Setting aside what Sablestar was getting from Jason and Rook (hint: access to the Sepiaverse), Enora Dralis is actually a separate character, and the Megaverse crew is going to meet her
Huh, I thought I had asked about if that was the same character or a separate one in the past, but I guess I just assumed it. Now I got to come up with replacement name for her since she’s coming up in Concord’s deck. 
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Alycia definitely has better legs.
Obviously, young Jason doing something while Byron hovers overhead with a helicopter backpack (in lieu of a jetpack).
For Science!
Er, for Order!
Uh … for fuck’s sake, someone has to save the world and if it’s gonna be me then get off my goddamned back!
While mechanics diversity is important, significantly different story can make a big difference, too, and mask a multitude of underlying similarity.
I think we are all there.
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So Mercury’s deck is nearly mechanical completion, so I think it’s time to make sure all the cards feel right. To that end, here is the Mercury hero deck as it stands now.
As you no doubt can see, some of these I have very strong mental images for (namely any card that has all three of the Theme and Flavor, Image, and Quotes columns filled out) but just as many I’m struggling to come up with a good way to differentiate them (I’m looking at you Annoying Barrage and Quick Hits). Also, I do not put it past myself to have missed an obvious name for a card (though it’s also possible that the obvious name was already taken by another card name in the base game), so feel free to recommend names as well as themes, image ideas, and quotes. I try to get the cards to be approximately 50% from the game, 25% from post-game stuff, and 25% from stuff I just made up and sound cool, but these are not hard numbers and I’ll jump around to whatever makes the most coherent overall deck experience (which I seem to be succeeding on because people have very strong understandings of who Charade, Ghost Girl, Radiance, and Unmute are).
One notable omission is Uncle Comet’s trick, which Harry used a couple time throughout the game. That is a card idea I tried to get to work so many times throughout the versions of Mercury’s deck but it just wouldn’t in a way that made sense or played well. That said, it’s probably going to end up being the basis for one of Mercury’s variant powers (possibly Menagerie Mercury) so don’t fret too much about that.
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Devil’s Shadow Hands style:
An endless flurry of attacks that aren’t intended to connect, but need to be dealt with anyway - and can leave the defender flailing once the attacker withdraws.
The ultimate “I’m not touching you!” move - a distraction that leaves the defender exhausted.
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After far too long, I have completed the Netherwarden’s deck art. Now I just need to go through all the standard bits and bobs: run this by the proofreading team, get it over to my digital programmer, and finish writing the necromancer’s bio and flavor dialogue for digital.
In retrospect, this was probably the hardest deck to complete because I was already done with the deck when they were Ghostheart. All too often I was taking artwork I has perfectly happy with and just redrawing it, retreading old ground and not always being happy with the newer version.
But now it’s done and I can move on to new things like Mercury and Concord. 
I would ask if anyone has interest or time to give a look over the quotes at the bottom of the cards to double check me to make sure everything sounds like the necromancer we all… pity and tolerate. 
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Those quotes are super duper spicy. A+
Literally the only one that doesn’t give me any kind of vibe is Aspect of the Gatekeeper. I dunno if it’s too late to suggest alternatives, but in the interest of feedback, that’s mine. 
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Wouldn’t have asked for assistance if it was already too late.
Yeah, that is probably the most utilitarian quote, just reinforcing what the artwork is showing us, so if you have ideas feel free to make recommendations.
- “TK! The hand! Oh God…”
- “TK, it’s coming for you!”
- “TK, run!”
- “Behind you! The claw!”
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Simple but effective. Using this one in the updated card. Now to send them to the proofreaders.
While there are many sources of inspiration, including quotes from the games themselves and the Phase 2 stories, whenever I was writing for Netherwarden I would think of Parson Nathaniel from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds. Just the right amount of delusion and fatalism for the character in my opinon.
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As I was doing some deck prep this morning (Bill made this great system for me in Notion that has greatly reduced the level of overhead it takes to track decks, and I’ve been slowly importing old data into it) I noticed a hole in my plans.
While this isn’t a hard rule, I’ve been working off the idea that each villain has their “iconic fight location” that matches up with a particular environment deck. For instance…
- Unmute in Challenger Park (recreating the fight between the Menagerie and Unmute in the first three issues of the Menagerie)
- Netherwarden in Oakland Cemetery
- Pyrrhus in the Chin base below Plateau Station (whatever that environment deck winds up getting named)
And as I’m working on the Clockwork/Doctor Infinity deck, it makes wonder what their iconic fight location should be? The easy answer is Disney World, given where the last fight of the game took place, but given that I already make a whole lot of name and design changes to avoid an indy publisher’s theoretical lawyers, I do not want to deal with the Mouse’s very real and very scary lawyers and so would have to develop a fictional theme park and I don’t know how interested I am in that. Like it might be fun, but it would probably feel more like a joke deck than “serious final boss fight location.”
The alternative is the research station found in the Sepiaverse where Charade, Mercury, and Ghost Girl were ambushed by Doctor Infinity’s starfish drone. (As an aside, the more I go through that whole section of the game, it’s a bit of a trip. It’s a research station built in an alternative universe of an alternate future timeline. Only in superhero comic books.) But it seems like a bit of a stretch given that Doctor Infinity never showed up there in person and that had a bit more to do with Future Jason/Director Quill than it did with Doctor Infinity.
One thing I don’t want to do is to try to recreate the time chase that happened in Phase 2 as an environment, since there’s already one canon environment deck and a well known fan deck built around that concept. Besides, that seems more like an inherent trait of a fight with Clockwork, not something that only comes up when the fight is focused in one place.
Again, not a major concern, but was curious what others thought about this.
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- Is it more important to match the events of the Masks campaign, or more important to introduce a fun environment deck that Sentinels players can use?
- If someone else does the work of building out a theme park (for example), how receptive would you be to using it as a Disney World substitute?
Deceptively complicated question. I always want to make something representative of the Menagerie game, even when it’s treading new ground.
I’ll point to Stanley Sports Center as an example of that. That never existed in the Masks campaign, but I linked it to a notable Menagerie villain (Ghostheart/Netherwarden), other supporting characters (the Irregulators are featured throughout and seemed to have had some Scooby Doo-like adventure there), and Rook/Tyran (they own it). But I also made it because I had an idea I thought would be fun and ran with it, making the connections as I needed them.
So I guess the second is more important, but I still want to try to match the events where possible.
I mean I think I’d love it. My concern was that it would be seen as a joke deck, but there’s so much about that sort of location that would be fun to work with: people in mascot costumes, rides, weird attractions, and some dumb Unmute cameo where she’s trying to stream an episode of her show from inside the park.
The difficulty would be balancing all of that with the idea that this is where Clockwork/Doctor Infinity had her last stand and was frozen in time until she eventually freed herself by possessing her alternate universe self while she was sleeping with the left of her teammate’s time-altered little sister (again, superhero comics). But I guess that ship already sailed 4 years ago. Plus canon Sentinels of the Multiverse has a movie studio be ground zero of their Galactus/Unicron stand-in landing on Earth, so maybe I’m overthinking things.
Since it’s the beginning of the month, I figured I would give some data that exists for the Menagerie decks.
So there is a tool a member of the community made that goes through all of Handelabra’s game data and pulls the last six months worth of results. Really handy for seeing how decks are doing, if people are playing decks, and (using the win rate model) determining if a given deck is performing in line with others.
As we can see here, Radiance is the powerhouse of the Menagerie decks right now, with 1072 total completed games across both her variants. She’s even the #7 top played workshop hero deck, the only deck in the top 10 that isn’t part of the Cauldron (the biggest custom SotM deck project with 50+ decks) so safe to say people like Radiance.
Not to say Charade isn’t also doing well. She comes in at #19 most played, and is only the third non-Cauldron hero on the list.
Charade might look like she falls behind Radiance and Ghost Girl (873 total completed games) but that’s because we need to include her variants that are not a part of the Menagerie of the Multiverse mod.
That’s right, Charade has three variants across three mods. While I was a part of making Charade’s Gun Club variant (I did the art for all of the Gun Club), I didn’t have anything to do with the Reckless Plans variant. This brings Charade’s total completed games up to 743. Still in third place, but not terribly far behind Ghost Girl.
As for villains, Unmute sees quite a bit of play at 379 total games. She’s the 13th most played villain on the Workshop (and you guessed it, behind 12 Cauldron villains) and her 1.133 Model number makes her the 13th easiest Workshop villain. Symmetry!
My single environment, Stanley Sports Center, comes in at a respectable 14th place (again, behind 13 Cauldron decks) and is fairly middle of the pack in stats. Interested to see how Challenger Park and Netherwarden shake up these stats.
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God, I forgot about Alycia’s cat ears. 
Been a while since I updated this. Part of that’s due to everything going well and part of that is due to a couple things being on hold.
I had a pair of decks completed from the start of the year that did not have programming done for the Handelabra game, due to my regular programmer being unavaliable for most of the year. They’re still unavaliable, but I reached out to another programmer who has done a lot of work on workshop mods and they were able to get everything knocked out, so that will be going up sometime in the next couple weeks once I finish the incidential artwork.
On the top of new decks, Mercury is in the final touch up stage and completing artwork stage. Making artwork for Mercury is simulatanously really each and really frustrating. I love all of the Menagerie, but Mercury is probably one of the easiest to draw due to his really straightforward design. No complex shapes like Radiance and Charade, and no coloring issues like Ghost Girl and Concord. Draw a figure, maybe add a jacket, and you’re done.
The real difficulty is that a lot of Mercury’s artwork wants him posed in a running position and it’s a challenge to change up the framing and image enough to make sure you don’t easily confuse two cards because their artwork looks similar. It’s made me lean a lot more on color grading, which is not something I’ve worried about too much previously, to help differentiate them. Hopefully this turns out well in the final product.
As for what’s next, I think once Mercury’s finished I’m going to take a break away from working on Sentinel cards for a little while. I still want to finish at least the “minimum viable product” I originally pitched (which leaves Concord, Clockwork, and the Future Faire) but I also want to do other things than just draw Sentinel cards: make comics, write stories, and draw unhinged artwork. Like I can totally do those things while also working on cards, but I’ve also been working on this project since the beginning of 2019 and five years is a long time to work on anything.
During that time, I don’t think I’ve taken more than a couple days break at a time to not focus, work on, or even think about this project on some level. And while dedication is good, I think that level of focus and single-mindedness really shrinks your world. Plus taking the winter off might just be good for me all around. Who can say?
Next time, if Mercury’s not done yet, we’ll start talking about the fun of scripting the opening dialogue of fights in Sentinels.
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Whether taking off means just “no Sentinels work specifically” or “not working on any art/comic stuff”, I hope you take whatever break you need, avoiding burnout is vital
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Mercury’s officially all finished up and I am on a break from Sentinels stuff (sort of, don’t judge).
There’s still a bit of digital tidy work I need to work on, like writing up Mercury’s details, prepping files, and (the biggie) writing a bio for the Silver Speedster. And let me tell you it’s difficult to sum a character’s story up into ~600 words and 8 paragraphs and, as I’m now known for in the Digital community, a snappy opening line. Hopefully it reads well and I caught all of Mercury’s essential plotlines from the Game Era of the Menagerie, but if not please let me know what I can punch up.
Also, I’ve been working on some sketches for characters who are going to be showing up in the next deck’s (Concord’s) artwork:
Leo’s technically appeared in Menagerie card art before but it’s not a great look at him out of his armor, which is how I think he’s most likely to appear in Adam’s cards, so I put together a turn around of him.
Keri’s also someone who has shown up before (Why are all these people only shown from behind?!) and while if I focus on the Game Era exclusively, she’s probably going to show up in her classic outfit, I’m really tempted to cameo her as La Cordera. Bill’s been doing lots of fun stuff with her in Menagerie Megaverse. (Go read Megaverse, it’s fun cosmic stuff!)
Speaking of Cosmic, Octava was also a fun side character from the space end of things that I’d like to include. (Maybe being rescued from the Blot?) And while the look reference to the opera singer from the Fifth Element was a fun bit for a limited audience, I feel like I’m going to need to change up that design a little. Liking the face, but everything else still reads a little “TNG alien guest star” for my liking (like the ones from species that never show up again).
There’s also going to a cameo of a particular little bug, but I think we’re all aware I know how he’s supposed to look at this point.
As always, thanks for any help anyone would like to give, even if it’s just “skim the bio, check for spelling mistakes.” An extra set of eyes always helps.
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