Speculation and Worldbuilding: Pony Playing Cards—Construction and Symbology · 4:29am Aug 10th, 2015
Games are an important form of ancillary worldbuilding. They create verisimilitude by showing that characters do play games, but can also create a fundamental alien-ness. Think of the Dejarik from Star Wars or the 3D chess from Star Trek.
Playing cards are an intrinsic part of culture. They are timeless and ubiquitous. Their symbology is a product of the culture that created them, a streamlining and amalgamation of many concepts. All that has been condensed into a small set of simple cards with simple graphic design choices.
This makes them the perfect tool to worldbuild. But, what sort of playing cards would ponies use? What sort of games would they prefer? For today’s meandering mental exercise, I thought I would take one look at how ponies might construct playing cards. The symbols and culture attached to them, and the type of games they might like. (Of course, how ponies use playing cards without fingers is another question).
The first thing to consider is that playing cards in real life are very old constructs. Every country and culture has their own, but there is a degree of overlap and intermingling between them. Lots of numbers, sets, and themes repeat across the playing cards of different cultures, while symbology and structure can or not.
Based on this, I think it’s safe to assume that each pony tribe developed their own set of playing cards, then they gradually mixed elements over time. The same probably goes for other FIM cultures, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of this blog.
Let’s start with earth ponies. Earth ponies used to be the least prosperous of the tribes, and they are portrayed in the show with more dark colors and natural-dyed colors. This means their cards probably did not use much color and had cheap ink; all the suits must have been brown or black, depending on availability of dyes. Perhaps fancier decks were two-tone, like modern American cards, with the suits divided into a green group and a black/brown group. Since these cards are simpler, they would just have ascending numbers instead of face cards.
But what sort of symbology would be meaningful to earth ponies, yet also easy to draw? Acorns are one of the classical European suits, so that might work. A tree might be easier (think a set of circles/shrubbery like the suit of clubs). I once posited that earth ponies might use spearfighting. By the time we see them, however, they clearly have no military strength. The straight, thin design of a lance would have to morph into something visually similar but more relevant; perhaps a carrot? A simple circle could be good, either as a fruit or sun or whatever else. Finally, a horn of plenty or cup would be visually distinct but easy to draw. A cornucopia is obviously importing a human element into pony culture, but I don’t think cups/goblets would be too heavily tied earth ponies (being fancier), and mugs would be a bit hard to represent in silhouette. Hammers might work, depending on headcanon.
Earth ponies work a lot, so their games need to be light and easy. Something to unwind briefly at the end of the day. Trick-taking games are one of the oldest type of card game, so that’s a natural choice. So are matching games (think Go Fish).
Going up the affluence scale, we have pegasi. Pegasi—as portrayed in the show—are more militaristic, more bombastic in their choice of colors, and more concerned with skill and speed. Their cards would likely have more standard colors, and the expensive ones would likely have a separate color for each suit (like modern American poker cards).
Symbology for pegasi is easy; Raindrops, lances/spears, shields, and feathers all have obvious significance to pegasi and are easy to represent on playing cards. The harder thing is their face cards; do they have pictures like older Japanese face cards or mirrored half-images like modern American cards? I think that pegasi face cards would be more focused on specific pictures, rather than mirrored ones. Since their culture values personal glory, specific creatures and things would have more cultural relevance. Perhaps something like the Bat, Dragon, and General (in that order—obviously the pegasus general is the strongest one :P)--all three fly and would be familiar to pegasi.
Pegasi are militaristic—many modern armies distribute playing cards to their soldiers, so pegasi would probably favor similar types of games. Gambling games and speed games come to mind (also very old).
Then there is unicorns. Unicorns don’t seem the type of culture to develop the same sorts of playing cards and games as the others. Since ancient unicorns were all nobility, their games needed more depth and strategy, as well as more room for fancier versions. I imagine they had a game like chess; lots of little carved pieces with very complex rules.
Their cards, then, would follow a similar predilection. Perhaps they were like hanafuda cards; 12 suits of four, with each card based more around visual distinctions than numerical ones. Since unicorns used to control the sky and were all nobility, their suits also are easy to think of items for. The ones I came up with were: crescents/moons, coins, crowns, jewels, owls, parapets (think the Rook from chess), royals, scrolls, servants, stars, walls, and wands.
While unicorns might have played the same sort of games as with hanafuda cards, I think their main pastime was something like chess (as above). Something lengthy and complex for the royals to best each other at. Their cards were likely named after a single game, and that game was probably similar to chess. Perhaps each suit represented a different type of unit, and the various levels (first crown, second crown, etc) represented that unit going through various promotions. The goal of the game was to either defeat your opponent’s royal (who starts at 4 and goes down with each hit, representing military defeat/assassination), or maneuver your pieces such that the opponent can’t move theirs (representing diplomacy). Something like that.
Now obviously all this cultural heritage is well and good, but I imagine Celestia found it a bit dividing that all the servant cards in a unicorn deck were earth ponies, or that the face cards on fancier pegasi decks included the General and Dragon cards killing enemies based on the suit (the General of Feathers is clubbing someone with their wings, the Dragon of Raindrops is pillaging using steam breath, etc). At her behest, a company made a new deck that takes one suit to represent each pony tribe; acorns, feathers, wands, and a triangle or circle (to represent unity). The face cards of each suit are ponies of that type, and the fourth suit has all three working together. The Unity suit is always the highest trump suit in games that include such things.
So there you have it; one potential interpretation of how pony playing cards might have evolved differently from real world playing cards. I considered drawing a reference chart, but most of the things are probably easy to visualize, and those that are not are beyond the scope of my artistic ability. As always, leave any thoughts, critique, counter-speculation, clarifications, and comments below.
Part Eight in a series of blog posts about meandering mental exercises. If you found this passingly interesting, maybe check out the others?
One: Why do so many Pony works use Human weapons?
Two: Earth Pony Spearfighting
Three: Pegasus Combat and Weapons
Four: What Do the Main Six Drink?
Five: Magical Pony Sports
Six: What Do the Main Six Read?
Seven: Unicorn Combat and Weapons
I found it odd that in the show we saw Rainbow Dash and Applejack playing a card game where the cards had the cutie marks of the mane six on them. I got a good amount of amusing commercial-based pondering on that. Easy to see that somepony would make a set of cards with the Elements of Harmony cutie marks on them.
I think board games and games like Chess are a pegasus thing. Heck, they could even have something akin to 3-d chess. Militaristic as you said and those are war games.
Griffons probably invented dice.
Unicorns I see playing Go more than playing chess.
Earth Ponies seem more musically inclined than game playing. I don't see earth ponies bringing out a deck of cards much. They are more the somepony plays an instrument for the gathering type after a hard day's work.
I'm developing a Pony setting (original, not MLP, mind you) where I addressed the same question. I was inspired by the Lady and the Unicorn, series a beautiful medieval French tapestries I had the luck of seeing in Paris to create an analogue of the Tarot deck:
Banners
Flutes
Mirrors
Lilies
Grapes
Desideri
The first five suits are based off the five senses: Touch (Banners), Hearing (Flutes), Sight (Mirrors), Smell (Lilies), and Taste (Grapes). Each of these suits have 7 number cards and a Princess card* who's depicted performing an action related to that sense (e.g. the Princess of Lilies has her smelling a bouquet). The Desideri (or Desires, whose origins are a bit esoteric) are a series of 25 cards plus a wild-card of sorts† that depict various allegories, figures from their religion, etc. the original point being that abstract concepts such as fortune, love and faith triumph over the material world (at least according to the philosophy prevalent when it was made, anyway). Of course, though, for purposes of mass production, the Desideri were eventually stripped out in many decks, and the suits representing the five senses were replaced with five arbitrary, easily reproduced symbols (whose symbols I am yet unsure of), much like how the elaborate Italian suits of Coins, Cups, Batons, and Swords were replaced with the more prosaic Diamonds, Hearts, Clubs and Spades in Western Europe (or Bells, Hearts, Acorns, and Leaves in Central Europe) as playing cards filtered northwards.
*The Ponies of this setting have a base-8 numeral system rather than base-10
†And before you call me out on the high proportion of Desideri to suit cards, I would like to point out that real-life Minchiate decks has a same, if not slightly higher percentage of trumps in the deck than this hypothetical example
3308506 Ha, I never noticed that. It also brings to mind the fake manes the Rainbow Dash fanclub was wearing. If Equestria does have novelty playing cards, I imagine quite a few unlicensed theme decks about the main six are floating around
Or maybe it's like Build-a-Bear; you and your friends go to a shop and they make you a deck of cards based on you and your friends' cutie marks.
3308516 Well we know pegasi have a Battleship knockoff.
That's a good point about earth ponies though. Though perhaps they were too poor to even afford musical instruments, and got by on oral tradition instead.
3308560 Well, Tarot decks have four 14-card suits, and a 21-card trump suit, so that's not that much of a stretch (though it would depend on the game mechanics, of course). Generally, more cards is better for most types of games, because it lowers the chances of getting a particular card, and thus makes the game more challenging.
The earliest tarot decks were hand-painted--I would think that cutting out the trump suit would be an earlier development rather than later. Mass production would actually lower the effort involved; once the master plates/blocks are cut, new ones don't need to be made until they wear out. Of course, if they were removed for entrepreneurial reasons or moral/philosophical ones, rather than just logistical ones, that's another matter.
3308641
The question about the Mane Six deck is what the rules are. Who trumps who? Alternately, it could be that it's a variant deck, and Celestia imported two suits from each tribe into the unified deck... though that raises the question of how many cards are in there.
In any case, very thought-provoking blog as always.