Disco Elysium is many things – a boundary pushing RPG; a detective story; a deep and philosophical examination of the human condition; a Cohen-brothers style farce. And, thanks to Canadian Magic the Gathering fan Chrisopher Flink, it’s going to be a custom draftable Magic set.
Flink been a MTG player since the 1995 MTG sets Ice Age and Homelands. He has been working on his custom Disco Elysium set since the start of 2024. “I really just can’t say enough about my love and appreciation for Disco Elysium”, he says. “The worldbuilding is unreal, and reinforced by supranatural aspects… the universe feels like its old and lived in and deep”.
It’s hard to sum up Disco Elysium without missing a dozen things that make it special. Playing as the end-stage alcoholic detective Harry duBois, you wake in a trashed hotel room in the city of Revachol with no memory, no pants, and no gun.
Though there’s a murder to investigate and conspiracies afoot, this is a game where your Skills argue with you, your horrible neck tie might be an NPC, and you can spend hours searching for an invisible giant stick insect instead of working the case.
It has a firm spot on our guide to the best CRPGs. We can well understand why it has compelled Flink to undertake such a large project.
Flink aims to make “a fully draftable set for anyone who wants to print it”, with “approximately 100 Commons, 60 Uncommons, 50 Rares, and 15 Mythics”. He knows he has a long way to go: “I have about 70 of the 200ish cards done”.
The set has a mono-colored focus. “Each color pair interacts with the primary color in a different way”, he explains. So “blue is the Investigate focused color in this set”, while “white will make investigating easier, black will make clues mill your opponent in various ways”, and so on.
Flink is using “top-down designs” for the main characters of Disco Elysium, starting with their in-game flavor and working out the Magic mechanics that fit.
Kim Kitsuragi, Harry’s newly-assigned police partner, is a blue white human detective who lets you Investigate at the beginning of your end step, and reduces the cost of the activated abilities of artifacts you control. That last ability reflects his skill as an investigator, and his affinity with auto repair.
Enchantments and Artifacts “represent the history and tone of the world”. Smokes Tioumoutiri is a functional reprint of Skull Clamp with the added ‘Drug’ subtype, letting you give a creature a small combat buff or kill off your own wheenies to draw extra cards – a reflection of the ways drugs can both help and ruin your character in Disco Elysium.
Flink expects to have the most difficulty “figuring out how to get the common and uncommon nonlegendary creatures” right for the set. Disco Elysium is packed with iconic named characters, but when it comes to the less memorable NPCs that would work as basic creatures, “there can only be so many Racist Lorry Drivers, Scabs, Protesters, Dock Workers, etc”.
Flink has previous experience building an MTG cube (a custom, draftable sets made from existing cards), built from the “strictly worst cards from Magic’s history”. In the context of the cube, those cards work really well. It’s pure coincidence, but taking a pile of trash and making it into something special certainly resonates with the themes of Disco Elysium.
You can find Flink’s work in progress in the Disco Elysium Cunoposting group on Facebook, and the CustomMagic and DiscoElysium subreddits. Donations of fan art for the project are extremely welcome, and can be sent to his email [email protected].
Now that MTG Universes Beyond is a thing, there is the teeniest sliver of an outside chance that an official Disco Elysium set might appear on the MTG release schedule. Even if it does, we’ll be printing and playing Flink’s custom set when it’s finally done.
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Source: Wargamer
