League Of Legends Playing Cards (Community Creation)

OK, OK, JHIN WILL GET NUMBER 4 AND VI WILL GET 6!!!

http://i.imgur.com/TJ1aLdB.jpg

TLDR; As an active card-collector I’ve been working on a fully custom deck of playing cards about league of legends. It contains the splash arts of 53 different champions (one champion twice). I’ve had 2 decks printed, and would like to share the results with you! Feel free to scroll through the images in which I show the design and how it eventually turned out. Let me know what you think about it!

#Introduction

Hello again, my name is Willem Klok, or “WillieTheWhale” for you. I’ve always been a fan of making things for league. You may know me from the very extensive 1v1 map/gamemode I made a while back, or from the end game stats calculator. As I am quite a card collector myself (owning over 130 different sets of playing cards) there’s one deck that my collection quite misses. As you may guess, that deck has to do with League Of Legends. A deck of playing cards is (unfortunately) not a purchasable item in the merch store, so I thought screw it, I’ll just design them myself! And so I did. For the people who are interested I’d like to take you through the process of the making of these playing cards. As well as some fun facts about them.

#The design

Designing playing cards without advanced programs like adobe illustrator is actually quite difficult. Everything has to be lined out perfectly, on all 54 cards again. And because every card is unique, and I refused to use the standard index for playing cards it was quite a task to get it all right.

At first I wanted to make the faces of the cards (or, the ‘fronts’) blanks with only the suits (spades, diamonds, clubs and hearths). However, I soon realised getting all this lined out perfectly was impossible with the program I was using. I then decided to use the splash arts of certain champions (being either their classic or a skin splash art) as the faces, and then have on both side the index that tells you which card it is.

I won’t go over every aspect of the card, when I show you the designs you will see it for yourself, but there are some things I would like to point out!

I’m sorry if it bothers you, but I felt like I had to apply a watermark here, since I do not own the rights to the contend I don’t want it to be distributed and used by someone else!

Back design

Every deck of cards starts off with the back design. In most of the times it makes the deck what it is. I think about roughly 20% of custom decks (I’m talking high quality decks like decks from Bicycle, and not your local BMW dealer) have just their back design and the Aces changed from the ‘standard’. So yea, in some cased the back design plays the main role in whether you like a deck or not. Since this deck is fully custom, the back design doesn’t really have to be perfect, so that’s what I made:

http://i.imgur.com/JkHSig3.jpg

Not much special, It’s a one-way back (meaning that it’s different when you put it topside down). I myself in most of the cases do not like ‘one-wayers’ but since all faces are one-way anyway I didn’t think it would matter.

Faces

Probably don’t need to talk about them much, I can just show them to you. I won’t show them all, but here are a few chosen at random:

http://i.imgur.com/SHBkIeG.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ADUlOlw.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/bKGXL8l.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/RRiCb65.jpg

If you look closely, you can see that the ‘royalty’s’ (Jack, Queen and king) have some kind of a shiny border to them. Ideally, I would want this to be some kind of solid line, printed with metallic ink But since I won’t be producing this in large quantities, diving into that with a more business-focused company is not possible. Maybe when Riot decides to make these themselves, maybe ;).

#Fun facts

For each suit, all cards that follow up on each other have something to do with each other.

#Pictures from the end-product

http://i.imgur.com/MLgkz5h.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/iy5Lwcc.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ItJKX2o.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/kE9zUJ2.jpg

#Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zmhPOz5TUs

#Review

I’m pretty happy with them as a first print. The cards handle really well, but they are a little darker then they should be. I’ll contact the guys that printed them for me to see how we can fix this. Also, the suits should be moved a little further to the outer corner of the card. Because they are too far in ATM.

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I’m looking forward to your feedback!