Inspired by ribbonfarm.com, the Be Slightly Evil mailing list, and numerous discussions that have sprung from both, I started tinkering with designing MtG-inspired cards that would ideally introduce people to a person or idea through a judiciously chosen quote and a mechanic that illustrated the concept. The result was Be Slightly Evil: two sets of 250 cards, plus 20 basic lands and tokens, expressing persons and ideas from modern politics, philosophy, psychology, business, economics and technology.
The rules are borrowed wholesale from the popular Magic: the Gathering card game. There are some new mechanics present here (Clueless, Interchangeable, Surveil in the first set, Bid and Retaliate in the second) but otherwise keywords work here exactly as they do normally. Geek & Sundry has a good introduction to the game.
For obvious reasons, this is not a commercial project. This project is wholly unofficial and unauthorized, and for personal use only. I've tried to cite artists wherever possible, although in many cases the places I found the images failed to cite the origin of the image; in those instances I've listed the artist as Source Unknown.
The set is intended to be playable standalone. I hope you find this entertaining and that it exposes you to persons and ideas that you find curious and compelling.
The galleries here were last updated on January 6th, 2015.
What is this?
How do I play?
At present I have the only physical versions in my possession; however, all is not lost! Be Slightly Evil may be played online using Cockatrice.
In order to do so on Microsoft Windows, you will need to download Cockatrice (you may also need the Microsoft runtimes, which are provided in a subfolder at the link), and additionally the BSE-Cockatrice.rar file.
Use WinRAR to extract BSE-Cockatrice.rar to:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Cockatrice\
(you may need to create this directory first). This will produce a subfolder also called Cockatrice, a cards.xml file with BSE and BSE2 pre-loaded, and Cockatrice-compatible images of all cards.
Prebuilt decklists will be periodically uploaded to this link. The files should be copied into %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Cockatrice\Cockatrice\decks
In order to play online, you'll need to register an account. Once you have an account, connect to a server and start a game! For help with Cockatrice, see this subreddit.
Caveats
This was a proof-of-concept that seems to have succeeded. The next step will be building a new game that borrows the bits of the TCG genre that I appreciate (diversity of play styles, the metarule modification of rules by card text) and drops the parts that don't work (an exclusively combat-oriented game, the fantasy genre influence).
Please report text errors and bugs, or horribly broken cards, but I won't be making substantial balance changes. Please note that this block is not intended to be used with any 'real' MtG cards: explaining that such-and-such a card is broken in the context of such-and-such official set will be ignored: tell me how it's broken here.
For those comfortable with Github, I have a repository with the Cockatrice files: