November is here, which means a chance to gather all of my Mocktober designs from this year’s MLB Postseason. Just like last year, I created a unique card design for every postseason game featuring the “player of the game” for each contest. With the expanded playoff format this year, I knew I’d be doing more cards than previous years. Luckily, the way each series played out there weren’t an overwhelming number of extra games. The final count was 40 cards this year compared to 37 last year.

Jeremy Peña was the most featured with 4 individual cards. That makes sense since he was the ALCS and World Series MVP. Yordan made it onto 3 cards (with Peña getting a cameo on that final WS card). There were a couple of firsts for me this time around. Thanks to the Phillies’ historic homer-fest in Game 3 of the World Series, I did my first 5-player design. And then the following night, Cristian Javier and 3 other Astros pitchers combined for a no-hitter. In trying to figure out a way to feature them all without making another multi-player card, I focused on Javier while giving the rest of the crew the old hologram treatment. Thanks to some Photoshop tutorial vids on YouTube, I feel like I did a decent job with the hologram effect.

Looking at the whole lot now, it looks like I had better ideas as the postseason went on. I think that’s almost exclusively thanks to the number of games happening each day in the first round. That old adage “done is better than perfect” was definitely in play there. But this whole exercise is precisely about churning out ideas and trying out different things. All of them aren’t going to be great, but they’re all valuable.