Fake CCG Cards

About

Spoofs of CCG cards typically found online today are image parodies of the more famous CCG games of Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, and Pokemon.

The first Collectible Card Game (CCG) was Magic: the Gathering, introduced in 1993 by American game publishers, Wizards of the Coast.

Early text-based C.C.G. Spoofs

By 1994, early text-based parodies of Magic Cards had became popular in e-mail forwards, on fan sites, and other early web humor sites such as Frivolity.com.

The following is an excerpt from one of the earliest textual descriptions of parody Magic Cards from 1994.

Date: Mon, 8 Aug 1994 14:34:14 -0400
From: Charles J Poirier – Personal Account

Before the Wars of the Artificers…
Before the Time of Legends…
Way back when Magic itself was young…
Even before the Legends of Uselyssia…
Came the earliest beginnings of Magic…
When Magic didn't work very well!

Blizzards of the Cost proudly announces a new expansion set:

MAGIC: Ambiquities

Way, way back in the beginning of Magic, Mages stumbled and fumbled while discovering how to pound the raw forces of colored Magic into shape. (Colorless Magic, as is well-known, was a later innovation.)

Examine some of the weird, confusing, and misspelled spells that the earliest Mages tried to get away with:

Bogardan's Dog Breath® Enhance Creature
Creatures coming face-to-face with target creature
can not untap for a while.

Calcarian Astrolabe (WWWW) Artifact
(WW): Your defending creatures gain /(5 cos X),
where X is the angle at which attacking creatures are tapped.
Round off. If the Astrolabe is tapped, it doesn't seem to do
anything.

Charspur's Revisionism (U) Interrupt
The time at which any event resolves is delayed by one phase.

Flame Touch (RR) Enchantment
One conflict of rules may be resolved by burning one card.
Flame Touch goes to the ashtray when this power is used.

Magic inspires the creation of more CCG's

Following the success of Magic: The Gathering, a number of new CCG's were released including Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon in 1999. It should be noted that both properties existed prior, but the card games were released after the video games, TV series, and Mangas.

A list of Collectible Card Games and their release dates can be viewed on Wikipedia.

Early C.C.G. Macros

By 2001, CCGmaker, a downloadable program for creating spoof Magic card images was posted for download on ccgmaker.com.

Soon following the appearance of CCGmaker, a number of Fake Magic Card galleries started popping up on early Geocities and Angelfire websites.

• Yamoslair
• MTG Spoof
• Yawagotog

In 2002, yugiohcardmaker.net was created.

By 2005, another Magic Card macro generator was created at magic.falseblue.com.

Magic, being the original, inspired the creation of other famous CCG's such as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon.

Eventually, even 4chan CCG cards appeared.