How To: Make Decks with Daydreams

Do Mathematicians Dream of Electric Sheep?

It's the summer of 2010. I’m in summer school for the second year in a row because I daydreamed during math class. It's not that I’m bad at math—it's just really, really, boring. Ironically enough, this is also the year I started to get back into trading card games because I thought the card art looked cool and I wanted to imagine myself as an anime protagonist or something. Fifteen years later, I’d won a FutureCard Buddyfight World Championship title, along with multiple top cuts and invites, $25K in the first ever Battle Spirits Saga release event, and I even got top 4 in a Battle Hardened once, before being smited by Alexander Vore on Kano. Would you believe me if I told you the secret wasn't math, but daydreaming?

Hold up: before you call me crazy, hear me out. Card design isn't made in a laboratory with science, but by a team with a vision. If this wasn't true, there would be no need to have cohesive themes and world building on cards. I like to spend time daydreaming about the ways game designers envision a new deck’s placement in the meta game by trying to see what kinds of stories these cards tell. I’ve used this tactic successfully to discover new ways of playing heroes during their early days, when there weren't any decklists to reference. First, I brought Prism, Awakener of Sol to a Top 8 finish at US Nationals in 2024. I placed in the top 16 with Gravy Bones at US Nationals 2025, the same weekend of the undead captain’s release.