Palatinus' OverPower Forum

Here's two Overpower cards.



They're the same size and a bit waxy, so they're both probably from the X-Men expansion.



Matching text at the top. Hm, Thor got a card in X-Men? It must not have been very good, I can't remember what it does.



Matching text for the special code and card name. Wait a minute...Unfettered Might?



It's a card from The Marvels!



This is the result of untold hours of work, including painstaking print template alignment, Photoshopping a suitable high resolution border for the set layout, font research (major props to Jack on this), finding suitable artwork, and so on. No offense to any homemade makers out there, but it has always bugged me that most Marvels playsets have card art that does not match the name of the card, or uses art that is from Marvel Masterpieces or some other trading card that doesn't really flow with the feel of OP art. After a long search for artwork to use for Marvels cards, I can totally sympathize - there just isn't a ton of high resolution art out there that matches up properly with Overpower's tone. The solution to this was to start tracking down black and white work that was similar to existing Overpower cards (or in some cases, illustrations done by actual Overpower artists), and then digitally color them myself. This is how the actual coloring process worked for the real cards, so it seemed fitting to follow the same path. Unfortunately, I had no real background in digital coloring, so I was just sort of making stuff up as I went along.

So this:



With some base coloring:



And then shading...:



Becomes this:



Our group doesn't actually play with Marvels really, but we figured that if we were ever going to dabble in it that we might as well go all out and make some proper cards. After Comic Con I'll probably upload a video or some photos showing the whole set, and hopefully some of them will pop up in a game or two of match videos. Aside from making the Marvels, we took the opportunity of using a professional printing press to also go ahead and make some high quality proxies of stuff like Beyonder, 5 multipower (with different art), and so on. Aside from rare stuff, I also took the liberty of redesigning a few cards to have some fun modified versions of them. For example, I scanned an original sketch of Onslaught that I got at a convention, and incorporated it into an alternate art Team Overpower.

Awesome work.

Fantastic.  Looking forward to the rest of them.....you ARE doing the rest right? 

That's some fine looking stuff.  Keep up the great work.

Quote from: plenau on July 19, 2011, 12:05:43 AM
Fantastic.  Looking forward to the rest of them.....you ARE doing the rest right? 

They're actually all done completely, it will just take a while to get a nice recording or photo of them all. Here's a few more of them:

Those are gorgeous. Well done.

For those who might not know, Marvel did have plans to reprint the 5M and all Any Powers in the Marvels expansion. It would have been a ~300 card set with a lot of reprints of promos.

@Onslaught: What kind of paper stock are these cards printed on? What's the cost/card? I wouldn't mind paying for a set of these.

Oh, and can I get permission to post these on the Facebook page to get some discussion going?

The cardstock is identical to X-men, I put a bunch face down with actual X-Men cards and closed my eyes to see if I could tell the difference. I got them printed by an actual company that prints CCGs, so they are pretty much indistinguishable from X-Men cards. You are more than welcome to post these pics to Facebook or anywhere else, especially the future ones that will show each card individually.

The cost was substantial, it was about 200 dollars for three playsets. By playset I mean, x1 of every OPD, x1 of every crummy card that you only want for completion's sake (like Scarlet Witch's card), and x3 of all playable non-OPDs. It came out to about 130 cards per playset, so each person paid about 50 cents per card. The cost goes down the more you print, so for example a single 130 card playset costs almost 1 dollar per card. If you are able to get it up to like 10+ playsets (around 1500 cards being printed), the costs become much lower.

The main problem is finding a printing press that you can deal with face to face that understands you are using them for an out of print game/personal use only. Most companies won't even dream of printing licensed stuff like this, so I was fortunate that there was a professional printer in Los Angeles that I sorta met through a friend of a friend.

I would have offered to allow extra people to piggyback onto our order to get their own playsets, but the legality seemed fishy (even if I wasn't selling them at a profit) and I didn't wanna push my luck by placing a bigger order with the printer. Since I only printed 350 cards, it was pretty evident that it was for personal use.

Can't wait to get my set of these in my hands in real life this weekend  Badass.

DRDEATH25 opted for two copies of the Carnage 5M, while Overtime wanted one Carnage and one She Hulk. He chose She Hulk due to her appearance in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, so in honor of that I used her MvC3 character art (which makes it stand out a bit from the other cards). I already have a few 5m, so I went with just one copy of it (with Onslaught themed art) and used my other open slot on an 8 anypower.

Thanks again for including me in this project and taking my request for a She-Hulk 5m =).

What is the possibility of getting a complete set? 

That's straight insane! Nice work all the way around! Beautiful cards.

I have to agree with the masses, that's some quality work.

We had the same idea - printing up a batch of Marvels on Actual card stock and splitting the cost. One of our crew has a brother-in-law who owns a printing company. Still waiting to hear back on a quote, though. But certainly the work you've done in creating the artwork etc is to be commended.

Cheers!

-BBH

This is, indeed, excellent work. Have you considered contacting Marvel (or Fleer; do they have any rights?) and asking for permission of some sort to produce these on a larger scale?