Mythology Gag / Card Games

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South Park: Phone Destroyer

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• Legends of Runeterra, a spinoff of League of Legends, includes the champion Lee Sin. His leveled up form kicks enemies into their own Nexus to damage it. This was something his League incarnation's ultimate could do in his intentionally overpowered April Fool's Champion Spotlight.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • The Time Spiral block, whose set theme was nostalgia, is naturally full of Easter Eggs and other little jokes about cards from older sets. For example: in the flavor text of Viscid Lemures, Norin the Wary remarks that it's nice to face something harmless, like a lemur. On the (much) earlier Hyalopterous Lemure, the artist had apparently never heard of a "lemure", so the card is illustrated with a lemur.
  • The Lhurgoyf card had the flavour text "Ach! Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!". Much later, a card with a similar power had the flavor text "Not again", attributed to Hans.
    • And in Time Spiral, Saffi Eriksdotter, who said the immortal line, became a card in her own right. Hans would eventually get his own card too in Commander Legends.
    • That phrase also became an Unglued card. It summons a creature for one turn if the player says, "Ach Hans! Run, it's the..."
  • The card Lotus Petal is a weakened version of the Game-Breaker card Black Lotus — and its flavor text is a reference to how much money you'd have to spend in order to get one of the originals.
    • Black Lotus has inspired the creation of a few other mana producing artifacts themed around lotuses (as well as some lands)
  • The card Deep Analysis has the flavor text "The specimen seems to be broken." The artifact being examined in the card's art is a Masticore, another card famous for being exceedingly powerful. This doubles as a Take That, Scrappy!.
  • The card Persecute Artist doesn't let the caster choose Rebecca Guay. This is a nod to the time when rumors that Guay was being fired as a Magic card artist led to backlash.
  • The twelfth edition's print of Giant Spider states that "The wild is always changing, but it does have a few constants." This is probably a reference to the fact that by this point, Giant Spider was the only card (aside from the five basic lands) that has been in all core sets since the game's beginning.
  • Lightning Bolt was cut from the main set after Fourth Edition as too powerful and replaced by cards with basically the same effect but less powerful/mana efficient. It was reintroduced in the 2010 set with the flavor text, "The sparkmage shrieked, calling on the rage of the storms of his youth. To his surprise, the sky responded with a fierce energy he'd never thought to see again."
  • Call of the Full Moon gives your creature a power boost, but it goes back to normal if anyone casts two or more spells in a turn. This card represents turning your creature into an Innistrad-origin werewolf, and that drawback is shared by all the double-faced werewolf cards in the Innistrad block.
• A few cards in the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game are based upon storylines from the original manga from before the card game came to prominence:
  • Zombyra the Dark is based upon a character from a Show Within a Show Zombire, who is a Spawn Expy. Like Spawn, he gets closer to death the more he fights, represented by an ATK reduction.
  • Dark Master - Zorc was the Big Bad of the Monster World story arc, which was a Table Top Game. From that comes the die-rolling effect, including the fact that a lower roll is better and the highest roll is a fumble. And the art for its corresponding ritual spell card, Contract with the Dark Master, is based on the scene in which Zorc first reveals himself by transforming from a seemingly friendly NPC.
  • Number 67: Pair-a-Dice Smasher is a reference to the shadow game from Duel 2. Its first effect makes both players roll a die and puts a penalty on the player with the higher roll and its second effect changes the result of any die roll into a 7. The die split in half in the artwork continues this reference. ^note During the shadow game, Dark Yugi rolls a 6, which would've resulted in his automatic loss as the rules stipulated that he would give his opponent the win in case of a tie. He insists on his opponent rolling anyways, so the latter throws the die at Yugi's face in frustration. Dark Yugi blocks it with the point of his Millennium Puzzle, causing the die to break in half and show two faces simultaneously for a total roll of 7, causing his opponent to lose.

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