Blaseball: Wild Cards
Blaseball: Wild Cards was the second project from Wayfinder Games. Produced in collaboration with The Game Band, it was an adaptation of the niche horror-sport live experience game, Blaseball, into the form of a 2-player head-to-head card game, inspired by nostalgic collectable games of the ‘00s.
Blaseball: Wild Cards was designed by Beacon & Michael Fox, with graphic design by Beacon.
Cover Illustration by Tres Nadal. Card Art by Emily L’Orange, Felix R, Ivan, Julio G, Isaiah F, Tan Juan Gee, Waalkr, jellykebab and Steph. “Blaseball: Wild Cards” logo by Lauren Gallagher.
The final cover for Blaseball: Wild Cards, and a test-printed box of a slightly earlier design.
To really nail the nostalgic vibe, we wanted to lean into the collectable card game aesthetic. These are the foil-printed sleeves for the “booster packs” — sets of non-random cards, but packaged in tear-open sleeves.
The starter set box came with a set of punchboard tokens and a folded paper playmat with the Black Hole design (a reference both to an iconic Blaseball moment, and the playmat that came with Yu-Gi-Oh starter deck sets). A green-felt-style silicon playmat and laser cut acrylic tokens were also made available.
The cards, in two varieties — the Player cards, which have stats for their Blaseball-playing ability, and Special cards, which have effects on the field or Players. One of the stretch goals was to create an Art Booster Pack, which provided alternate designs for a set of players, which were given an altered layout so that they could support a full-sized illustrative piece. Each team had a different team icon (top-left corner) and colour scheme.
We created a font to easily include icons on cards in-line with the ability text. In order, these represent —
Balls, Outs, and Base Icons.
Player Stats.
Flip, Constant, Activated, Once-A-Turn, Quick and Reaction Abilities.
Dice faces.
Vibe tokens, which are a currency used to activate abilities.
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Manually re-generating 80ish card variations every time something changes would very quickly become a bottleneck for the production of the game. We worked out a process for making this happen, essentially from scratch. Here’s the workflow we used to make it possible.
The first step was creating an Airtable setup. Because we were collaborating with someone, we didn’t necessarily want them to have to be hands-on with the technical side of things. So, we created an interface for creating and editing cards, that fed back into a spreadsheet. Then, that user-friendly data would get put together with a number of special character strings indicating line breaks and formatting and placed into a separate table, so it could be exported as a .csv file.
This could then be imported to Adobe Illustrator via its Variables function, which would fill in the text boxes on the card layout file. However, in testing this out, it meant still manually formatting text, resizing illustrations, and so forth. So, we created a custom script using Adobe’s JavaScript functionality, that would format the text strings based on the special characters mentioned earlier, significantly cutting down on the time to format text.
Then, it was just a case of creating a macro that fed each line of the spreadsheet into the Illustrator template, formatted the text and illustrations, and saved that back out into a print-ready .pdf file.
A few miscellaneous assets created for demonstration purposes or social media — A 3D-rendered playmat, a demonstration of what a holographic-foil card might look like, an invitation to a digital playtest event, and a teaser video for the game’s announcement.
The game’s logo, originally named “Blaseball: The Card Game”, went through a number of variations. Some of those work-in-progress versions are shown above — as the game was in development, the Blaseball website itself went through a significant rebrand, so there was some initial attempts to bring the design closer to that new brand identity, before pivoting away and creating its own identity.
Very early playtest versions of the card designs.
A record of some of the designs through development.