Spellbound

Rules and format

These cards make up an unofficial, Magic-like set meant to be played in the casual style and spirit of Commander. They’re designed for multiplayer games mostly, though 1v1 works, too.

All the rules of Magic apply, but these cards are self-standing. They are not meant to be played alongside normal Magic cards.

Any format works. Here are the usual options.

1. Draft: each player has three packs. They open one, pick a card, and pass the rest to their left. Repeat till those first packs are finished. Do the same with your second pack, but pass right. Then the last pack, passing left again. Then each player builds a deck from their selected cards. Draft is best for advanced players.
2. Sealed: each player gets three packs and opens them. They build themselves a deck using only those cards.
3. Constructed: if you don’t have the cards separated into boosters, each player can build a deck choosing from all the available cards.

The first two options require that the host has separated the cards into booster packs, each containing a rare or mythic rare card, three uncommon cards, and ten common cards.

Whichever format you choose, we suggest building decks of 40 to 60 cards. A deck can include multiple copies of a card.

The set includes only spells and (rarely) non-basic lands. Your remaining lands will be basic lands, which you’ll get from a separate, communal stash provided by your host. Usually, aim for 40-per-cent lands in a deck. In a deck of 40 cards, that’s 23 spells and 17 lands. (You might diverge from this, depending on your deck.)

Once everyone has built their deck, you’ll play a normal game of Magic. We recommend everyone starts with 25 life.

The Commander option

For a faster, more flavourful game, each player can choose one legendary creature or planeswalker card in their deck to be their commander. Then you play with the usual Magic Commander rules (e.g. commander tax, commander damage), except your cards do not have to match your commander’s color identity.

Card changes

I still have lots of play-testing to do, and I might be changing the cards. For my own purposes, I keep a list of errata: changes I’ve made since I printed my first full set. You can see that, and all the card details, on my live card-development spreadsheet. If you play with the cards and have suggestions, let me know.

Archetypes

When you choose cards for your deck, the best way to ensure synergy is to build around an archetype.

An archetype is a theme (e.g. ‘Gryffindor combat’ or ‘Slytherin snakes’) associated with particular colors.

In a draft, you’ll start by picking the most powerful or flexible cards, and identify your most promising archetype after five or six picks. (It’s not unusual to have to change direction later in the draft.) You can mix archetypes, too. They’re just a guide to the most likely synergies among cards.

There are seven archetypes built into this set.

• Gryffindor: battle and bravery (red, usually with green)
• Hufflepuff: food and plants (white, usually with green)
• Ravenclaw: enchantments and card draw (blue, usually with white or black)
• Slytherin: snake control (black, usually with green)
• Magical creatures from forest and lake (green, usually with blue)
• Hogwarts United (white, blue, black, and red)
• The Ministry of Magic: death by bureaucracy (colorless).

In general, the fewer colors you play, the faster you’ll make an impact on the game. Three- or four-color cards are harder to cast, but can be very powerful.

There are also lots of colorless spells that can support almost any archetype.

The art

The art on the cards is almost all in the public domain, because it’s that old. And look how beautiful and fun and surprising it is! Finding all the art was a wonderful journey.

You’ll see each artwork’s title and creator (or a similar note) at the bottom of the card. A couple of cards have Creative Commons licensing restrictions noted, and the rest are in the public domain. (Well, with one interesting exception: The Little Prince is still in copyright in France, because Antoine de Saint-Exupéry died in action, and so his works get an extension there.)

I am especially grateful to these wonderful sites, roughly in order:

• Artvee, which provides fabulous curation of high-quality art, with interesting bios and easy download.
• Public Domain Review, which provides wonderful curation and fascinating articles.
• The Rijksmuseum, which has a wonderful user experience.
• The Flickr commons.
• The Wellcome Collection.
• The MET.
• MoMa.co.uk, for their incredible list of public-domain-image sources.
• The National Gallery of Art.
• Europeana.
• Museo, a super little open-source tool for searching many collections at once.
• The Minneapolis Institute of Art.
• The Art Institute of Chicago. What a gorgeous site, with great write-ups.
• The Lootwijk Scope, a lovely personal blog of interesting images.

And many places that I found after a more general search. Thank you for sharing.

Print your own

I created this site for me, and for my friends to read before I have them round to play.

If you’d like your own set of cards to play, you’re welcome to print them out. Remember, don’t sell the cards! (See below on rights.)

To get a printable PDF:

• In a Chrome browser, press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on Mac).
• In the print settings:
  • Set Margins to ‘None’.
  • Turn on ‘Background graphics’.
• Click ‘Save’ to save a PDF.

Note: It can take a while for the print preview to load several cards.

To create a full set of 40 booster packs, you’ll need one of each rare and mythic, three of each uncommon, and ten of each common. Use the card filter to show each rarity in turn before you Ctrl+P. If you have a separate PDF for each rarity, you can tell the print shop to print x copies of each.

In the card filter, only tick ‘Show cutlines when printing’ if you’re going to manually cut the cards out with scissors (ouch, good luck). Ideally, your print shop has a cutting machine. Then they can punch out the centre 88mm × 63mm of each card’s page. It’s even better if they can round the corners for you, too. A 2mm or 3mm rounded corner works best.

When sorting the cards into booster packs, each booster pack gets a rare or mythic, three random uncommons, and ten random commons. Take care to randomise the uncommons and commons without creating packs that are too similar or contain duplicates. It’s quite a puzzle!

Rights

This is my personal project. It is not the work of J. K Rowling or her agents, nor of Wizards of the Coast. It’s a kind of fan fiction that honours them. I don’t and won’t make any money from it. To be clear and legal-like:

Spellbound is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.

Anything in addition that I’ve invented here belongs to me. If you print your own copies to play with, don’t sell them or call them your own. Unless you’re Wizards of the Coast working with J. K. Rowling, in which case it would be an honour. All yours. Please invite me to the prerelease.

About

I’m Arthur. My son and I started this project in 2020, on a family holiday in the mountains. He was eight then, and developed many of the card concepts himself.

This is also a software-and-design hobby project for me. I create and maintain the cards in a Google sheet. This site fetches the card details from there in real time, and lays out the cards.

Many thanks to my early play testers, and the support of my lovely local game stores.

Thanks to the countless fans who created the Harry Potter wiki on Fandom, which helped immensely with the details of Potter lore.

And, of course, thanks to the brilliant people who created Magic: The Gathering, the Harry Potter universe, and each piece of art here. Even though each has an original creator, as time goes by these worlds are more and more the work of communities who imagine and collaborate and build together. And that is what makes them last for centuries.

See my other games and game pieces at The League of Masks.