the Seikens Board

Just try to tell me this isn't the coolest thing you have ever seen. Just try.

Ok folks, what I have for you today is a little teaser for what is probably going to be one of the next sections I will work on here at Seikens. This card is part of the shortlived Legend of Mana trading card game that was released in Japan in 1999. There were 150 cards in total, and they fall into five types:

27 Artifacts - These cards have pictures of the artifacts and overworld views of the lands from Legend of Mana. They work together in an interesting "land build" system where each land plays off of the four next to it.
40 Monsters - Monsters! They each have different costs, strengths, defenses and abilities.
40 Support - Support cards do various different things and feature different characters on them.
19 Items - Various weapons and instruments which can be used by...
24 Player Characters - This is what I will talk about today.

You've already seen the Rabite, here are two more character cards:
Male Main Character
Female Main Character
They look a little dark because they are both premium foil cards. A premium Male Hero and Trent card come in every deck (the rest of the deck will be random), but the Female Hero premium is very rare! (based on my understanding of a Japanese site about the game that has since vanished)

One interesting thing about this game is that you play with two decks; one deck has artifacts, monsters, support and item cards, and the other has player cards.
The back of the player cards are different from the other cards, they look like this:
The back of the player cards

Each player has special abilities printed on them and also has Synchro effects listed at the bottom. When the Rabite is on a team with the Male or Female Main Characters he gets one point added to his attack and defense.

So far I only have a few of the player characters, some of them may surprise you though!
I have Niccolo, Daena, Sierra, Pearl, Bud, Lisa, Rabite, Skippy (!), Hamson (!) and a Machine Golem. Of course there has to be an Escad, Larc, Blackpearl, Esmerelda and Elle cards... but who could make up the rest? The Machine Golem says "Machine Golem 1" on it, so I am guessing there might be another one, but that still only comes out to 19 different characters. I have no idea who could make up the other 5, and I might never know... these cards are insanely hard to come by!

Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this little teaser. I'll get to work translating the rulebooks and cards and get some better scans up later.

So are you gonna make translated cards that we can print out?

Hmm, maybe eventually.
First I've gotta figure out if I can translate these things myself XD

...do I dare ask my Japanese host family to help me...

You Dare, I know you do. Actually once you have a feasable template we could all rig up cards fairly easily. Once we know what fonts to use and such. Also to make printed cards look nice, you can do 2x card facings on a 4x6 picture done at Wal-Mart, so for $0.10 you can get two card facings, then put them in sleeves to hide the backs, unless you really want them.

Ah!

I almost died and went to heaven! Sheexy, you're the MAN! And Lotus, I totally agree with you about the translations. That would pretty much make my LIFE! Excellent thought for printing, too! Sheexy? . . . What do you say, buddy ol' pal? Gonna ask them exchange hosts for some help? . . .

Cheers,

manaman

We need someone good at photoshop to remove all the current text, once we have a blank card, I should be able to guestimate a similar font with the rest of your guys help. Also, perhaps ask Kassidy to help translate, we don't need absolute perfect, just has to be close enough to figure out what they actually do. When we have a complete test translation, making an English deck translation should be very easy.

Whooow Sheexy definitely rocks !!

Oi, making blank cards is gonna be such a pain.

All of the player cards will look the same at least.

Artifacts, Monsters, Support and Items all have different layouts, so there would need to be a different blank for each of those.

And then, the Artifacts, Monsters, Support and Items all come in eight to nine different background colors and textures depending on their element x.x;

It can be done though...
I just gotta scan these first XD