This is Negative Man. He rules. Instead of explaining his whole vibe, I will just reiterate that his name is Negative Man. He is from Mother 3 on the Game Boy Advance—a game with an encyclopedic amount of development lore that I won’t delve too far into. It has frustratingly only been officially released in Japan and takes some effort to play in the West, but thanks to a dedicated fan community it is fairly accessible. I beat it for the first time this summer and for me, a late-to-life EarthBound fan, it more than lived up to the hype. One of my favorite podcasts, Get Played, has a very long episode on it (this should probably be like a footnote, but I haven’t coded footnotes into the blog yet—add it to the roadmap).

Since I’ve been messing with emulating trading cards on the web recently, I figured if I were gonna showcase some on my own site, it would be fun to come up with a semi-original design for one. And a faux, conceptual “Negative Man trading card” sounded appropriately silly.

I looked to the two most obvious properties as inspiration: the Pokémon Trading Card Game and Magic: The Gathering, and came up with the result below:

The card on the left is the first version, where I directly used the Negative Man sprite and the background from the in-game battle. The card on the right is the final version, where I decided to use Procreate to at least amateurishly illustrate a separate version and background, which seems more in the spirit of these kinds of cards. It probably deserves a more creative interpretation at some point, but the original character pose is so memorable, and so evocative of despair. Similarly, for the card back, the Mother 3 logo and red background are iconic enough on their own. I also wanted to include some of Negative Man’s many hilariously inept “attacks”—which are actually from the game—to highlight how thoroughly unworthy this guy is of being on a trading card.

So there you have it. Since this guy will be living on my site for at least the near future, I thought it was worthy of a quick write-up.

Update: Inspired by a Brent Price 1992-93 Topps rookie card 🤷🏻‍♂️, I added a gold foil overlay to sit on top of the Negative Man illustration that animates light across the surface separate from the rest of the card.