CONJURER'S BLACK BOON
1B Enchantment
B: Target creature summoned this turn gains a +1/+1 counter and you lose one life

Okay, okay..... this was an early card, and it shows. Poor graphics handling, lame illustration, and a lousy card idea. Makes you wonder why I simply don't delete the thing and pretend it never existed, eh? While it might be the Quasimodo of the bunch, its my Quasimodo - and I choose to keep it around to remind me on how not to make bogus cards.

DRACOLICH
BBB Sorcery
When cast, sacrifice a dragon and put a dracolich token into play. Treat this token as a Clone of the sacrificed dragon with a +1/+2 bonus. Dracolich cannot be the target of green or white spells.

The nicest thing going about this card is the illustration, and I ruin that with my inept job of graphics splicing. Yep, the black cards are the pick of the litter.

SPIDER QUEEN
1BB Summon Queen
All spiders in play gain Poison:1

First, the "Poison:1" bit. Most of you are familiar with the concept of poison counters in MtG. Certain creatures, when damaging the opponent mage, give the opponent a poison counter - 10 counters, regardless of life remaining, kills the mage. Some creatures give one poison counter, some two. This definition was rather cumbersome, and I didn't want to put all of that onto the Spider Queen card. So.... I made a new special ability, like Banding and First Strike, that is fully explained in the MtG rulebook but only listed in shorthand on the cards. In a prefect world, "Poison" would be such a rule.

As for the image itself, it's a drow female from AD&D.

SEPULCHER FIEND
BBB Summon Fiend
Sepulcher Fiend has power and toughness equal to the number of creatures in your graveyard. When attacking, these are instead equal to the number of creatures in the opponent's graveyard.

One of my all-time favorite cards is Gaia's Leige, which has one of the best special effects of any card I'v ever used. What I wanted to do was to design cards with the same theme, but for the different colors. So, for black, the variable was based upon creatures in the graveyard instead of the number of forests in play.

DARK HELLION
2BBB Summon Hellion
Trample
Pay RR during your upkeep or Dark Hellion does 5 damage to you and all your creatures in play.

This card was little more than an experiment into aiding the implementation of multicolored decks - something that WotC itself was working on at the time. You know, having a white card's special ability activated by tapping green mana? That kind of thing. Personally, I'm rather apathetic about this particular card. Nothing special.

"THE IMP"
I have no idea what I was expecting out of this image. It looked promising at the time, but nothing ever came to mind afterwards

RAJAN'S CURSE
1B Enchantment
Each time a player declares a Banding, Rajan's Curse does 2 damage to that player.

I hate Banding. As a game-mechanic concept, it seemed to do nothing but confuse the possibilities of combat, as well as not making much sense in the first place. More importantly, I never owned any cool Banding creatures :) This card was designed simply to punish those players who had the Banding cards I would never own. Self-centered? Sure. Hey, these are my card designs, and I'll be as petty as required!

SKELETON LORD
My intentions were to create a "lord", in the spirit of Lord of Atlantis and other such creatures, for skeletons. No original idea formed as to what bonus or special ability this lord would grant his skeletal minions, so I moved on to other cards whose ideas were more ripe and promising.

SKELETAL WARRIOR
1BB Summon Skeleton 3/2
Put a corpse counter on Skeletal Warrior each time a creature is put into the graveyard the same turn Skeletal Warrior damaged it.
0: Remove a corpse counter to regenerate Skeletal Warrior.

I've nothing to say about the card mechanics of this one, but I would like to take a moment to discuss the presentation of skeletons in classical fantasy. Generally, these animated bones are depicted as being slow, simplistic, and.... non-frightening. Much like the old black & white films showing the Mummy or Frankenstein slowly pursuing some hapless villager or peasant, what was scary about something you could outrun on one leg, or out-think with no effort? Skeletons are depicted this way in AD&D - little more than cannon fodder; some additional, free XP for the PCs to collect. But it need not be that way. Skeletons can be shown as threatening, with so little work. Little things, like having the group encounter a skeleton who is still a master with his blade, or who ruthlessly hunts the group, easily following them with its undead ability to sense the presence of life.

Sorry for the rant, folks. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

TOMB OF THE DAMNED
First of all, I never realized I had so many darn unfinished cards! Looking thru my list is starting to become mildly depressing! Second, this is yet another cool image whose concept never solidified. I might not have made this a creature, but some black instant or sorcery dealing with the raising of the dead mechanic.

VAMPIRIC CAPE
BB Enchant Creature
Target creature gains Flying. Target creature gains a +1/+1 counter each time a creature dies in a turn in which the target creature damaged it

Another simple card. Take the special abilities of the Sengir Vampire and turn them into an enchantment. Found an interesting image to match the idea, and here we go.