How “Siguran: Second Age of Gloom” was made.
2024
I’ve been participating in the annual custom Magic card design event – Moxtober – for a few years, the earliest evidence I still have on file is from 2022, but I’m sure I started prior to that.
For those unaware, Moxtober is run throughout October, and provides participants (it’s an open event) with 31 – usually one-word – prompts. From their, participants design a custom magic card from that prompt.
In 2024, the 5th prompt was Gloom (the prompts were pairs that together made an idiom, in this case “Doom and Gloom”). I’m not sure why, but instead of a single card, this prompt had me design an entire mechanic. Gloom.
Gloom was designed with the idea “The Hidden Horror in the mind”, how negative emotions can leave you unable to act rationally or even think – hence exiling your library (your knowledge) and doing so in a way where you don’t know what’s been lost.
The first iteration of Gloom was born, and I put it in my back pocket with a wild notion to make a custom set around it – possibly, one day. The final version of gloom isn’t too far from the version you see examples of above.
2025
I did nothing with this idea for over a year, and oddly, it was a completely different set of prompt from Moxtober 2025 that set into motion what would eventually become a full custom set.
The prompt? Moon.
The design I came up with for this prompt was weird, it pushed boundaries (to the point where what I was trying to do doesn’t actually work in the rules of the game).
I tried to design something around the phases of the moon, utilising a piece of art to invoke the idea of a horrific entity that eventually awakens and consumes everything.
It was cool, it doesn’t work in the rules, but importantly, I was excited to try and fix that. So while I worked on iterating the idea, I started to create a world around them, a lore.
The mechanic plays into the same “Hidden Horror” flavour I had in mind when I designed Gloom a year previously.
So now, I had an idea for a splashy mythic cycle of cards AND a core mechanic, both which played into the same themes.
2026
However, there’s no point in spending time, energy, and money putting together a custom set of this scale – 226 unique cards – if people aren’t interested in it. It’s a bit too big of a task to just “prove I can do it.”
Thankfully, my local group – me included – is 8 people, perfect for drafting. We’ve also been trying to find ways to meet up to play since we have a split of preferred formats; modern, pauper, EDH, since standard stopped firing at the LGS post-pandemic.
We had been doing block constructed, but after trying Kaladesh/Aether Revolt, player retention dropped (because damn, that is a bad block). So at the start of this year, I floated the idea, “If I make a fully custom set, would you play it?”
The answer was yes, I had a reason to actually work on this set. Off to work I go.
Thanks for reading
Dingus Egg
This is part one of how I created my custom set, “Siguran: Second Age of Gloom”. In the next part, I’ll go through the initial design process. The full set list can be found here.
the scrambled thoughts of a dingus egg 
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