefore, I only need a small set of different spells printed, but I need duplicates of them.
Going further with this idea, I think spell cards were invented due to the random nature of spell selection (i.e. you roll for them). Unlike fixed equipment, it's not a viable solution to print all the possible spells for a level 1 caster on the army list. And this is where a Daemon army excels - randomness! Daemonic gifts, magic weapons, Hellforged Artefacts - everything is assigned randomly. So why can't we have cards for that as well?
All in all, I've decided to make my own cards. I opted for a digital format, such that it should be easy to print them as many times as needed - thus solving the issue of duplicate spells. Moreover, making them should be easy enough such that I can create cards for anything that I need to keep track of.
I've found this great little tool on the internet: Magic Set Editor
It allows you to create custom cards with title, text and illustration - exactly what I needed.
Without further ado, here's what I've come up with for my last 40k match:

Greater and exalted rewards:

This is how they look like up-close:

 Biomancy powers:


This solves my issues, but it does have its drawbacks. Obviously you have to type this all in a document. I used a table-based document to create all the text, then copy-pasted everything into the card editor. Then you have to print the cards, and finally, you have to cut them out, so it takes some invested time and effort. But I've found the result to be worth it!

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