monger's mainframe planeswalker guide

monger’s mainframe planeswalker guide
(I use paint.net with the TR’s AlphaCutter plugin)
Part A. Creating the card
0. use separate textboxes and check “options specific to this card”
1. add the art and abilities (note the art percentage scaling)
2. move the stripe coordinates to make the text sizes as close as possible
3. use level 1-4 chops to minimize unused space
4. choose a separated text size such that all abilities are the same text size. go back and adjust stripe coordinates/level 1-4 chops if needed
5. move loyalty costs according to your personal preference (ex. center of textbox, center of text, just above center). my preference is between the first and second lines of text (or centered on a single line of text)
6. apply any other personal stylistic choices (ex. I like to use tricolor borders instead of gold for tricolor walkers)
Part B. Creating the popout
1. open the art and select + crop the popout parts (for multiple parts in paint.net, this requires creating a new file with multiple layers then copying and pasting each part in a new layer once you cut it)
2. save both the image editor file and the png file
3. resize the png to the same percentage as the art when you put it on the card and note the dimensions
4. in the popout image style field put 1,1,(width),(height), and import the png MAKINNG SURE TO DESELECT THE SHARPEN FILTER (the png can either be the original or the resized one, either way it should scale to either X% or just 100%)
5. change the 1,1 around. tips: pick a defining feature and line it up either vertically or horizontally first, then move the other dimension. compare it to the original art to make sure it’s lined up. you can use 0.1 pixels if it looks off

Bonus: Custom masking for space and profit
have a walker with too much text and not enough space? use custom masking to give it the size of a four-ability walker with only three abilities. warning: use this sparingly or even better, not at all. custom masking can also be used to change the background color of the stripes but I’ll just cover the extension
0. turn default image size off for the card
1. go to your magic set editor folder then data/magic-mainframe-extras.mse-include
2. cajun’s afn_k_mask.png is perfect to edit for this
3. just color pick the third box (the dark one) and use the paint tool on the bottom one to make three boxes total
4. also make sure to fill in the hole up top
5. I found the box colors to be odd so I replaced them with the ones from cajun’s ahk_nissa_mask.png, which looked better
6. restart mse to load the new masks then put in the path to the mask from the magic-mainframe-extras.mse-include in the custom mask field (so if it’s in that folder just the png name.png, otherwise foldername/name.png)
7. now make the card, except whenever you want to change the stripe coordinates instead go and edit the mask+chops