In case you were wondering, yes, there is a small system at work with the lettering on Battle Monsters cards.

All the artwork available for download is done by hand, as is the lettering.

The first monster — a prototype of the Zombie — was sketched and lettered with a standard, classroom-variety 2B pencil (a Woody Natural WN12E by Pyramid, if you must know).

The lettering on the Zombie prototype was a strong, tall sans-serif letter, all in uppercase. Hand drawn, but not unlike Helvetica Neue Ultra Light.

That lettering shape became the standard for all the original monsters, arranged into Groups, and drawn with a Uni-Ball Eye 0.5mm.

The name of the Group was in a similar typeface, but much smaller — drawn with a 0.18 Uni-Ball Signo Bit.

When the Pixies arrived, Groups had already fallen out of favor with the developers, and as a result lowercase letters were introduced.

But with the advent of monsters designed by and adopted from students, the lettering changed.

The Wizard, for example, uses a common brush pen (nothing as fancy as this) instead of a ball point pen.

The brush pen has a long, pointed tip and creates a sweeping, brisk stroke.

It’s intended for calligraphy but in this case, makes sharp characters with different stroke widths.

So if you see large, strong, sweeping characters on a Battle Monsters card, it was created by a student, or adopted from their work.

If you see lowercase letters, more than likely it’s a pixie.

And anything drawn in clean, uppercase letters was drawn up by the developers, at any point in the game’s evolution.