Growing up, I enjoyed playing many trading card games with my close childhood friends. Amongst them were Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokémon, and VS System to name a few. VS System in particular was a popular Marvel versus DC Comics card game created by Upper Deck Entertainment that got discontinued in late 2008 due to worsened economic conditions in the trading card industry. Today, there’s a newer version of this game with different rules called VS System 2PCG but it just wasn’t the same for all of us that had started with the original.
Later down the line, when I stopped living in the city and moved back closer to my parents, I revisited a couple of my good friends. We talked about getting together again to play some card games and the idea of creating custom cards for VS System sparked. Now equipped with the knowledge of design and my love for VS System, I decided to take on this project and print out some custom art one-of-a-kind decks. I redesigned the original cards, front and back, expanded the images on the cards, and selected my own favorite artwork scouring the web for any images that aligned with each card. These cards were only to be played amongst my close friends and later shared onto the VS System Facebook Community group.
All the custom cards were based on actual cards from the original game thanks to the card database library found here: http://www.ccgdb.com/vs/. I was able to leverage https://www.makeplayingcards.com/ to print out over 1,200+ cards (20+ decks, 60 cards per deck) spanning from my Spider-Stall to one of my favorite Wolverine/Deadpool Clone decks. Did I mention how every card printed was foil? However, when Covid hit, I decided to take this game online using a tabletop simulator called Steam. It was an easy transition since all the assets were created with design software, to begin with. Overall, it was an extremely rewarding and nostalgic process utilizing my design skills to perfect these custom decks that I plan on teaching my kids how to play one day.
