Almost everyone who’s ever been involved in a Barigord Studios adventure has been passionate for gaming! We love board games, table games, video games, roleplaying games, and game shows! This post is best viewed on the home site with plug-ins.
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Hey gamers! Do I need to familiarize you with Magic the Gathering’s Universes Beyond at this point in history? The recent Lord of the Rings set was the best selling Magic set of all time, and they’ve had success with Doctor Who, Warhammer 40k, and even Godzilla.
In 2020, I wrote a joke-adjacent column called Top 10 Terrible MtG Secret Lair Crossovers and floated the possibilities of Magic cards featuring Dora the Explorer, both Avatar franchises, Family Guy, Lego, Prada Bags, and more. Sadly, none have come true. Yet.
The upcoming Universes Beyond, over the next few years, include Final Fantasy, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, and now a glimpse of the Legend of Zelda. Tomb Raider cards just dropped this week. Magic has gone hard into video games.
Of course we want our crossovers to be great representations of great games. But there’s plenty of games that would be terrible choices, and that’s what we’re doing today! You may know many of these games already, but if not, look them up. They’re very special. Let’s go!
Dishonourable Mention! – The Lord of the Rings: Gollum ‘Desperately Seeking Smeagol’ Secret Lair
Sadly, the R&D team that put together ‘The Lord of the Rings: Gollum’ isn’t currently available for comment, and we may never know more about these intricate and forward-thinking cards than the few OP spoilers like the one above. Online ‘leaks’ that powerful abilities ‘Skulk’ and ‘Vigilance’ may be applied to these cards in future remain unconfirmed.
Dishonourable Mention #2 – From Software Games ‘These Cards Really Aren’t For Everyone’ Expansion Set
From the makers of Dark Souls, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and Elden Ring comes a gritty, grindy and bleak set with a deep lore and storyline that you have to figure out for yourself. Expect no sympathy from the From Software Online Community as you struggle with even getting and using these cards. It’s a feature, not a bug, and you’ll learn to love the pain you derive from From’s relentless, uncompromising difficulty level.
And now, the actual Top 10!
10 – WWE 2K20 Ultimate Cage Metch Edition
WWE 2K20 Ultimate Cage Metch Edition fertures all 3R4 werstlers and CARREER MODE, with awsome rounds rope toprope {filenotfound} vrrrt vrrt vrrt!
brings the ring to your tabletop with a powerful chokeslam of awesomeness, cards videogame! mature rating may not be suitable for all punch-punch-dropkick-sequence.dat cardboard rectangles!
Now mostly Glitch Fee!
9 – The Spore ‘Adaptable You’ Theme Booster
Remember that time you evolved your digital life companion, and all you got was some stupid Charizard? How was that an expression of you?
Remember the game Spore? No? That’s actually for the best, because this theme booster is based on Spore’s mechanics, and if you’re not familiar with them, we might be able to convince you that they’re cool. Just like Adapt and Evolve, Magic abilities you know and love. Spore’s mechanics are just like those!
Spore’s cards represent the game’s many other features including the decomplexity drive, uncomplicatedness engine, and the anti-anti-repetition matrix.
The cards may also be marketed as being ‘The Closest Thing There Has Ever Been to Being a Real God and Creating Actual, Serious, No-Fooling Life,’ but experiences will vary.
8 – Star Wars: Battlefront ‘Starter Account Booster’ Giveaways
In a rebellious move against the tyrannical empire of meanie-weenies and party-poopers who want to tell you how not to spend your money… comes a brand new hope of a set, not a rogue one!
How is it different? Well all the cards are free… up front! Battlefront! Haha! You heard us say free, right?
And we know you want a lightsaber equip card and some cool Jedi… and we’re working on it, but for now, here are some exciting starter characters to try, like Hoth Trooper, Yavin Trooper, and Dantooine Trooper.
What better way to begin your relationship with Battlefront cards than a booster full of features you can unlock to enhance your gaming experience? The only card you need that you don’t get in these boosters is your credit or debit card (required for online purchases and all ‘unlocks’).
7 – The No Man’s Sky Planetary SuperBundle
Coming soon, and patching soon after, is the No Man’s Sky Planetary SuperBundle, containing an unspecified number of copies of cool new planet-exploration-themed cards, Hey What About That One, Hey What About This One, and That One’s Nothing.
Each bundle comes with a 10% discount on a nearby (participating) storage facility service, because cards are just going to start arriving, seemingly at random and without a clear plan.
While many of the cards in the bundle may be unfinished, still in development, or lacking key features such as cardstock, we’re confident that we’ll have those things fixed long before you’ve finished sorting. Will there be an almost identical drop for Starfield coming soon? The odds are definitely better than discovering intelligent life on some other planet!
6 – The Superman 64 Secret Lair – Lord of the Rings Edition
If the Ring tempted you when we did Tolkien, wait til you see the incredible adaptation of the Siegel & Schuster Kryptonian crusader, in his finest hours of strikingly similar gameplay!
This exciting Secret Lair lets you relive the excitement and anticipation of the time between Superman 64’s preview at E3 and it’s actual release, when people were able to play it.
While this product contains no actual Lord of the Rings cards, there will be a rumour going around that 1 in 100 actually contain a special The One Ring card, with artwork featuring a disappointed Lois Lane standing alone at an altar in a chapel. That zing you just heard was Superman whizzing by!
5 – The Library of Congress’ Hallowed History of the Classic American Video Game Series – Night Trap
“The world needs heroes. Heroes like you. The kind of hero who selflessly watches surveillance tapes of a slumber party. For good. For the world. For our future.” – Orson Welles, from ‘The Night Trap Chronicles: Why FMV is Super Sweet.’
The Library of Congress’ Hallowed History of the Classic American Video Game Series is proud to bring you this commemorative collection of 16 premium gaming cards, in durable cardstock with an enticing foil coating treatment.
Return to the scenes of 1992’s Night Trap, and help retell the timeless tale of fangless, staggering vampires as they attempt to discourage a late-evening celebration of laughter and the appreciation of fine satin garments.
4 – John Romero is About to Make You… Some Daikatana Commander Decks
We promise – and we promise that these promises will be kept this time – that this is the awesomest, best-ever, coolest, hardest-core set of Commander decks you ever made a hard-core purchase of in your extreme local game store (XLGS). Some of the cards will even have a hard, metal core of pure titanium as soon as we get that figured out.
You will need a special chair. A cool chair. An ergonomic gaming chair. Just to deal with the G-forces from these stacks of cards.
We promise these cards are coming soon, maybe in five years, and the targeting system and AI of the sidekick cards will be revolutionary. We also promise to have the best advertising campaign ever, which won’t insult and confuse our playerbase… this time…! …No promises.
3 – Atari’s E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) ‘People Will Buy Anything’ Party Crate
This could just be a card game/video game crossover, but Magic the Gathering and Atari’s 1982 E.T. The Extraterrestrial game also bring together 2 IPs that have been found in landfills in California!
And who cares if all the E.T. cards are unplayable and even difficult to look at? Only a very small undisclosed number were ever printed, and those were all thrown out, and then reclaimed by the publisher before shipping to stores. Many of those were lost in transit or mistaken for miscellaneous debris and hurled into the nearest bonfire. Luckily all the ones you bought made it to you.
We feel that making this product seem exclusive and hard to get will totally justify making you pay money for literal garbage.
2 – Leisure Suit Larry – Commander Precon in Lotionslick Foil
Until now, the best way to disgust your opponents using your Magic cards was to either try and pass them off as an appetizer with spinach dip, or use proxies with questionable art. Combining those can get expensive, and make tournament play awkward. Somebody needs to do something.
That somebody is Larry Laffer, the star of the Leisure Suit Larry games, and Commander of his own precon covering the lore of all 10 critically-reviewed discharges in the series, and all three remakes!
The Larry cards introduce the ‘cringe’ mechanic in the form of cringe counters, which turn many of your favourite Magic keywords into vaguely gross and suggestive innuendo! If only poor Larry knew what prowess was!
1 – The Conker’s Bad Fur Day ‘SuperPlop’
From the company that once printed a few lines of Emily Dickinson on Karakas comes a steaming pile of cards to Fling at your opponents from the Commode Zone.
It’s not all high-concept flatulence, either. Players will also be able to explore the themes of alcoholism and regret that make Conker’s Bad Fur Day an enduring classic.
While this is a product for Mature audiences, we are sensitive to the all-ages nature of Magic. So to bring down the Mature rating of this product, all mention of the word ‘Scotch’ has been replaced by the much more family friendly and squirrel-appropriate ‘Nut Juice’.
Get your finest snifter ready.
Conclusion
These cards are jokes, but are they? If you told me in 2015 that Magic was going to be Walking Dead and Lara Croft and Bob Ross, I would have been convinced you were talking about something like this, where someone got happy with MTGcardsmith.com.
I’ll be keeping an eye out for actual interpretations of some of these games. Dark Souls/Elden Ring seems possible. The Gollum game probably already would have cards if it didn’t tank so badly. No Man’s Sky is a maybe. Probably not the rest.
But who knows? All it takes is a some social media attention sometimes, or someone with money and determination, or a cross promotion in desperate need of a partner.
Thanks for reading!
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