🛠️ dota 2 deck of cards

I made a 120-card deck of playing cards featuring heroes from Dota 2:

What's a guy to do in the middle of a pandemic, other than make a deck of cards?

The deck features:

• 8 suits, 15 cards each (classic A - K, but also a 1 and a W)
• suits based on runes from the game:
  • Haste (red)
  • Bounty (orange)
  • Illusion (yellow)
  • Regeneration (green)
  • Double Damage (blue)
  • Arcane (pink)
  • Invisibility (purple)
  • Made Up Rune (white)
• all 119 heroes from the game as of early 2020 plus Roshan (to make it a nice 120)
• each card displaying the classic rank-per-suit, but also, a 1-120 rank, and pips for 6 Nimmt
• a custom box

The deck supports multiple games:

• any game playable by one or two standard decks of cards
• Wizard (my favourite competitive trick-taking game)
• games playable with ordered cards up to 120
  • such as The Game, The Mind or others
• 6 Nimmt

Origins

Ah... 2020.

The pandemic replaced our weekly board game night with Board Game Arena, upon which I discovered 6 Nimmt. I wanted to play in person, but instead of buying a deck like a sane person would, I chose to design a new deck and get it printed (for $57 and REDACTED hours of time).

Making 120 cards is too much of a pain to do in something like Inkscape, so I chose my other golden hammer: good ol' HTML and CSS. The repo contains a Clojurescript namespace that lays out the cards with Reagent (React).

Doing it programatically helped me iterate on the designs en masse. I spent most of the time fiddling with how to group the heroes (ended up mostly going by color) and which heroes to make which rank (particularly for Wizards, Kings and Queens).

Here's all 120 (and the individual files are at the end of the post):

Using web tools for the layout was very effective and I would do it again. CSS even supports "mm" and "in" as units, which I used, until I realized the printer wanted "px".

The cards were printed using Make Playing Cards (box also).

When we first got them in our hands, we tried to make up some games to play that actually related to DOTA, in particular:

• charades
  • pull a card to determine a hero
  • pull another card to determine whether it's "mime", "sounds like", etc.
• variations on various games (Rummy, Scrabble, Set, Codenames) that involved creating sets of heroes using in-game lore or stats (ex. heroes with 4 legs, heroes with a global power, heroes who buy a Desolator)

As with many art projects, it was about the journey, not the destination; I've treated the deck as "too precious" and it has spent most of its time in the box. (Mind you, Gloom/Frosthaven having taken over 1000 hours from our game group since then might also have something to do with it).