How it all Began

So, before I started playing Altered I had never done any Cosplays before. Given that when I started playing Altered, I was fifty-five years old,  it may have been thought that it was perhaps too late to start. However, I’m stubborn and I decided to give it a go. After all, what could be so hard? A lot of things, it seems and the other fantastic cosplayers make it look so eary! I guess (if you’re interested) you’ll see some of my problems I came across, and the solutions that I came up with. Even the ones that were not as good as I wanted them to be.

Asmodeus

It all started for me when I began to wonder which character in the game I would be able to cosplay. As an older and more rotund gentleman I was a little more restricted in my choices, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I settled on doing a cosplay of Asmodeus as that seemed to be relatively easy and I decided to aim for premiering it at UKGE nine months later. I bought black trousers, a black shirt, a pink undershirt, black shoes, pink socks, pink opera gloves and a white overcoat. All were relatively easy to acquire, and there were no issues there.

That was the easy bit though. The horns, ears and the claws were all a pain in the butt to make. I bought a cheap white wig, some ring like claws, some plastic horns and some ‘elf’ clip on ears. Now we go through all the issues.

• The headband on the horns needed to go underneath the wig, but the horns themselves had to be seen on the top. I initially decided to spray paint the horns and fit magnets on the headband and the horns. The first magnets that I bought were way too weak, and the horns just instantly fell off. Then I bought stronger magnets and attached them. However, the horns would still fall off if I moved my head too much. Eventually, I ended up buying a new pair of horns, spray painted them, and just stuck them through the wig.
• The ears I also painted, but they would not actually clip on. I eventually tried to add some elastic bands on the bottom, however that was only partially successfully. They were hard to attach and would occaisionally fall off. In the end the solution was to attach them to the end of the horn band so that they would always be attached. It wasn;t perfect but it worked.
• The rings on the claws were a bit tight on my fingers, but they just about worked. The issue was that they wouldn’t go on my finger with the opera gloves on as well. In the end, I just cut holes in the fingertips of the gloves,  and poked the ring claws through. It was however a real pain to put them on with the gloves. Wearing the claws meant it was extremely difficult to pick anything up and playing Altered with them on was impossible. Still they looked pretty good in the end.
• I tried to create the gaming table in the picture on the card as well.  I used some material stuck onto a green cloth with some gold coins and gemstones. Creating the correct pattern that was on the card with the material was ‘difficult’ to say the least. I’m not sure that I got the shapes right, but I hope I captured the spirit of it.
• The last element was that my face needed to be pink as well. I decided that the best way to do this was using face paint. My practice attempt at home using this method used too much paint. The pink makeup just got everywhere. I also had to work out how to get it off with a minimumu of fuss. I bought some makeup remover ,and at the actual event used less makeup. In the end I was able to get all the damn pink off without too much hassle!

Bravos Pathfinder

So my favourite card in Beyond the Gates is Bravos Pathfinder. I was discussing the Asmodeus cosplay with the Musubi and I happened to mentioned this. They suggested I cosplay her since she was my favourite character. My objections to doing a cosplay of my favourite character were quickly stripped away, and I decided to ‘secretly’ do it with a wonderful sounding board in Saphire (who was so much help!). I even had a crazy idea of replicating the mountain climbing on the card by dressing a friend’s staircase as the mountain. By the time I got around to actually doing the cosplay we were into Trial by Frost and so I decided to add some snow to the whole scene.

I bought a red sweatshirt with a hood, grey jogging bottoms, some fur lined boots and a backpack. Most of these items didn’t need much alteration (pun intended), except the hood and the bottom of the sweatshirt which needed fur adding. I bought some fur pieces to stick on, though the quality of the fur was less than purfect. I think it was mainly used for Santa outfits as it was way too white. I tried to lightly spray it with grey paint but it tended to clump the fur a bit. At the end of the day it looked okay in the phots but I knew it was not purfect.

The largest jobs on this build were the gloves, cuffs and the lollipop holder. The gloves I bought as fingerless leather gloves and then super glued on pieces of scrap leather and even a little of the damn fur onto them look like the picture. They looked pretty good, but I had issues trying to avoid supergluing bits of the gloves together as there were small holes in the gloves. I nearly superglued my hands to them once! Also the gloves were a bit tight with all the extras I had added to them, so I needed to add some magnets to ensure that they fastened togther properly.

The cuffs for the costume I bought from Amazon, and then I glued some small genstones on as well as some lighter brown bands on the edging. The larger diamond gems in the centre though were a problem as they were too big to glue on. The cuffs had large metal rings where they would go. So I used magnets (again) with some limited success. If I wasn’t careful, they would fall off if jerked around too hard. If I reuse the costume I am going to find a better solution for these.

The hardest thing of all to make was the lollipop holder. It may not be most obvious part of the costume, but it is essential to the character of Sunniva, who likes lollipops (the green ones especially). I made it from a clear plastic insert to a game component that I stuck on leather scraps to and then filled it with lollipops. It didn’t look too bad, but the real struggle started with attaching it onto the costume. In the end I got some thick wire and made a big loop to fix it onto the backpack. It wasn’t ideal but it just about served if the pack didn’t swing around too much. Again in the future I am going to look at a better solution for this.

Auraq & Kibble

The next challenge I decided to give myself, was to cosplay Auraq. Now Auraq is such an outlandish character that I thought it would be an obvious target to cosplay, but to date no one had attempted to do it. I stupidly thought – how difficult could it be? I decided to have an aim in mind which was to have Auraq reveal a card, which I did for Seeds of Unity (1st February 2026).

The answer of course, was more difficult than I thought. I decided to start with the easier part by creating Auraq’s alter ego, Kibble. I bought a mauve rabbit from ebay and made a cloth face, gluing on the eyes and mouth with fabric glue. Then I stitched the face on the rabbit. Then I bought a mauve foam pipe and a little purple fabric heart and stitched them together to make the tail. The only remaining issue was the ears which flopped down on the rabbit, so I reused the thick wire I had to give the ears some stiffness. I then sewed on some mauve material over the wire to hide it. All in all I was pretty pleased with the result with my only criticism being the face was slightly wonky.

For the Auraq costume, I started with the top piece on the shoulders which proved to be more difficult than I’d hoped. I bought a purple shrug and sewed on gold ribbon to the edges as well as reshaping the front slightly to make it shorter. The two huge shoulder pieces were somewhat more difficult though. I used two mini cushions (one light pink and one light blue) and I sewed the ends together to make them look croissant shaped. Then I sewed on a bunch of gold ribbon to edge them all, followed by large and small pearls. Finally I added some sparkly gems on top before sewing the pieces onto the top of the shrug. This was tricky and I got the angle slightly wrong on one of the sides.

Next I made the neck piece from a piece of purple leather, with some shaped brown leather and small pearls stuck on it. I attached it to the collar of the top piece either side using velcro. This was fine when it was together, however it had a tendency for the toothed part of the velcro to snag onto the braiding when it wasn’t together. In future I think I would use something else like a popper stud here instead.

The ruff I bought and sewed on the large pearl buttons. This actually worked out quite well. The gloves I made using some leather fingerless gloves and then stuck on gold leather rings on the end. These worked okay, but were tight to get on and of after the rings were added. The vambraces I made from card and stuck the purple and gold leather on it using double sided tape. These worked but were a bit loose in practice. If I did them again, I’d make them from cosplay foam like proper cosplayers do.

Now we get the to hard parts – the abdomen piece, the wig and the cones. This is the point where I am forced to learn new skills.

The first skill I was forced to learn was dying half a wig. Not the whole wig; but half a wig. You see, its not actually easy to buy a wig that is half pink and half blue. So, I bought a cheap pink synthetic wig in the right style and researched dying half a wig. I bought blue dye, watched a bunch of YouTube videos and covered up one side of the wig before I gave it a go. It didn’t come out too badly in the end, but the parting wasn’t exactly in the middle, and the heat from the hot water used in dying the wig removed the curls from that side. I tried putting curlers in it to put the curls back, but that didn’t work. Then I tried again with the curlers and using a heat gun to try to set the curls in place. This was only partially successful, as it fused some of the synthetic hair together, but it ended up not looking too bad from a distance. So, job done!

The abdomen piece was even harder to make. Doing so meant that I had to learn an entirely new skill. Making foam armour was not something I’d ever done before. I decided that I needed to do it this way, however as cloth wouldn’t be sturdy enough. So, I watched some videos from an excellent cosplayer called Kamuicosplay. You can find her stuff here – https://www.youtube.com/@KamuiCosplay. She has a video about adjusting patterns for your size, so I bought one of her chest piece patterns used her advice and tried to adjust it to fit what I wanted. Now I was partially successful in this. My seams were not that well done and it ended up a little on the lose side. I have some improvements in mind for next time I make foam armour, but it kind of did the job.

The piece that caused me the most problems though, were the cones that Auraq has on their head. I thought it would be easy just to print out the patterns on cardboard, fold them around and then attach them. However the damn things wouldn’t sit correctly on my head and even using clips and some tape to try and keep them upright, it was not easy to make them stay in the right place. In the end I avoided moving my head too much so as to keep them in the right position. If I did this again I’d probably make them from cosplay foam and make sure the central part stabilises them together.

With the shoulder and skirt mesh drapes added, it all came together. For the cosplay try on, I even did some videos for a card reveal that you can find elsewhere on the site.

The Future

So, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve done fairly well, perhaps it was time for a bit of a rest from cosplaying’. Then I got hit by a glimpse of the future in Roots of Corruption and I knew that I had to get straight back into the saddle. I could improve on the skills that I’d learned from my previous experiences, and this time do my next project better than the last. The only way to get better is to try harder and that is what I intend to do! I am going to up my game on the foam armour, and I hope to really get it looking good. Here’s a sneak peak on some of the bits I’m working on for my next cosplay!

I hope you all take this as an inspiration to go out and make your own cosplay of your favourite Altered TCG character!

You can find more content on the Altered TCG Blog here …

• Rotations – Opinions and Bannings
• Seeds of Unity Feb Patch Announcement